5 ms·

Whoh! Did I just read that Zach Holman needed technical interview to get hired? In that case, yes, things are seriously broken. His idea of pair programming as

by sytelus 11y ago

Whoh! Did I just read that Zach Holman needed technical interview to get hired? In that case, yes, things are seriously broken. His idea of pair programming as interview is actually pretty good. However I would stress that there is no such thing as bad interviews, just bad interviewers. I've seen cases of "one secret right answer", "question with hidden land mines" and "irrelevant puzzles that you would never need to solve on actual job". My favorite strategy is to think of some problem I solved myself as part of the job, abstract it out a bit and see how candidate would go at it. This makes things very relevant, allows me to compare candidate's thinking and performance with my own and avoids asking popular chewed up practice puzzles. The problem is that this puts a burden on interviewer to first think of great problem they had solved and then nicely make it simple, interesting and friendly question. This is much harder than looking up one of the irrelevant popular puzzles asking one of them.

voltagex_ 11y ago
Zach's lucky (privileged, even) to have a platform to rant on and a large number of connections to find his next gig. He's unlikely to lose any opportunities as a result of this post. What about the rest of us, who don't have "star-power" or anywhere near the kind of platform that Zach has? If you're just Joe (or Jane)-average programmer, yes, startup interviewing is fucked. Doubly so if you don't live in SF or SV.
- sotojuan 11y ago
  I agree with you, but I have heard the opposite from some people. They like being able to memorize programming interview books and grind problems on LeetCode/HackerRank instead of having a portfolio or other alternatives.
  - voltagex_ 11y ago
    I may have to break down and hop on HackerRank. Have you heard of https://codility.com/ https://codility.com/?
    - sotojuan 11y ago
      I haven't but I will check it out! From my time at /r/cscareerquestions, LeetCode is the "hardest" and thus the best for top companies. HackerRank is good but every challenge requires parsing STDIN instead of just giving arguments to a function the user writes. It's very annoying to me and a deal breaker, especially with certain languages.
      - hobolord 11y ago
        yeah the first time I had an technical interview with hackerrank I had to go google how to do i/o in Python
  - ucho 11y ago
    I can't understand why HackerRank gained such popularity. Among many similar sites it has lowest quality of problems, especially input/output specification. The "pay for more test suites" strongly reminds me Pay to Win ...
- nullundefined 11y ago
  If you don't know how to solve a simple problem, especially one that was solved 50 years ago in computer science, you're fucked anyway. A lot of these interview questions are 'crap' but designed to be solvable in 20-30 minutes and not require hours of domain specific knowledge. In other words, it's something _anyone_ with _any_ degree of problem solving skills should be able to solve.
  - pfista 11y ago
    The problem isn't that interview questions are too simple. Sure, quick weed out questions that can easily be sent out before an onsite interview make sense. But to have someone implement a red black tree, or implement some other algorithm that has an "elegant recursive solution" that is so far removed from any actual work the programmer would be doing is asinine. It's the same reason standardized testing is such a poor measure for many kinds of intelligence. It's forced and impractical- far removed from the real world. Onsite interviews should consist of working with another engineer to look at a real problem the company is dealing with (or was dealing with in the past) to see how the interviewee approaches the problem and tries to solve it. It's not about reaching a solution per se, but rather how well the candidate works with the team and if her approach is the correct one.
- rco8786 11y ago
  > Zach's lucky (privileged, even) Eh, he built that platform. Not sure I would call it luck or privilege.
bigjimmyk3 11y ago
I am a huge fan of the pair-programming interview, as it gives the candidate a clear view of what they're getting into and gives you a chance to hear how their brain works. If you feel it's exploitative, there's nothing to stop you from paying them for their time. They might not take the job, but they will probably tell their friends about the place with the wacked-out interview process.

by sytelus 11y ago

voltagex_ 11y ago

Zach's lucky (privileged, even) to have a platform to rant on and a large number of connections to find his next gig. He's unlikely to lose any opportunities as a result of this post. What about the rest of us, who don't have "star-power" or anywhere near the kind of platform that Zach has? If you're just Joe (or Jane)-average programmer, yes, startup interviewing is fucked. Doubly so if you don't live in SF or SV.

sotojuan 11y ago
I agree with you, but I have heard the opposite from some people. They like being able to memorize programming interview books and grind problems on LeetCode/HackerRank instead of having a portfolio or other alternatives.
- voltagex_ 11y ago
  I may have to break down and hop on HackerRank. Have you heard of https://codility.com/ https://codility.com/?
  - sotojuan 11y ago
    I haven't but I will check it out! From my time at /r/cscareerquestions, LeetCode is the "hardest" and thus the best for top companies. HackerRank is good but every challenge requires parsing STDIN instead of just giving arguments to a function the user writes. It's very annoying to me and a deal breaker, especially with certain languages.
    - hobolord 11y ago
      yeah the first time I had an technical interview with hackerrank I had to go google how to do i/o in Python
- ucho 11y ago
  I can't understand why HackerRank gained such popularity. Among many similar sites it has lowest quality of problems, especially input/output specification. The "pay for more test suites" strongly reminds me Pay to Win ...
nullundefined 11y ago
If you don't know how to solve a simple problem, especially one that was solved 50 years ago in computer science, you're fucked anyway. A lot of these interview questions are 'crap' but designed to be solvable in 20-30 minutes and not require hours of domain specific knowledge. In other words, it's something _anyone_ with _any_ degree of problem solving skills should be able to solve.
- pfista 11y ago
  The problem isn't that interview questions are too simple. Sure, quick weed out questions that can easily be sent out before an onsite interview make sense. But to have someone implement a red black tree, or implement some other algorithm that has an "elegant recursive solution" that is so far removed from any actual work the programmer would be doing is asinine. It's the same reason standardized testing is such a poor measure for many kinds of intelligence. It's forced and impractical- far removed from the real world. Onsite interviews should consist of working with another engineer to look at a real problem the company is dealing with (or was dealing with in the past) to see how the interviewee approaches the problem and tries to solve it. It's not about reaching a solution per se, but rather how well the candidate works with the team and if her approach is the correct one.
rco8786 11y ago
> Zach's lucky (privileged, even) Eh, he built that platform. Not sure I would call it luck or privilege.

bigjimmyk3 11y ago

I am a huge fan of the pair-programming interview, as it gives the candidate a clear view of what they're getting into and gives you a chance to hear how their brain works. If you feel it's exploitative, there's nothing to stop you from paying them for their time. They might not take the job, but they will probably tell their friends about the place with the wacked-out interview process.