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The reason that people still ask algorithmic questions is because they work for avoiding false positives. False positives are a lot more damaging to a company c

• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• andrei_says_ 7y ago
  Surely urgent care nurses can spend time prepping for dental assistant interview questions, but they usually don’t because ER interviewers don’t go on irrelevant tangents. Suggesting that they do would not address a glitch in the interviewing process but rather try to accommodate it at the cost of the interviewees’ time.
• coleifer 7y ago
  Yeah, I studied for an interview and it paid off huge. Just treat it like a cs exam and you'll be fine.
  • collyw 7y ago
    I did that nearly 20 years ago. Why do I need to do it now?
    • jahewson 7y ago
      Why did you do it 20 years ago?
      • collyw 7y ago
        I was in University and had exams.
    • echelon 7y ago
      Because you want the job. If you don't put in the work, someone else will. These are high paying positions. You can't just expect to lazily stroll in.
    • david-gpu 7y ago
      Because you are applying for a job where the interview requires you to answer that sort of questions. Maybe you don't want that job so much, and that's okay. Personally, I would refuse to do take-home projects, and that's also okay.
  • daveFNbuck 7y ago
    Getting past the interview isn't the only step to being fine. I also want to work at a company where my co-workers know what they're doing. When the hiring process uses an irrelevant filter, you end up filtering out qualified people and letting in unqualified people.
    • _pgmf 7y ago
      I worked at a place with a demanding interview process for about 3 years and the people I worked with were excellent. Nobody is making you do anything you don't want to do. So drop the attitude and the childish entitlement.
      • daveFNbuck 7y ago
        I'm not sure what you think my attitude and entitlement are. I can handle the interview process fine without studying. It plays to my strengths. I've only worked at places with demanding interview processes. My concern is about the success of the company I work at. My coworkers tend to be excellent when the bar is a tough algorithms interview, but they can't hire enough people. I'm a particularly demanding interviewer. I've rejected candidates who failed miserably, then later learned from my excellent coworkers that the candidate I rejected was excellent at their job. I've also referred an excellent coworker from a previous job, only to have them fail the interview process. My current company would have benefited greatly from that hire, but instead rejected a talented person for a role they were having trouble filling. If a company is having trouble hiring, it needs to at least get these excellent people that are being filtered out. Lowering the bar to let these excellent people in also lets in much less qualified people. Instead, the filter needs to be changed to let in people based on how qualified they are rather than how good they are at algorithm puzzles. Successful companies need more than just people who are good at algorithms like me and studious people like you.
  • scarface74 7y ago
    But I don’t think I would want to work for a company full of people hired via that process. I’ve met too many smart people(tm) who spend more time arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of pin than they spend figuring out how they can ship software faster/better/profitably.
    • _pgmf 7y ago
      I don't understand why you feel it's necessary to share your personal justifications (rationalizations), other than you're trying to normalize your own mediocrity. Which, by definition, already is normal.
      • scarface74 7y ago
        In the real world, where your job as a software engineer is to translate business requirements into working systems, algorithms are of little value when solving problems can involve a combination of knowing how to ask the right questions, knowing the underlying architecture, knowing the industry/ecosystem well enough to know when to build versus when to find someone else to do the “undifferentiated heavy lifting”, etc. But if in your own words “you studied for an interview”, it’s not exactly showing that you have a special skillset if all someone has to do is study for a month. If you’re an experienced software engineer and companies aren’t beating down your door and you’re still randomly applying for jobs and jumping through the same hoops as someone just graduating from college - you’re doing it wrong.
      • blub 7y ago
        Call it caring about ones profession and having a just hiring culture if you must.
  • jpeterson 7y ago
    That 90%+ of the hiring signal can be projected onto "hours spent on leetcode" is exactly why this process has become a parody of itself.
    • coleifer 7y ago
      Who cares. It might as well be experimental theatre for all I care. If I want the job, I'll put in the effort. It's that simple.
      • blub 7y ago
        Using your simple logic, the company could ask you to walk on all fours and eat grass and you'd put in the effort, if you want the job. We're irritated with the current interview practices, because the gauntlet that many of us have to run is not only wasteful, but it's also harming the profession. If one has to jump through the same old hoops their entire professional life only to be thrown out at 40, what's the point of building a career in software engineering?
        • _pgmf 7y ago
          Solving problems directly related to the field in which I'm claiming expertise is in no way a damaging to my dignity.
