46 ms·

I remember an interview where I was asked to solve an algorithm from my college days. In the 10 years out of college, I've never needed it and to remember how t

I remember an interview where I was asked to solve an algorithm from my college days. In the 10 years out of college, I've never needed it and to remember how to solve it during a timed interview seems completely unreasonable.

krapp 11y ago
I'm pretty sure filters like this exist in part to implicitly reject candidates old enough to have forgotten their CS curriculum.
- ebrewste 11y ago
  I'm pretty sure filters like this exist because the real world people that are doing the interviewing / filtering aren't good enough / experienced enough / invested enough in interviewing to come up with a better filter.
  - dexwiz 11y ago
    An interview is a two way street. If someone can't write an interview question, they likely don't understand what they are interviewing for. If your boss doesn't understand your job, you don't want to work for them.
- thwarted 11y ago
  I was once asked, during a phone interview, to describe how to implement quicksort. I told the interviewer that I had not done that in years and I wouldn't implement a sorting routine from scratch these days because I'd use a sorting routine from a library. The interviewer said he'd never had anyone say that before. I ultimately joined that company as, I believe, the oldest engineer at the time. (At the time, I felt the remaining gauntlet of questions they asked were appropriate for the position I was applying for. And in retrospect, it was the younger interviewers, significantly junior to me, who were asking all the questions that required rote-memorization to answer, and the more experienced interviewers didn't.) In another case, I was I getting interviewed (again, via phone) with a bunch of CS algorithm questions. Now, I have a CS degree, but none of this stuff comes up day to day. I told the interviewer that if these were the kinds of questions, then it didn't seem my 20 years of experience were what they were looking for. The interviewer, someone probably 15 years younger than me, was really flustered, since he was reading stuff right from some collection of questions they had previously prepared and this response didn't match any of the acceptable answers that were listed. The company recruiter called me back later and apologized because the feedback she got from the interviewer was that they were not prepared to interview someone with my experience. Oh, and any tips I could give their recruiting team to address this would be appreciated. I told them I'd be happy to help improve their interview process, at my normal hourly rate. I don't think these filters are explicitly designed to reject candidates based on age, but it does result in it as a side-effect due to the freshness of those topics in the younger candidates' mind. And it just ends up being "easier" to go with the candidate who can recite the answer they are looking for, vs actually evaluating the candidate's fitness for the given job. Or hiring someone and seeing how they work out. There's this need to "hit the ground running" with new hires, and a perception that somehow, those who can answer these random trivia CS questions are able to do that better. This isn't an excuse, however I think it does give us some information on how to address the existence/perception of age discrimination where it does exist. (BTW, I took your use of "implicitly" as being unsavory, to mean "we won't need to reject people due to age, we'll just set them up to fail our test, and maintain our youthful culture", which is where a lot of the rhetoric around age discrimination is focused. That is, I don't necessarily consider it to be the result of bad actors, but inexperienced people who are forced into doing something they don't fully understand or appreciate the complexity of, and they just want to get it off their plate. Admittedly, you might have meant it as I describe in the former paragraph.)
  - munificent 11y ago
    > I was once asked, during a phone interview, to describe how to implement quicksort. If you know how quicksort works, I think this is a great question because it tests your ability to explain technical material to another human. I think that is a vital skill in all programming jobs. Of course, if you happen to not know it yourself, you're sunk. > I told the interviewer that I had not done that in years and I wouldn't implement a sorting routine from scratch these days because I'd use a sorting routine from a library. Let's say you have a list of events. For each event, you know the year, month, and some other data. You want them sorted chronologically. Obviously you're not going to code the sort by hand. Maybe you'd consider: 1. First sort them all by month. 2. Now that the months are in order, sort again by year to group the years together. Basic "application programmer" kind of stuff, right? Does this work? Well... it depends. Is your sort stable? If so, it's fine. If not, this will give you totally wrong results. But that does require you to know what a "stable sort" means, and it's likely you won't have a good intuition for that unless you're familiar with at least one unstable sort like quicksort. > I don't think these filters are explicitly designed to reject candidates based on age, but it does result in it as a side-effect due to the freshness of those topics in the younger candidates' mind. You say that like freshness is some immutable fact. I'm a college dropout. Much of the stuff you learned 20 years ago in college, I never got a chance to learn. So when I started interviewing, I hit Wikipedia and started learning and implementing some algorithms. It's not that hard to refresh your brain, and I'm a better programmer because of it. Since then, I have often been able to apply that knowledge to my work. I'm continually surprised how often some seemingly muddle hairball of a problem is really just a graph traversal, or a topological sort, or a heap, etc. when you look at it right. Algorithms and data structures are just new perspectives you can use to approach your work. Who wouldn't want more ways to be able to look at a problem?
    - Redoubts 11y ago
      > Let's say you have a list of events. For each event, you know the year, month, and some other data. You want them sorted chronologically. Obviously you're not going to code the sort by hand. Maybe you'd consider: Why wouldn't I just do myList.sort(key=lambda x: castToTimestamp(x)) ? Then I'm just sorting a list of integers/floats, which sounds like a solved problem.

