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A lot of people here seem to suggest it is unreasonable to ask someone to do some coding in an interview given that you've shown a series of projects and provid
by verelo 11y ago
A lot of people here seem to suggest it is unreasonable to ask someone to do some coding in an interview given that you've shown a series of projects and provided references. Unfortunately I've been through a variety of interviews where I feel the conditions which I was asked to code were unreasonable (whiteboard, overly complex problems while under pressure, using a language I was not comfortable with or just academic problems that are rare in the real world), but I really think confirming their ability to write code, beyond things like github repos etc, is an important step of hiring a developer (because i've seen great github repos and references, but ended up with developers that are very, very average)
I've only hired tens of people, and while that is not a massive sample size, I'm still astonished by the simple questions we ask that people get stuck on. The one that continues to shock me:
"In any language of your choice, write a function that takes an array of ints and returns the sum of those ints (If you use a language such as php do not use array_sum)"
I'm just looking for something like:
function sum($ints) {
$sum = 0;
foreach($ints as $i) {
$sum += $i;
}
return $sum;
}
Then we follow up with something like: "lets say your input array contains [4,-7,0], walk me through the code"
And we finally ask "talk to me about some things that could go wrong at runtime that might cause issues with this function". Expecting people to talk about overflows (maxint?) or if its a dynamic language like php, checking for non-integer values.
I estimate that around 50% of people get ruled out during the "coding" exercise mentioned above. It is astonishing that these people even apply for developer jobs.
- tomjen3 11y agoImagine there are twenty candidates who can't code at all, so they apply everywhere. There are also twenty candidates who can code, but are presently unemployed because they all worked for SpoonRacket. Now the entire lot apply for jobs at your company, and you hire two of those who can code. Within 3 months the rest of the good ones have found jobs, but 30 others have temporarily been unemployed and none of the bad ones have been unemployed. So you interview again and roughly 40% of the programmers you interview can't code. But that doesn't mean that even 5% of the programmers out there can't code, it just means it is the same bad programmers that interview in lots of places. It is the same when employers say they are getting ten or twenty job applications for every open position - that doesn't mean anything because everybody who is unemployed applies to more than one place, but from only one side of the fence it sure looks like that.
- Chris2048 11y agoI'm not sure I understand, > but 30 others have temporarily been unemployed and none of the bad ones have been unemployed Is this 30 new programmers plus 20 of the original candidates who can't code? Should that be "none of the bad ones have been employed"?
- tomjen3 11y agoYes, sorry.
- verelo 11y agoYeah, lots of people who are not amazing applying and having to be filtered is a key challenge for anyone trying to hire at scale. In fact the key issue that this question is intended to address, so I agree with you. I would never want to suggest that 'most programmers are bad' or anything like that, i think the real issue is that people who are not really great programmers apply for jobs that are beyond their level of skill at the time of their application.
- bkovacev 11y ago> (because i've seen great github repos and references, but ended up with developers that are very, very average) Not trying to be a smart ass, but being average is not only the developers fault, it could also be the company's.
- verelo 11y agoI'm not sure I'm following, do you mean that the company may not be extracting optimal performance out of them? I'd agree, great people don't always do great work, often simply due to the environment they're in. Having said that, i think when people have a great personal Github repo where it appears they should be able to answer the above question, but in practice cannot do it without looking up the answer on Stack Overflow...then there is an issue.