• malvosenior 7y ago
  > False positives are a lot more damaging to a company compared to false negatives. This is accepted blindly as dogma in our industry but in my experience it's only the case if the company is dysfunctional and management is too weak to let poor performers go quickly. Being an effective leader means being able to hire and fire quickly. If you're open and honest about it, you don't have to do as much as much intense vetting up front which costs your team's time and filters out potentially great hires.
  • HillaryBriss 7y ago
    But, at least in California, don't employment laws make the firing process kind of slow and expensive?
    • nanomonkey 7y ago
      California is an at-will work state, which means that either the employee or the company may terminate employment at any time, with or without cause or prior notice.
      • oppositelock 7y ago
        However, CA has very strong worker protection laws, where the worker can incur a lot of legal costs for the employer by accusing them of violating those laws. For this reason, employers are reluctant to fire and more likely to offer a severance package to leave, in exchange for a general liability release. The company has to have all of its paperwork in order to terminate your employment or it'll be open to lawsuit. Anyone over 40, all women, all non-white people, all non-straight, and all people with medical issues or handicaps are a protected category in CA, and in firing them, the company has to show that those reasons were not involved. Put another way, it's really simple to fire a white, under 40, straight guy, but you have to be more careful with everyone else. The net effect it has is that firings are uncommon, and people hang around until the next round of layoffs, when a reason will be found to lay them off.
      • rightbyte 7y ago
• vorpalhex 7y ago
  Or the software company can spend a few hours actually building a real interview process instead of making ridiculous interview projects. I have no problem proving that I can code (whiteboarding, pairing, etc), but I refuse to do stupid college-esque programming assignments on my own time unless they're paying me for it.
• jpeterson 7y ago
  "they work for avoiding false positives" Citation needed. I have many years of experiential evidence that suggests otherwise.
  • joeax 7y ago
    The whole "false positives" narrative is an example of the "saying something enough makes it true" fallacy. I've interviewed dozens of people, and you can easily root out false positives by asking about their prior experience. Simply probing about things like design patterns to challenges with Javacript front-end coding is enough. If the candidate can go into explicit detail about past projects including bugs they fixed and limitations they came across in a Angular 6 project (as an example), then that's usually a good sign they know what they're talking about.
• scarface74 7y ago
  The one whiteboarding code review I had was to pseudocode a merge sort on the board. I knew the question he was going to ask because I had two coworkers who had gone through the process previously, one had worked with the company and the other declined the offer. I already had an offer by then but I did the interview for grins and giggles and didn’t try to remember what a merge sort was. I actually wanted to test the culture of the company. If they ask me to write a merge sort and I don’t know the algorithm, will they describe it on a high level or will they look at me derisively? That would tell me a lot about the company. Well anyway, the guy was nice enough, I did the mergesort on the board, got an offer but decided if their interview for “senior engineers” consisted of the ability to do a merge sort instead of deeper architectural questions, that wasn’t the company I wanted to work for. When I conduct interviews, I have a simplified non working (but compiling) class that is a sample of the types of problems we solve everyday with a set of failing unit tests. We pair program and they have to see if the tests pass.
• daveFNbuck 7y ago
  How does answering tough algorithmic questions avoid false positives for roles that don't require algorithmic skills? I can breeze through an interview like that but I'd be a terrible hire for a role requiring skills in Kubernetes, Docker, AWS, Terraform.
• WhompingWindows 7y ago
  Can you explain that? Wouldn't being skilled at algorithms be a false positive at times for dev-ops skills in OP's scenario? Maybe the algorithmic knowledge is simply rote and practicing, as opposed to skills and knowledge in dev-ops specifically.
• sbov 7y ago
  Then companies should stop talking about this shortage of qualified software engineers.
  • kache_ 7y ago
    There is a shortage of qualified software engineers. The whiteboard interview has spawned out of necessity. There is no good formal examination like an MCAT that companies can rely on.
• zerr 7y ago
  > Spend a few hours a week doing leetcode questions There is no persistent storage in humans - people forget things, and it is quite annoying to do this again and again for every new job.
• conanbatt 7y ago
  This math doesn't check out: a false negative allows a follow-up false positive. And without that effect, you also have that each one costs thousands of dollars.
• coffeefirst 7y ago
  > False positives are a lot more damaging to a company compared to false negatives. People say this, and then they whine about how they can't find good candidates, can't find diverse candidates, etc. They could, of course, study interviewing, treat it with the same level of seriousness you might apply to other skills, and actually learn how to evaluate people with a pretty good level of accuracy so you can avoid both problems.