6 ms·

If there are separate tutorials for how to "Crack the Coding Interview", maybe coding interviews do not accurately select for coding skill.

kafkaesq 10y ago
Exactly. What kind of hiring "bar" is it if all it measures is the motivation (or more specifically: degree of desperation) necessary to pony up for a 30-day cram school... led, not coincidentally, by the very company that's administering your weeder tests?
- jakebasile 10y ago
  > led ... by the very company that's administering your weeder tests? I actually didn't even notice this conflict of interest. It would line up exactly with how such an awful class of product has gotten so popular. I've been subjected to HackerRank tests before, along with a few competitor's products. They are universally demeaning, insulting, infuriating, and useless as an indicator of skill.
  - blablablame 10y ago
    then do it like I do. Whenever they send you a link to one, don't take it. Explain you are more than happy to talk to an engineer but you won't do some random online test. (or if you want to be mean, take it, answer every question with a variant of 'this is dumb' and then email the company saying they just wasted their money on these systems)
    - fail2fail2ban 10y ago
      I was polite but ended a phone interview recently when they wanted me to code in a Google Document.
      - kafkaesq 10y ago
        Good call. The sheer idiocy of expecting people to show off their mad hacking skills in such an obviously crippled environment is just... breathtaking. Especially when the cost of renting a session on one of the services that does offer a full-featured IDE (with vi and emacs modes) is close to zero. But given that it's most likely the result of junior hiring managers giving marching orders to junior engineers (i.e. the people conducting the screening) who just don't know any better than to say "no" to such a silly and insulting request to make of incoming candidates... the depth and reach of this annoying fad becomes less surprising.
        jstimpfle 10y ago
        This is really misguided. As a programmer you should be able to write a few lines of code in a Google Document. On the other hand it would be idiotic to expect people to be able to code in IDE XYZ (whether it has vi and emacs mode or not).
        fail2fail2ban 10y ago
        I've written code for pay for over two decades in a variety of languages and on a variety of platforms. I can say if I don't wish to write code into a Google Document, nothing misguided about that. Someone fresh out of school, maybe, even then, most coders are using an IDE all day or have another window or terminal open so we can do a quick compile sanity check so even for a new coder fresh out of school, this makes no sense.
        kafkaesq 10y ago
        You should be able to write code with half-busted crayons on the back of yesterday's newspaper, also. But it's much classier (and time-efficient) for all concerned if the employer provides at least ballpark-adequate tools upfront (meaning at the very least an editor that doesn't overtly work against you -- like Google Docs does).
        deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
    - jakebasile 10y ago
      I have begun doing this. The RoI just isn't there for me. I've been looking for full time employment for over 6 months now, doing contracting to make ends meet and to stay involved in the industry. I started out doing the tests, putting lots of effort into the insipid take home exams, and so on. It amounted to absolutely nothing. I'd get invited on site, get tortured with a whiteboard for 6 hours, and get no offer. Meanwhile, contract "interviews" have been "What have you done at your previous jobs?", "How can you help us do $THING", and finally "What's your rate?". They have, unlike FT interviewers, understood that I am telling the truth about what I have done, what I can do, and how I do it, and so didn't require a college test to prove it.
      - kafkaesq 10y ago
        Yeah, you have to pretty much assume that if you balk on their "weeder" test, they'll balk on you. The only alternative is to be at least -somewhat- compromising -- as I don't mind these tests too much, if they're on the short and sweet side (up to 90 min timed, or 3-4 hours untimed). But once you've decided what your limit is, hold to it. "I'm sorry, but I've done enough of these already -- sometimes without getting any response at all from the company, even though I felt pretty confident my solution was at least ballpark correct -- so unfortunately I can't justify the time investment for your drippingly pretentious mandatory 4-hour HackerRank hazing session." (Same goes for ridiculously over-hard and/or over-rushed algorithm