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this article is awful. it cites a single bad coding interview as a problem with all coding interviews. as someone who gives tons of code interviews, they are ab

by teen 11y ago

this article is awful. it cites a single bad coding interview as a problem with all coding interviews. as someone who gives tons of code interviews, they are absolutely invaluable, and are a strong indicator in weeding out people who can't write code. you can't blame bad interviewers for the entire process not working.

ubernostrum 11y ago
I have, in the recent past, done multiple coding interviews. Thus far none of them have been useful to me, and none of them have provided information the interviewers couldn't have gotten already from my GitHub contributions. The single personal anecdote was meant to reinforce my points: from that interviewer's perspective there's a good chance that I'll be one of those "people who can't write code" who forms the basis of later stories about how great it is to use coding interviews as a filter. Meanwhile, I do go into some detail about the issues with coding interviews in general, and the way they can affect and accidentally weed out candidates a company probably didn't want to weed out that way. Also, the "nobody can really code, you have to do this to filter them" thing is approaching cargo-cult status at this point. Further up in the section on education I touched on some reasons why I think those situations happen.
gqvijay 11y ago
Slippery slope fallacy...You are incredibly oversimplifying what he is saying. Sure, he is generalizing but he isn't citing a single coding interview to judge the entire process. Having said that, I actually agree with him because I've learned that it's not always simple as who can't write code. I would much rather assess a candidates' ability to learn (sharpness) than the current skill-set.
- fieryeagle 11y ago
  Second this, but Joel Spolsky said it much better http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchool...

by teen 11y ago

ubernostrum 11y ago

I have, in the recent past, done multiple coding interviews. Thus far none of them have been useful to me, and none of them have provided information the interviewers couldn't have gotten already from my GitHub contributions. The single personal anecdote was meant to reinforce my points: from that interviewer's perspective there's a good chance that I'll be one of those "people who can't write code" who forms the basis of later stories about how great it is to use coding interviews as a filter. Meanwhile, I do go into some detail about the issues with coding interviews in general, and the way they can affect and accidentally weed out candidates a company probably didn't want to weed out that way. Also, the "nobody can really code, you have to do this to filter them" thing is approaching cargo-cult status at this point. Further up in the section on education I touched on some reasons why I think those situations happen.

gqvijay 11y ago

Slippery slope fallacy...You are incredibly oversimplifying what he is saying. Sure, he is generalizing but he isn't citing a single coding interview to judge the entire process. Having said that, I actually agree with him because I've learned that it's not always simple as who can't write code. I would much rather assess a candidates' ability to learn (sharpness) than the current skill-set.

fieryeagle 11y ago
Second this, but Joel Spolsky said it much better http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchool...