6 ms·
If you have one candidate who has seen all of this stuff before and can use it directly from memory, and another candidate who has been busy raising kids and ha
by kafkaesq 10y ago
If you have one candidate who has seen all of this stuff before and can use it directly from memory, and another candidate who has been busy raising kids and has never seen this stuff before, who do you want to hire, all else being equal?
The one who's raised kids† obviously.
As that's approximately 3-4 orders of magnitude more difficult -- and indicative of not only of general character (by itself hugely important), but of the more generalized cognitive skills necessary do to high-quality software development -- than the ability to memorize a bunch of scarcely-used algorithms. Because, you know, all those websites and Big 4 recruiters told you to.
† And, to bend your requirements (which is necessary because you're presenting us with a false dichotomy), has darn well "seen this stuff" not only in college (unless you think they're lying about that degree), but in the 0.5% or so of real-life development work which actually requires you to conceive, analyze, and flawlessly implement some non-trivial (if not outright esoteric) algorithm right there, on the spot.
That is, I don't dispute that these skills have some importance -- just that the current default interview process assigns a ridiculous degree of importance to these skills, way out of proportion to their actual importance in the field. And to the exclusion of other, more generalized skills which are actually way more important, but alas, much harder to measure -- with the current crop of faddish (turn-the-crank) interview techniques, anyway.
- wiredfool 10y agoI would say further, that If you are in a position to be implementing some non-trivial algorithm that's not currently in the toolbox, then your best approach is probably to go read a few papers first, and make sure that the algorithm you're looking at has not been surpassed. (Or, perhaps, you just need to dig something up from the '70s. A lot has been forgotten). Then again, if you can implement Paxos on the first try...
- Washuu 10y agoThe best personal analogy I can think of for myself. Six or seven years ago I was updating some legacy code coming across an unsalted MD5 hash being used, "Huh, I thought MD5 was becoming obsolete." I did my research to confirm and also to determine what would be the best hashing algorithm to move forward with. Of course that is not exactly the same as some other problems presented by white board coding.
- ourmandave 10y agoI just googled Paxos and I still can't implement it. =(
- Joof 10y agoTry raft. It's the easy version that works most of the time.
- tostitos1979 10y agoMeh .. I think Paxos is easier than raft. A lot of Raft's complexity is in leader election, getting rid of old leaders, etc. Sad that I have failed Google's whiteboard interview soooo many times that I don't bother returning messages from their recruiters.
- digler999 10y ago> and indicative of not only of general character Someone who chose to bear crotchfruit has no more "general character" than anyone else. All it requires is a functioning reproductive system. You have no idea of the quality of someone's parenting at the time of a job interview and it's borderline-illegal to even ask. > the current default interview process assigns a ridiculous degree of importance to these skills, way out of proportion to their actual importance in the field. That I agree with. I was tested on shared pointers and java reflection for this job 6 months ago. I've written less than 200 lines of actual code, total. I spend my days on HN, going to meetings, reading log files, and pushing buttons on test systems. And I make almost 3X my entry-grade salary 10 years ago.
- jpttsn 10y agoWhiteboard programming isn't very relevant to day-to-day programming. Raising kids is doubtlessly even less relevant.
- FullMtlAlcoholc 10y ago> Raising kids is doubtlessly even less relevant. That's a bit dismissive. From personal experience, if one isn't a complete failure, raising kids to a satisfactory degree would exercise one's managerial and time management muscles, not to mention their ability to work under pressure/sleep deprivation. Parents of infants
- kafkaesq 10y agoRaising kids is doubtlessly even less relevant. Right. But if done successfully (or even just satisfactorily -- given how difficult of a job it truly is), at least has some correlation with character, and general cognitive fortitude. And hence -- unlike the ability to withstand repeating whiteboarding sessions -- has at least some correlation with actual fitness vis-a-vis the role being applied for.
- dagw 10y ago"So you seem to have the experience we're looking for and our engineers seem impressed with your interview. Just one small final thing, a formality really, could you bring your daughter in tomorrow so we can talk to her and see if she's been brought up right?" If whiteboard testing is frowned upon, I imagine testing a candidates kids would be doubly frowned upon.
- kafkaesq 10y agoNo worries; I was responding rhetorically to a rhetorical questions. I wasn't suggestion that it actually be used as a hiring filter.
- yellowapple 10y agoI reckon that'll change significantly as AI grows increasingly advanced and complex.
- david38 10y agoRaising kids is a metric of nothing other than having had sex. Every parent I know is a "great mom or dad" simply because you're not allowed to say people aren't great parents unless they are truly bad.
- kafkaesq 10y agoI was referring to the practice of raising kids. Not to participation in one side or the other of the insemination process.
- david38 10y agoRaising kids is a metric of nothing other than having had sex. Every parent I know is a "great mom or dad" simply because you're not allowed to say people aren't great parents unless they are truly bad.