krapp 11y ago

I'm pretty sure filters like this exist in part to implicitly reject candidates old enough to have forgotten their CS curriculum.

ebrewste 11y ago
I'm pretty sure filters like this exist because the real world people that are doing the interviewing / filtering aren't good enough / experienced enough / invested enough in interviewing to come up with a better filter.
- dexwiz 11y ago
  An interview is a two way street. If someone can't write an interview question, they likely don't understand what they are interviewing for. If your boss doesn't understand your job, you don't want to work for them.
thwarted 11y ago
I was once asked, during a phone interview, to describe how to implement quicksort. I told the interviewer that I had not done that in years and I wouldn't implement a sorting routine from scratch these days because I'd use a sorting routine from a library. The interviewer said he'd never had anyone say that before. I ultimately joined that company as, I believe, the oldest engineer at the time. (At the time, I felt the remaining gauntlet of questions they asked were appropriate for the position I was applying for. And in retrospect, it was the younger interviewers, significantly junior to me, who were asking all the questions that required rote-memorization to answer, and the more experienced interviewers didn't.) In another case, I was I getting interviewed (again, via phone) with a bunch of CS algorithm questions. Now, I have a CS degree, but none of this stuff comes up day to day. I told the interviewer that if these were the kinds of questions, then it didn't seem my 20 years of experience were what they were looking for. The interviewer, someone probably 15 years younger than me, was really flustered, since he was reading stuff right from some collection of questions they had previously prepared and this response didn't match any of the acceptable answers that were listed. The company recruiter called me back later and apologized because the feedback she got from the interviewer was that they were not prepared to interview someone with my experience. Oh, and any tips I could give their recruiting team to address this would be appreciated. I told them I'd be happy to help improve their interview process, at my normal hourly rate. I don't think these filters are explicitly designed to reject candidates based on age, but it does result in it as a side-effect due to the freshness of those topics in the younger candidates' mind. And it just ends up being "easier" to go with the candidate who can recite the answer they are looking for, vs actually evaluating the candidate's fitness for the given job. Or hiring someone and seeing how they work out. There's this need to "hit the ground running" with new hires, and a perception that somehow, those who can answer these random trivia CS questions are able to do that better. This isn't an excuse, however I think it does give us some information on how to address the existence/perception of age discrimination where it does exist. (BTW, I took your use of "implicitly" as being unsavory, to mean "we won't need to reject people due to age, we'll just set them up to fail our test, and maintain our youthful culture", which is where a lot of the rhetoric around age discrimination is focused. That is, I don't necessarily consider it to be the result of bad actors, but inexperienced people who are forced into doing something they don't fully understand or appreciate the complexity of, and they just want to get it off their plate. Admittedly, you might have meant it as I describe in the former paragraph.)
- munificent 11y ago
  > I was once asked, during a phone interview, to describe how to implement quicksort. If you know how quicksort works, I think this is a great question because it tests your ability to explain technical material to another human. I think that is a vital skill in all programming jobs. Of course, if you happen to not know it yourself, you're sunk. > I told the interviewer that I had not done that in years and I wouldn't implement a sorting routine from scratch these days because I'd use a sorting routine from a library. Let's say you have a list of events. For each event, you know the year, month, and some other data. You want them sorted chronologically. Obviously you're not going to code the sort by hand. Maybe you'd consider: 1. First sort them all by month. 2. Now that the months are in order, sort again by year to group the years together. Basic "application programmer" kind of stuff, right? Does this work? Well... it depends. Is your sort stable? If so, it's fine. If not, this will give you totally wrong results. But that does require you to know what a "stable sort" means, and it's likely you won't have a good intuition for that unless you're familiar with at least one unstable sort like quicksort. > I don't think these filters are explicitly designed to reject candidates based on age, but it does result in it as a side-effect due to the freshness of those topics in the younger candidates' mind. You say that like freshness is some immutable fact. I'm a college dropout. Much of the stuff you learned 20 years ago in college, I never got a chance to learn. So when I started interviewing, I hit Wikipedia and started learning and implementing some algorithms. It's not that hard to refresh your brain, and I'm a better programmer because of it. Since then, I have often been able to apply that knowledge to my work. I'm continually surprised how often some seemingly muddle hairball of a problem is really just a graph traversal, or a topological sort, or a heap, etc. when you look at it right. Algorithms and data structures are just new perspectives you can use to approach your work. Who wouldn't want more ways to be able to look at a problem?
  - Redoubts 11y ago
    > Let's say you have a list of events. For each event, you know the year, month, and some other data. You want them sorted chronologically. Obviously you're not going to code the sort by hand. Maybe you'd consider: Why wouldn't I just do myList.sort(key=lambda x: castToTimestamp(x)) ? Then I'm just sorting a list of integers/floats, which sounds like a solved problem.