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The article assumes that only an "easy" real-life scenario will fit in an interview's timeframe. That is only true if you select scenarios unaltered. A truly c

by oDot 6y ago

The article assumes that only an "easy" real-life scenario will fit in an interview's timeframe. That is only true if you select scenarios unaltered. A truly challenging real-life scenario can fit just fine after some alterations.

pydry 6y ago
This is how I do it too - normally I'll take a thorny real life issue we've just had and decouple it from extraneous things I don't want to test and use that. I'm intensely suspicious of people who believe that this isn't possible.
- anonymoushn 6y ago
  Do you mean a day or an hour? One company asked me to find a bug in a library in a language of my choice out of a small list of languages in a bit under an hour. So I pick a language from a list of languages none of which I use regularly, and until the interview I was not sure which of dozens of combinations of tooling will be used by the project. It seemed like a reasonably sized bug that someone who was not worried about time pressure and had worked on a project tthar used the same tooling could reasonably do in the time given. So I failed, and I passed comparably difficult sections at other companies that I did not want to work at as much.
  - nicoburns 6y ago
    > So I pick a language from a list of languages none of which I use regularly, and until the interview I was not sure which of dozens of combinations of tooling will be used by the project. Seems like this is where they went wrong...
    - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
      It seems an ok technique, if you understand that the person does not use those languages, because maybe what you are testing is how well they approach something they do not know anything about. I had this happen to me in one interview https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13295212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13295212 using Python which I didn't know very well. Despite it not working out I thought it was one of the better interviews I've had.
  - pydry 6y ago
    An hour. It's important to test your interview with people whom you know should pass as well though. If you give it to somebody you know you'd want to hire and they take 4+ hours to do a 1 hour task that's kind of a red flag. I'll bet your company didn't test their test.

by oDot 6y ago

pydry 6y ago

This is how I do it too - normally I'll take a thorny real life issue we've just had and decouple it from extraneous things I don't want to test and use that. I'm intensely suspicious of people who believe that this isn't possible.

anonymoushn 6y ago
Do you mean a day or an hour? One company asked me to find a bug in a library in a language of my choice out of a small list of languages in a bit under an hour. So I pick a language from a list of languages none of which I use regularly, and until the interview I was not sure which of dozens of combinations of tooling will be used by the project. It seemed like a reasonably sized bug that someone who was not worried about time pressure and had worked on a project tthar used the same tooling could reasonably do in the time given. So I failed, and I passed comparably difficult sections at other companies that I did not want to work at as much.
- nicoburns 6y ago
  > So I pick a language from a list of languages none of which I use regularly, and until the interview I was not sure which of dozens of combinations of tooling will be used by the project. Seems like this is where they went wrong...
  - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    It seems an ok technique, if you understand that the person does not use those languages, because maybe what you are testing is how well they approach something they do not know anything about. I had this happen to me in one interview https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13295212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13295212 using Python which I didn't know very well. Despite it not working out I thought it was one of the better interviews I've had.
- pydry 6y ago
  An hour. It's important to test your interview with people whom you know should pass as well though. If you give it to somebody you know you'd want to hire and they take 4+ hours to do a 1 hour task that's kind of a red flag. I'll bet your company didn't test their test.