5 ms·

I’m slightly over 40. Recently, I’ve been interviewing, and almost all of the focus has been on how I solve their ‘coding challenge’. Few questions about softwa

• Lendal 9y ago
  Fist, I don't want to work with a group of people who have only been selected by their ability to solve stupid, meaningless puzzles. That's something you do in college, which I hated. Second, once you get past a minimum level of intelligence a lot of success in software development is based on motivation. It's hard to be motivated by a made-up problem where all your hard work is going to be thrown away and not used by anyone for anything, and my first step in solving it is to involuntarily roll my eyes and groan. That starts the project off on a bad foot to begin with.
  • monsieurbanana 9y ago
    I take offense on the "stupid, meaningless puzzles". I don't agree with their use in interviews, but that's needless bashing. You not liking them doesn't make them stupid.
    • perl4ever 9y ago
      Different people like different kinds of puzzles. I like Fermi-type problems, which at least at one time, it seemed like everyone on the internet liked to bash. It may be they are no longer bashed because interviewers abandoned them. I once posted a puzzle on a different website that boiled down to "why did I choose this particular non-round number" with some context, and eventually someone got it, but some people got very angry at me. The trouble is that a lot of puzzles reduce to "can you follow a particular convoluted path to a solution" and if you don't, you are being judged unworthy for being dissimilar in your thinking and not necessarily for your sheer brainpower. That's why I prefer puzzles that nobody has solved, but those have two obvious problems - either (a) they are too hard to solve, or (b) once solved, they appear to be too easy. Either way, you can't use them as tests. It's natural to like tests that you are good at and other people are not, and to hate tests that other people are good at and you are not. So, people are always going to take offense at tests.
• ForRealsies 9y ago
  Really? In my industry they're paying qualified people $200 just for an interview, no strings attached. Another is giving free tickets to Infinity War.
• tcbawo 9y ago
  Seeing whether someone can code has to be part of the recipe. It's surprising how many candidates can't demonstrate basic coding ability. The coding component is better if it requires the candidate to ask questions about what is required, where they can demonstrate their thought process and approach to the problem at hand. Anything that requires more than 15 minutes on a whiteboard is probably overkill. Brainteasers and the like are mostly a waste of time.
• perfunctory 9y ago
  > “Given an NxM matrix of integer strings, print true if any row, column, or diagnonal contains only palindromic numbers that can be written as the sum of consecutive squares.“ Ok, but this is not really a puzzle. It looks like a rather trivial exercise just to see if you can write nested loops. I guess an average software engineer shouldn't have problems with this. Or I am missing something.
  • myth_drannon 9y ago
    Solve it with a For loop and it's immediate interview fail. The solutions should be optimal. /S
    • theandrewbailey 9y ago
      ...because our architect forbids use of for loops. One killed his pappy.
  • eythian 9y ago
    We use questions like this (actually, significantly simpler - basically, can you drive a loop and an array) as a screener test to see if you actually write a trivial program. If you succeed, it's a chance to add constraints and talk about how data structures and algorithms would change given these changes, or how it could be more optimal, etc. But a surprising number of applicants fail to pass a simple coding test, not even getting a naive solution.
    • perl4ever 9y ago
      There exist people who can't code in an interview, period. Now, you might react to this with doubt that they are employable. But the reason such people exist is because interviews that do not require even trivial coding exist, and thus they are hired and proceed to code just fine in their actual job. One thing that really helps with perspective, whichever side of an interview you are usually on, is to have seen how radically differently different companies do things. That doesn't necessarily mean that you should change your practices, but diversity in behavior exists because there are niches that can be exploited and trade-offs to doing so.
• dlandis 9y ago
  > Oh, and on some random guy’s laptop, with a panel of 4 people watching me type as they sit in silence, and with 20 minutes remaining. That part, to me, is worse then the question. Are you exaggerating, or did the panel really just sit there and watch you? If so, can you say which company so people know to avoid?
  • softawre 9y ago
    isn't this what most companies do?