questions which in realistic terms almost no one is able to genuinely "solve" in the time provided -- unless they crammed and/or did them very shortly before. Just sit back and assess the situation for 5 minutes before jumping in. And if, heaven forbid, you don't think you'll be able to crank out the flawless the solution they'll undoubtedly expect in the next 35 minutes -- just say, "I'm sorry, but I done challenges like these before and I just don't they're realistic problems to ask people to solve on the spot. So I'll have to pass.") Of course you don't have to use the exact phrases "drippingly pretentious" and "mandatory hazing session." But at least you're giving them a qualified rejection (instead of "Neah, I'm just too cool for your shit.") Which they'll also almost certainly decide to pass on you for. But if so, then at least you've managed to hold your ground, and keep your head up. And who knows, maybe at some point these companies will start looking at the response data on these poorly considered "challenge" tasks -- and will move on to some other filtering fad.
  - Apocryphon 10y ago
    The College Boardification of software has begun. Arguably it was already here back when companies were hiring based on candidate SAT schools and college pedigrees, this is just a new chapter with sw interviewing platform firms becoming the new Princeton Reviews.
    - kafkaesq 10y ago
      Along with the "Top 20 Startups to Work For in 2017" mentality. As if for the same crop of... for want of a better term... "kids" who had the whole stack-ranking and "human beings are infinitely measurable and weighable" ethos so relentlessly and successfully drilled into them from pre-K up through graduate school -- there's not even a question of jacking up and scaling out that same system out into the professional working sphere. It's just the way universe works. And so of course getting a leg up and "making it" means cramming one's brains out for however many months as necessary in order to graze whatever "bar" they set because... that's just what learning is, right?
gaylemcd 10y ago
Oh, totally. If interviews were a perfect science, and perfectly measured ability, then you wouldn't need to prepare for them at all. You're absolutely right there. And if it were 100% about preparation -- if preparation could land anyone any job they wanted -- then the interviews would be mostly worthless (other than perhaps assessing how much work someone is willing to put in). The reality is somewhere in between: Preparation helps someone perform at their best, but it will not land anyone any job they want. This is why tech companies actually encourage preparation -- it reduces the number of good candidates who get rejected. Note that this isn't really unique to coding interviews. People prepare for ALL types of interviews, so it's revealing the same flaw in all of them.
- jakebasile 10y ago
  In my experience over the past year, programmer interviews are almost all the way towards the "preparation" (learning to interview, not learning to do the job) end of the scale, with a unhealthy doses of sadism and elitism. I've rarely been asked anything that has something meaningful to do with my abilities as an engineer, only demeaning HackerRank style tests that check only for algorithmic academics knowledge, insulting take-home exams that ignore existing code and industry experience, and torturous whiteboard sessions that select for nothing except ability to withstand day-long in-person inquisitions. HackerRank is a symptom of the terrible interview cult that is pervasive in our industry which is so extremely guarded against the fabled false positive hire. It is designed with absolute certainty that no one is qualified for any job unless they are some silly notion of a 10x engineer or "hacker" while claiming there is an engineering shortage. It allows us to opine about how terrible impostor syndrome is while simultaneously engendering it in others through these interview practices. It allows us to write off people with experience who are further out from college (and therefore older) or never even went under the guise of algorithmic knowledge requirements without admitting ageism. As to other industries, I have little direct experience. I know that my friends and family (none of which are in tech) have been on interviews that are humane and conversational as opposed to the inquisition our industry supports. They have all been aghast at what I've been going through.
  - friendlygrammar 10y ago
parennoob 10y ago
