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Interviewing is a funny thing. I remember when I graduated from a "Top School" and interviewed at "hot startups" from the valley. I aced a lot of the interview

by k2xl 10y ago

Interviewing is a funny thing. I remember when I graduated from a "Top School" and interviewed at "hot startups" from the valley. I aced a lot of the interviews - why? Because I had just taken classes on LinkedLists, Binary Trees, HashMaps, etc... So when they asked me to whiteboard a "shortest path algorithm" it was just rehashing what I did in school. Years later, looking back, I fail to see the relevance in most of the technical questions. In fact, if I had to do those questions over again today I would probably fail miserably. Yet, I have been in the industry for a while now and have worked with countless more technologies and have accomplished far more than my younger self. Just because someone performs well in a technical interview doesn't mean they will do a good job. That is the data that really matters. I've interviewed hundreds of candidates as a hiring manager for some big startups, and from my experience technical interviews are not a great indicator of success. I'm saying this coming from someone who has gone to a "Top School" and done multiple Coursera/Udacity/etc classes. Yes, someone might be able to whiteboard a random forest or write a merge sort, but do they know how to engineer a system? Can the candidate: > Communicate well with others in a group? > Solve unique technical problems? > Research and learn new technologies effectively? > Understand how to push back to product owners if there's scope creep? etc... These are all things that are not really analyzed in many technical interviews. As I'm reading this analysis all I can think of is that it is pretty useless - if not dangerous for the industry. What I've found is that it is critically important that someone knows how to code at some basic level. But their ability to code and explain algorithms on the fly, while probably relevant in academia/research, is such a minor part of the day-to-day of a programmer - At least from my experience.

phd514 10y ago
That has been my experience, too. I remember deriving the optimal solution for an interview question that was a variant of a radix sort and impressing the interviewer for one of the hot startups at the time. That was partly the result of my ability to recognize the similarities between the problems but even more a consequence of having recently studied radix sorts. Twenty years later, I'm a much better developer than I was then and have shipped many projects with significant degrees of complexity, but I couldn't answer that interview question or ones like it as well today as I did then.

by k2xl 10y ago

phd514 10y ago

That has been my experience, too. I remember deriving the optimal solution for an interview question that was a variant of a radix sort and impressing the interviewer for one of the hot startups at the time. That was partly the result of my ability to recognize the similarities between the problems but even more a consequence of having recently studied radix sorts. Twenty years later, I'm a much better developer than I was then and have shipped many projects with significant degrees of complexity, but I couldn't answer that interview question or ones like it as well today as I did then.