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I agree it speaks to bad interviewing, because these whiteboard interviews are a bad interview practice. Yea knowing how to not acciddentally get an O(n^3) bott
by lovich 8y ago
I agree it speaks to bad interviewing, because these whiteboard interviews are a bad interview practice. Yea knowing how to not acciddentally get an O(n^3) bottleneck is table stakes for development. What we get however is you interviewing for a job to make data entry apps and they ask you to implement a variety offlood fill algorithms with modifications that force edge cases unless you work around it. Or you'll be maintaining a legacy application and then they ask you to work out a Month Carlo simulation on the board. Then on top of this, despite what interviewers say out loud, they almost always start looking at edge cases and if the interviewee does not work there way around them they are dinged for points compared to an interviewee who does deal with the edge cases.
The majority of development work does not have you working through every comp sci algorithm in existence on a frequent enough schedule that the average engineer, or even a great engineer, will remember them all. That is going to garuntees that interviews are a game of chance. The more algorithms and the trick question associated with them that you can memorize the greater your odds, but it's still down to luck of the draw for what questions you are asked.
If you're looking for devs to show that they understand the ideas, you'd be better off telling them the problem space ahead of time so that they can prepare for it, and then deeply questioning their knowledge in that space
- stcredzero 8y agoYea knowing how to not acciddentally get an O(n^3) bottleneck is table stakes for development. It seems to me that a lot of younger folks want to lower the bar below that. If you're looking for devs to show that they understand the ideas, you'd be better off telling them the problem space ahead of time so that they can prepare for it, and then deeply questioning their knowledge in that space Perhaps combine that with a related but novel question.
- mixmastamyk 8y agoCreativity comes from solitude not with a gun to your head.
- stcredzero 8y agoWe're not looking for creativity in our interview. It's more about evidence that you've had plenty of practice designing, implementing, and debugging actual running systems, in greater depth than just gluing libraries together and following online tutorials and guides.
- mixmastamyk 8y agoCreativity is what you just described.
- lovich 8y agoThe only way to tell if someone can do the job is to look at their past accomplishments through a web of trust with other engineers, or by having them do the other job. Both of these routes put more risk on employers so they'd rather filter out the majority of people based on an inaccurate test, then throw their hands up and say there are no developers. The whole country has at will employment and companies certainly aren't voluntarily signing any employment contract. Just fire someone if they turn out to be incompetent/fraud.