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From my perspective on interviewing and talking to lots of dev's, I take at least some of the horror stories with a grain of salt. I've seen some "pressure cook
by cloverich 8y ago
From my perspective on interviewing and talking to lots of dev's, I take at least some of the horror stories with a grain of salt. I've seen some "pressure cooker" scenarios really just be interviewers who were not very good at interviewing. Conversely, I've gone deep in conversations with a developer on how BS interview questions are, and while imaging some crazy graph algorithm or something they come out with "Yeah they tried to get me to implement a Set" (at a high level, in Javascript). That's not a challenging or obscure problem, this person simply lacked technical depth and was jumping on the bandwagon.
Which is all to say, I can agree in general with obtuse CS problems being a bad proxy. But I think asking someone you are hiring to write code all day to write code as part of the interview is reasonable, and at this point I'd be suspect if I were interviewing somewhere and they _didn't_ ask me to write at least _something_.
- adetrest 8y agoWhat's the point of reimplementing a set though? It already comes with the language, and the language's implementation is probably miles better than what you'd come up with anyway. I'd be more interested to know whether the candidate knows what a set is, and how it differs from an array or an object, and when might it come handy. But reimplementing what already comes with the language? A waste of time, and (hopefully) not representative of the work they'll be doing day to day.