Programmers are confessing their sins to protest a broken job interview process

I cannot load this page on mobile. When trying to scroll it moves back up. Firefox doesn't offer me to set up the "view mode" for it and Save as PDF is also broken. It's funny how, from memory, all the pages that were broken because of some fancy effect were about programmers.

Re: Programmers are confessing their sins to protest a broken job interview process

#5

Post by ebbv » Tue, Feb 28, 2017, 9:26 PM UTC

Asking developers to program in front of strangers is primarily testing for ability to perform in front of strangers and developer skills secondarily (if at all.)

I never ask people to code in front of me. I ask them questions to get a feel for where their areas of expertise are, and to get to know them.

I wrote a post about my feelings on it last year: https://medium.com/@ebbv/my-case-against-coding-tests-6b15c1...

Re: Programmers are confessing their sins to protest a broken job interview process

#6

Post by ng12 » Tue, Feb 28, 2017, 9:26 PM UTC

> Hello, my name is David. I would fail to write bubble sort on a whiteboard. I look code up on the internet all the time. I don't do riddles.

Does the interviewer explain what bubble sort is, or do they expect the candidate to know it? The first is a reasonable interview, the second one isn't.

Re: Programmers are confessing their sins to protest a broken job interview process

#7

Post by AdamN » Tue, Feb 28, 2017, 9:27 PM UTC

ng12 wrote: post #6

> Hello, my name is David. I would fail to write bubble sort on a whiteboard. I look code up on the internet all the time. I don't do riddles. Does the interviewer explain what bubble sort is, or do they expect the candidate to know it? The first is a reasonable interview, the second one isn't.

quicksort would be fine too :-)

Re: Programmers are confessing their sins to protest a broken job interview process

#8

Post by aanm1988 » Tue, Feb 28, 2017, 9:27 PM UTC

> “Whiteboard” interviews are widely hated. They also discriminate against people who are already underrepresented in the field.

I don't particularly like whiteboard interviews. How can they be discrimination if the expectations are laid out and are such that anyone can reasonably practice to reach them.

I understand you can create a test that is deliberately discriminatory (e.g. voting tests).

You can create a test and realize later that people from certain backgrounds do worse (IQ tests apparently?)

But with whiteboarding you are taking knowledge people should have (lets set aside the idiocy of some of these problems). It's foundational stuff for the industry. So the problem might be with the nature of the test, but anyone can go grab a set of whiteboard markers and start working problems. In fact this is part of why I so dislike these interviews, they are setup to make it easy to game them. So how can that really be discriminatory?

Re: Programmers are confessing their sins to protest a broken job interview process

#9

Post by ng12 » Tue, Feb 28, 2017, 9:27 PM UTC

ebbv wrote: post #5

Asking developers to program in front of strangers is primarily testing for ability to perform in front of strangers and developer skills secondarily (if at all.) I never ask people to code in front of me. I ask them questions to get a feel for where their areas of expertise are, and to get to know them. I wrote a post about my feelings on it last year: https://medium.com/@ebbv/my-case-against-coding-tests-6b15c1...

A good interview should be conducted more like pair-programming than performance art. The interviewer should be explaining things about the problem space and asking questions about the interviewee's code (especially when they're going astray).

Re: Programmers are confessing their sins to protest a broken job interview process

#10

Post by mti27 » Tue, Feb 28, 2017, 9:27 PM UTC

Had a 2 hour technical interview last month where there was a lot of white boarding, but the panel of interviewers understood when I said "Well I don't know the specifics of X but between Google and stack overflow I'll manage." - got the job by the way...