4 ms·

Interviewing should now be part of most CS educations, if not its own three class/semester course. Its that weird, and that important.

kornakiewicz 11y ago
Then we shall call them a sales (or whatever) training, not the CS.
rifung 11y ago
Isn't it already? I feel like all of the interview questions come down to things you learned in a Data Structures or Algorithms course. I suppose the design questions aren't necessarily taught in school but presumably you would learn that as you program more.
dang 11y ago
But the people who'd need that the most are the ones furthest out of school. I shudder at the thought of ever having to do another programming interview. Well, alternately shudder and laugh. What a joke!
- waterlesscloud 11y ago
  It's my belief that the best experienced programmers don't have to go through programming interviews. Even if you don't actively make an effort to network, you have a network of people who know you're good enough to outright hire without the whole rigmarole. Companies who aren't finding people like this are missing out on many of the best.
  - vonmoltke 11y ago
    > Even if you don't actively make an effort to network, you have a network of people who know you're good enough to outright hire without the whole rigmarole. Not sure why you think this is the case. It is really easy to end up with a worthless network (I managed), and many larger companies insist on forcing every applicant through the HR hiring funnel for compliance reasons.
    - waterlesscloud 11y ago
      It's been my whole career. Yeah, I've had to go in and do the grip'n'grin interview and talk to people for a couple hours to make sure I'm not a martian or something. But every job has always come about because someone at the company either knew I was competent (from working with me in the past) or asked someone I knew who told them I was. I've never had a job that involved whiteboarding or any sort of coding test.
      - vonmoltke 11y ago
        Yes, but why do you think your experience generalizes to anyone else?
BinaryIdiot 11y ago
Alternatively we could come up with a better system for interviewing. Instead of concentrating on being able to remember algorithms and write them out in a completely non-normal way (white board) we could, instead, give them a very small project to do then have them come in and explain it, walk someone through extending it and / or work through a problem together. You'd get real experience seeing how they write their code, work with others and their ability communicate. Drilling someone to do tree traversal or various Big-O exercises doesn't exactly come up in the real world. Yeah performance and understanding data structures is important but that's why you give them something real, see what kind of data structure they come up with and why and go from there. Well at least in my opinion. I've interviewed a lot of people and have been interviewed myself. I've unfortunately haven't been able to gather the data to see how effective my method is BUT I like it a hell of a lot better.
- zodiac 11y ago
  > we could, instead, give them a very small project to do one objection to this I've heard is that it disproportionately disadvantages people who don't have the free time to do it
  - BinaryIdiot 11y ago
    While true in the end I would expect it to take less time to do a small project, come in and review / work with it than the typical 1-2 days of interviews. Not sure if it would actually happen that way in practice I admit. I'd like to try it and attempt to gather data in either case.
peter303 11y ago
We used to have something called the "recitation class" one hour a week for solving homework problems out loud. I was under the impression these were making a comeback as classes "flipped" to watching the lectures outside of class. People would skip recitation sometimes because they werent learning new material like in the lectures or doing their problem sets which took enough time already. If these were made more mandatory somehow, they'd be like interviews.

kornakiewicz 11y ago

Then we shall call them a sales (or whatever) training, not the CS.

rifung 11y ago

Isn't it already? I feel like all of the interview questions come down to things you learned in a Data Structures or Algorithms course. I suppose the design questions aren't necessarily taught in school but presumably you would learn that as you program more.

dang 11y ago

But the people who'd need that the most are the ones furthest out of school. I shudder at the thought of ever having to do another programming interview. Well, alternately shudder and laugh. What a joke!

waterlesscloud 11y ago
It's my belief that the best experienced programmers don't have to go through programming interviews. Even if you don't actively make an effort to network, you have a network of people who know you're good enough to outright hire without the whole rigmarole. Companies who aren't finding people like this are missing out on many of the best.
- vonmoltke 11y ago
  > Even if you don't actively make an effort to network, you have a network of people who know you're good enough to outright hire without the whole rigmarole. Not sure why you think this is the case. It is really easy to end up with a worthless network (I managed), and many larger companies insist on forcing every applicant through the HR hiring funnel for compliance reasons.
  - waterlesscloud 11y ago
    It's been my whole career. Yeah, I've had to go in and do the grip'n'grin interview and talk to people for a couple hours to make sure I'm not a martian or something. But every job has always come about because someone at the company either knew I was competent (from working with me in the past) or asked someone I knew who told them I was. I've never had a job that involved whiteboarding or any sort of coding test.
    - vonmoltke 11y ago
      Yes, but why do you think your experience generalizes to anyone else?

BinaryIdiot 11y ago

Alternatively we could come up with a better system for interviewing. Instead of concentrating on being able to remember algorithms and write them out in a completely non-normal way (white board) we could, instead, give them a very small project to do then have them come in and explain it, walk someone through extending it and / or work through a problem together. You'd get real experience seeing how they write their code, work with others and their ability communicate. Drilling someone to do tree traversal or various Big-O exercises doesn't exactly come up in the real world. Yeah performance and understanding data structures is important but that's why you give them something real, see what kind of data structure they come up with and why and go from there. Well at least in my opinion. I've interviewed a lot of people and have been interviewed myself. I've unfortunately haven't been able to gather the data to see how effective my method is BUT I like it a hell of a lot better.

zodiac 11y ago
> we could, instead, give them a very small project to do one objection to this I've heard is that it disproportionately disadvantages people who don't have the free time to do it
- BinaryIdiot 11y ago
  While true in the end I would expect it to take less time to do a small project, come in and review / work with it than the typical 1-2 days of interviews. Not sure if it would actually happen that way in practice I admit. I'd like to try it and attempt to gather data in either case.

peter303 11y ago

We used to have something called the "recitation class" one hour a week for solving homework problems out loud. I was under the impression these were making a comeback as classes "flipped" to watching the lectures outside of class. People would skip recitation sometimes because they werent learning new material like in the lectures or doing their problem sets which took enough time already. If these were made more mandatory somehow, they'd be like interviews.