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Coming from the candidates perspective, I loved it. The whole process was efficient and flexible. The coding questions were realistic. The workday simulation wa

by nxc18 10y ago

Coming from the candidates perspective, I loved it. The whole process was efficient and flexible. The coding questions were realistic. The workday simulation was really cool. I get that the author cares about privacy, but without doing what they do there should be no way to make the process as smooth as it is without getting tons of cheating. (It sounds crazy, but being in uni, I've seen crazy amounts of people cheat, often on the order of >50% of the graduate cs program.)

SOLAR_FIELDS 10y ago
It's almost unbelievable - and perhaps the perspective of people who interview for one of these in-demand companies can offer the better perspective on why go to these lengths . I work for one of the big 5 in demand software companies to work for - originally I would do a live-programming question on Coderpad as part of a first round pass with candidates. I used a pretty basic question as sort of a fizzbuzz - build a Pascal's triangle. The amount of people who took the exact top sample direct from StackOverflow without even attempting to change anything or mask their cheating was astounding. We've since adopted a better heuristic approach that more accurately reflects the day-to-day work and abandoned the smoke test, but as everyone knows, the most valuable resource any interviewer has is time - the more of that you can save, the better off you are.
- flukus 10y ago
  Did you call it fizzbuzz or pascals triangle and is that how they were able to google it? If you change the parameters to ducky-fuzz (the drinking game variant) and describe the requirements they shouldn't be able to google an answer, at least not a 100% one.
  - thomasahle 10y ago
    Unless people already know the problem and its original name.
    - OJFord 10y ago
      I'd have thought that's a more valuable '+1' than a correct fizzbuzz answer - shows the candidate can recognise a common pattern in a problem, and know the name from being interested enough to hang out on HN, SO, or whatever.
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    Similarly, people search questions in live phone interviews all the time. If you ask "tell me about UDP", they'll read you the Wiki page. If you ask "tell me about the best known connectionless networking protocol", they're not likely to turn that up in a convincing amount of time.

by nxc18 10y ago

SOLAR_FIELDS 10y ago

It's almost unbelievable - and perhaps the perspective of people who interview for one of these in-demand companies can offer the better perspective on why go to these lengths . I work for one of the big 5 in demand software companies to work for - originally I would do a live-programming question on Coderpad as part of a first round pass with candidates. I used a pretty basic question as sort of a fizzbuzz - build a Pascal's triangle. The amount of people who took the exact top sample direct from StackOverflow without even attempting to change anything or mask their cheating was astounding. We've since adopted a better heuristic approach that more accurately reflects the day-to-day work and abandoned the smoke test, but as everyone knows, the most valuable resource any interviewer has is time - the more of that you can save, the better off you are.

flukus 10y ago
Did you call it fizzbuzz or pascals triangle and is that how they were able to google it? If you change the parameters to ducky-fuzz (the drinking game variant) and describe the requirements they shouldn't be able to google an answer, at least not a 100% one.
- thomasahle 10y ago
  Unless people already know the problem and its original name.
  - OJFord 10y ago
    I'd have thought that's a more valuable '+1' than a correct fizzbuzz answer - shows the candidate can recognise a common pattern in a problem, and know the name from being interested enough to hang out on HN, SO, or whatever.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  Similarly, people search questions in live phone interviews all the time. If you ask "tell me about UDP", they'll read you the Wiki page. If you ask "tell me about the best known connectionless networking protocol", they're not likely to turn that up in a convincing amount of time.