I have no idea why people who otherwise are against practices like stack ranking think that companies like "Hacker"Rank which assign you a score based on a set of simplistic algorithm are a good idea. If you are a manager and your company uses HackerRank as a hiring filter, I request you to take a good, hard second look at it – specially if you lament that you are unable to find any developers. These companies make bank from both sides (the person interviewing who is cramming on their material, and the employer), and leave out important things like how well you work with teams, how fast you adapt to new frameworks, or how maintainable your code base is. I guess it is no surprise that another of their "featured" blog posts talks in extremely glowing terms about someone for coding for 24 hours without any sleep. (http://blog.hackerrank.com/recap-how-mimino-solved-78-project-euler-problems-in-under-24-hours/ http://blog.hackerrank.com/recap-how-mimino-solved-78-projec...).
- chezinn 10y ago
  "Make bank from both sides" Can you point me to the part of the HackerRank website where they ask people (not businesses) to pay them money?
  - parennoob 10y ago
    I am sorry -- since Gayle's book of the same name is a product worth ~$30, I assumed there was a paywall at some point behind https://www.hackerrank.com/domains/tutorials/cracking-the-coding-interview https://www.hackerrank.com/domains/tutorials/cracking-the-co... -- I guess I was wrong? It doesn't clearly say on the page that it was, and I don't want to sign up for their product. A slightly weaker version of that argument is that having a vast base of signed-up users and data about their challenges is still making bank out of the efforts of individual users, but clearly not as bad as requiring you to pay for this tutorial.
    - chezinn 10y ago
      Had a look myself. There isn't.
    - jakebasile 10y ago
achr2 10y ago
Imagine a world where the interviewers sat a candidate down in the company's typical environment, with a simplified version of their codebase, and asked them to re-implement a small piece of striped-out functionality. Give them a couple of hours, and then allow them to ask questions, explain what they did, where they got stuck, and give their own feedback. Now you know that they understand your environment/stack, and get an actual sense of how they would perform for your company on code that matters. Let them see the actual code you use at the end, and discuss differences, why they made certain choices, and see if they get excited or frustrated with your company's practices (style, systems, conventions).
- gaylemcd 10y ago
  Yeah, some companies do those (or a slight variation, called pair programming interviews). There are a lot of benefits of those, but also some drawbacks. First, it's much harder to scale in a consistent way. Second, and more importantly, you also evaluate how they code right now, on these specific technologies, not how well they would code with a bit of training. Think about it: There are a ton of new college grads who are better software engineers (or would be, with 6 months) than people with 20 years of experience. But a person with 20 years of experience who knows that technology will perform better in an immediate sense than the new grad. No interviews are perfect.
  - jakebasile 10y ago
    > There are a ton of new college grads who are better software engineers (or would be, with 6 months) than people with 20 years of experience. Citation? How does having fresh recollection of algorithms that you will rarely if ever use outside of interviews make someone a better software engineer?
    - gaylemcd 10y ago
      I didn't say it did. I wasn't saying that new grads are, on average, better than experienced hires. I was just saying that experience is not everything. An experienced hire will outperform a new grad on a "build this project in 3 hours" test. But the new grad might actually be a fundamentally better engineer - they might be smarter, more careful, etc. Given 3 - 6 months of training, the new grad might actually make better technical decisions. Obviously, the reverse can also happen: the experienced hire might be not only more knowledgable, but also smarter, more careful, etc. The problem with the "build a project in 3 hours" test is that it weights experience and knowledge so heavily that you end up eliminating people who could be great, with a little bit of training. Again, a new grad could also be a fundamentally terrible software engineer (there are fundamentally terrible software engineers with experience and with no experience). And in 20 years, they'll be a terrible software engineer with 20 years of knowledge and experience. They might be able to build a 3-hour project better than some smart inexperienced coder but I'd still rather hire the smart inexperienced coder (assuming I have some time to train them). Ultimately, ALL hiring processes are flawed.

kafkaesq 10y ago

Exactly. What kind of hiring "bar" is it if all it measures is the motivation (or more specifically: degree of desperation) necessary to pony up for a 30-day cram school... led, not coincidentally, by the very company that's administering your weeder tests?

jakebasile 10y ago
> led ... by the very company that's administering your weeder tests? I actually didn't even notice this conflict of interest. It would line up exactly with how such an awful class of product has gotten so popular. I've been subjected to HackerRank tests before, along with a few competitor's products. They are universally demeaning, insulting, infuriating, and useless as an indicator of skill.
- blablablame 10y ago
  then do it like I do. Whenever they send you a link to one, don't take it. Explain you are more than happy to talk to an engineer but you won't do some random online test. (or if you want to be mean, take it, answer every question with a variant of 'this is dumb' and then email the company saying they just wasted their money on these systems)
  - fail2fail2ban 10y ago
    I was polite but ended a phone interview recently when they wanted me to code in a Google Document.
    - kafkaesq 10y ago
      Good call. The sheer idiocy of expecting people to show off their mad hacking skills in such an obviously crippled environment is just... breathtaking. Especially when the cost of renting a session on one of the services that does offer a full-featured IDE (with vi and emacs modes) is close to zero. But given that it's most likely the result of junior hiring managers giving marching orders to junior engineers (i.e. the people conducting the screening) who just don't know any better than to say "no" to such a silly and insulting request to make of incoming candidates... the depth and reach of this annoying fad becomes less surprising.
      - jstimpfle 10y ago
        This is really misguided. As a programmer you should be able to write a few lines of code in a Google Document. On the other hand it would be idiotic to expect people to be able to code in IDE XYZ (whether it has vi and emacs mode or not).
        fail2fail2ban 10y ago
        I've written code for pay for over two decades in a variety of languages and on a variety of platforms. I can say if I don't wish to write code into a Google Document, nothing misguided about that. Someone fresh out of school, maybe, even then, most coders are using an IDE all day or have another window or terminal open so we can do a quick compile sanity check so even for a new coder fresh out of school, this makes no sense.
        kafkaesq 10y ago
        You should be able to write code with half-busted crayons on the back of yesterday's newspaper, also. But it's much classier (and time-efficient) for all concerned if the employer provides at least ballpark-adequate tools upfront (meaning at the very least an editor that doesn't overtly work against you -- like Google Docs does).
        deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
  - jakebasile 10y ago
    I have begun doing this. The RoI just isn't there for me. I've been looking for full time employment for over 6 months now, doing contracting to make ends meet and to stay involved in the industry. I started out doing the tests, putting lots of effort into the insipid take home exams, and so on. It amounted to absolutely nothing. I'd get invited on site, get tortured with a whiteboard for 6 hours, and get no offer. Meanwhile, contract "interviews" have been "What have you done at your previous jobs?", "How can you help us do $THING", and finally "What's your rate?". They have, unlike FT interviewers, understood that I am telling the truth about what I have done, what I can do, and how I do it, and so didn't require a college test to prove it.
    - kafkaesq 10y ago
      Yeah, you have to pretty much assume that if you balk on their "weeder" test, they'll balk on you. The only alternative is to be at least -somewhat- compromising -- as I don't mind these tests too much, if they're on the short and sweet side (up to 90 min timed, or 3-4 hours untimed). But once you've decided what your limit is, hold to it. "I'm sorry, but I've done enough of these already -- sometimes without getting any response at all from the company, even though I felt pretty confident my solution was at least ballpark correct -- so unfortunately I can't justify the time investment for your drippingly pretentious mandatory 4-hour HackerRank hazing session." (Same goes for ridiculously over-hard and/or over-rushed algorithm questions which in realistic terms almost no one is able to genuinely "solve" in the time provided -- unless they crammed and/or did them very shortly before. Just sit back and assess the situation for 5 minutes before jumping in. And if, heaven forbid, you don't think you'll be able to crank out the flawless the solution they'll undoubtedly expect in the next 35 minutes -- just say, "I'm sorry, but I done challenges like these before and I just don't they're realistic problems to ask people to solve on the spot. So I'll have to pass.") Of course you don't have to use the exact phrases "drippingly pretentious" and "mandatory hazing session." But at least you're giving them a qualified rejection (instead of "Neah, I'm just too cool for your shit.") Which they'll also almost certainly decide to pass on you for. But if so, then at least you've managed to hold your ground, and keep your head up. And who knows, maybe at some point these companies will start looking at the response data on these poorly considered "challenge" tasks -- and will move on to some other filtering fad.
- Apocryphon 10y ago
  The College Boardification of software has begun. Arguably it was already here back when companies were hiring based on candidate SAT schools and college pedigrees, this is just a new chapter with sw interviewing platform firms becoming the new Princeton Reviews.
  - kafkaesq 10y ago
    Along with the "Top 20 Startups to Work For in 2017" mentality. As if for the same crop of... for want of a better term... "kids" who had the whole stack-ranking and "human beings are infinitely measurable and weighable" ethos so relentlessly and successfully drilled into them from pre-K up through graduate school -- there's not even a question of jacking up and scaling out that same system out into the professional working sphere. It's just the way universe works. And so of course getting a leg up and "making it" means cramming one's brains out for however many months as necessary in order to graze whatever "bar" they set because... that's just what learning is, right?

gaylemcd 10y ago

Oh, totally. If interviews were a perfect science, and perfectly measured ability, then you wouldn't need to prepare for them at all. You're absolutely right there. And if it were 100% about preparation -- if preparation could land anyone any job they wanted -- then the interviews would be mostly worthless (other than perhaps assessing how much work someone is willing to put in). The reality is somewhere in between: Preparation helps someone perform at their best, but it will not land anyone any job they want. This is why tech companies actually encourage preparation -- it reduces the number of good candidates who get rejected. Note that this isn't really unique to coding interviews. People prepare for ALL types of interviews, so it's revealing the same flaw in all of them.

jakebasile 10y ago
In my experience over the past year, programmer interviews are almost all the way towards the "preparation" (learning to interview, not learning to do the job) end of the scale, with a unhealthy doses of sadism and elitism. I've rarely been asked anything that has something meaningful to do with my abilities as an engineer, only demeaning HackerRank style tests that check only for algorithmic academics knowledge, insulting take-home exams that ignore existing code and industry experience, and torturous whiteboard sessions that select for nothing except ability to withstand day-long in-person inquisitions. HackerRank is a symptom of the terrible interview cult that is pervasive in our industry which is so extremely guarded against the fabled false positive hire. It is designed with absolute certainty that no one is qualified for any job unless they are some silly notion of a 10x engineer or "hacker" while claiming there is an engineering shortage. It allows us to opine about how terrible impostor syndrome is while simultaneously engendering it in others through these interview practices. It allows us to write off people with experience who are further out from college (and therefore older) or never even went under the guise of algorithmic knowledge requirements without admitting ageism. As to other industries, I have little direct experience. I know that my friends and family (none of which are in tech) have been on interviews that are humane and conversational as opposed to the inquisition our industry supports. They have all been aghast at what I've been going through.
- friendlygrammar 10y ago

parennoob 10y ago

I have no idea why people who otherwise are against practices like stack ranking think that companies like "Hacker"Rank which assign you a score based on a set of simplistic algorithm are a good idea. If you are a manager and your company uses HackerRank as a hiring filter, I request you to take a good, hard second look at it – specially if you lament that you are unable to find any developers. These companies make bank from both sides (the person interviewing who is cramming on their material, and the employer), and leave out important things like how well you work with teams, how fast you adapt to new frameworks, or how maintainable your code base is. I guess it is no surprise that another of their "featured" blog posts talks in extremely glowing terms about someone for coding for 24 hours without any sleep. (http://blog.hackerrank.com/recap-how-mimino-solved-78-project-euler-problems-in-under-24-hours/ http://blog.hackerrank.com/recap-how-mimino-solved-78-projec...).

chezinn 10y ago
"Make bank from both sides" Can you point me to the part of the HackerRank website where they ask people (not businesses) to pay them money?
- parennoob 10y ago
  I am sorry -- since Gayle's book of the same name is a product worth ~$30, I assumed there was a paywall at some point behind https://www.hackerrank.com/domains/tutorials/cracking-the-coding-interview https://www.hackerrank.com/domains/tutorials/cracking-the-co... -- I guess I was wrong? It doesn't clearly say on the page that it was, and I don't want to sign up for their product. A slightly weaker version of that argument is that having a vast base of signed-up users and data about their challenges is still making bank out of the efforts of individual users, but clearly not as bad as requiring you to pay for this tutorial.
  - chezinn 10y ago
    Had a look myself. There isn't.
  - jakebasile 10y ago

achr2 10y ago

Imagine a world where the interviewers sat a candidate down in the company's typical environment, with a simplified version of their codebase, and asked them to re-implement a small piece of striped-out functionality. Give them a couple of hours, and then allow them to ask questions, explain what they did, where they got stuck, and give their own feedback. Now you know that they understand your environment/stack, and get an actual sense of how they would perform for your company on code that matters. Let them see the actual code you use at the end, and discuss differences, why they made certain choices, and see if they get excited or frustrated with your company's practices (style, systems, conventions).

gaylemcd 10y ago
Yeah, some companies do those (or a slight variation, called pair programming interviews). There are a lot of benefits of those, but also some drawbacks. First, it's much harder to scale in a consistent way. Second, and more importantly, you also evaluate how they code right now, on these specific technologies, not how well they would code with a bit of training. Think about it: There are a ton of new college grads who are better software engineers (or would be, with 6 months) than people with 20 years of experience. But a person with 20 years of experience who knows that technology will perform better in an immediate sense than the new grad. No interviews are perfect.
- jakebasile 10y ago
  > There are a ton of new college grads who are better software engineers (or would be, with 6 months) than people with 20 years of experience. Citation? How does having fresh recollection of algorithms that you will rarely if ever use outside of interviews make someone a better software engineer?
  - gaylemcd 10y ago
    I didn't say it did. I wasn't saying that new grads are, on average, better than experienced hires. I was just saying that experience is not everything. An experienced hire will outperform a new grad on a "build this project in 3 hours" test. But the new grad might actually be a fundamentally better engineer - they might be smarter, more careful, etc. Given 3 - 6 months of training, the new grad might actually make better technical decisions. Obviously, the reverse can also happen: the experienced hire might be not only more knowledgable, but also smarter, more careful, etc. The problem with the "build a project in 3 hours" test is that it weights experience and knowledge so heavily that you end up eliminating people who could be great, with a little bit of training. Again, a new grad could also be a fundamentally terrible software engineer (there are fundamentally terrible software engineers with experience and with no experience). And in 20 years, they'll be a terrible software engineer with 20 years of knowledge and experience. They might be able to build a 3-hour project better than some smart inexperienced coder but I'd still rather hire the smart inexperienced coder (assuming I have some time to train them). Ultimately, ALL hiring processes are flawed.