4 ms·

Anyone who's interviewed software engineers for a tech company knows there's a skills gap, and it's very real

marcinzm 6y ago
Having been on both ends it's also very true that there's a difference between "skills needed to pass interview" and "skills needed to do the job." The gap in the former is arbitrary depending on how pedantically silly the interview is made and it does not necessarily correlate to an equal gap in the latter.
- Kalium 6y ago
  Very true. That said, sometimes they're basic skills. In one job a few back, I did a lot of resume-reading and phone screening. I used basic questions. A solid 50% of screenees failed FizzBuzz. Now, it's absolutely possible that many of these were just nerves. Not everyone handled interview tension well! But it strains credulity for me to accept that being nervous makes half of software engineers forget how to do a loop, conditional, and modulo.
  - marcinzm 6y ago
    As a note, that doesn't mean 50% of engineers lack the skill. Those lacking skills will interview the most so for any position the distribution will be biased towards them. For example, if 10% of people on the market lack skills but they interview at 9 times as many places (failing at each) then each company will see 50% of applicants lacking skills.
    - Kalium 6y ago
      Also true! That said, it continues to strain credulity that 50% of interviewees for engineering jobs suffer from forgetting the most fundamental of tools in the face of an interview. So I am led inescapably to the conclusion that there are indeed many people out there who only have skills on paper.
      - newen 6y ago
        > that 50% of interviewees for engineering jobs... that in 50% of interviews for engineering jobs, the interviewees... Fixed to be more precise.
  - _qulr 6y ago
    > But it strains credulity for me to accept that being nervous makes half of software engineers forget how to do a loop, conditional, and modulo. Which is more improbable, that programmers who tend to be socially awkward and work alone in front of a computer and are not stage performers get "stage fright" during interviews, or that people with many years of experience getting paid as a programmer can't do anything? To me, the latter strains credulity.
    - Kalium 6y ago
      I've worked with enough people in both groups to have little difficulty believing either. More than once I've had an engineer on my team that we worked with by confining their work to somewhere where they couldn't do much damage.
    - marcinzm 6y ago
      Wasn't there a recent study that found that the main things modern interviews test for is lack of anxiety? And when you're told that your career rests on how perfectly you do in this interview and that any deviations from perfection will make you fail, is it any wonder people get anxious? I once almost failed the most common leetcode easy problem because my mind blanked and I implemented the wrong solution at first. Interviewer probably labeled me as someone with fake credentials as I didn't have time for their second problem as a result.
zadkey 6y ago
I've asked in an interview for people to implement a multiply function using just addition, and a surprising number of candidates struggled with that one. Of course if they struggled with that one, there was likely no way the would get the question where we asked them to write a function that takes an integer and return an integer that is the result of each of it's digits being squared.
- quacked 6y ago
  What's the elegant mathematical way to do this? I learned engineering school programming (read: programming with no standards or formal theory whatsoever) and the only thing that's coming to mind is num2str/split/multiply/concatenate/str2num, but that seems too easy for a real programming interview.
  - linuxftw 6y ago
    You can detect each digit like this: For example, take 999 (N). Using only math, how can I determine the value of each digit? (be sure to take abs(N) and record value of N/abs(N) for later) res = N - (N - 1). Digit = res + 1; If Digit == 10, Digit = 0. So, given that function to find each digit, you can build a loop using 10^i to detect each digit (subtracting the sum of all preceding digits and dividing by 10^i to trim the lower order digits you've already resolved). We'll need a place to store each digit, such as an array. Of course, this assumes integers in base 10. If they are another base (8, 16), replace the 10^i above with the base. It's also ambiguous as to if the function should just return a concatenated version of the results or some possibly a sum. In any case, using a cast to string would be way easier.
    - quacked 6y ago
      Thanks!
  - pmiller2 6y ago
    If you want to be tricky about it, you can do it in one line in Python. Let d be your original integer. Then [(d%10**(n+1) - d%10**n) / 10**n for n in reversed(xrange(int(log10(d)+1)))] will be a list containing the base 10 digits of d as integers. Technically, you need to do from math import log10 to make this work, but you can fit that on the same line with a little hacking around using __import__, such as this quick and very dirty attempt: [ [(d%10**(n+1) - d%10**n) / 10**n for n in reversed(xrange(int(log10(d)+1)))] for log10 in [__import__("math", fromlist=["log10"]).log10]][0] Edit: Just to carry this a little further, if we interpret "a new integer that's the result of each of the original integer's digits squared" as doing something like this: 129 -> 1481 (i.e. 9 gets replaced with 81), then we can do it in one line like this: int(''.join([str(x**2) for x in [(d%10**(n+1) - d%10**n) / 10**n for n in reversed(xrange(int(log10(d)+1)))]]))
pascalxus 6y ago
Where are you located? I've worked for over half a dozen software companies in the bay area and we never had problems finding highly qualified candidates. I was part of the hiring process durring a period of rapid growth. I noticed that difficulties in hiring had more to do with our own ineptitude in hiring people rather than short comings of the candidates. Simply put: engineers suck at interviewing other engineers. Often times, engineers would ask unreasonable questions or questions that had nothing to do with the job, etc. And it's not just engineers, even engineering managers and engineering leads often don't know what they're doing in interviewing until they get some experience with it. And even then, some of them insist on passing on highly talented people just so they can build up their own ego. My advice to any company who thinks there's a "skills gap" is take a look at those so called skills and make sure you're asking the right questions. For each tech question you ask, first ask yourself whether that skill/knowledge is used on the job, if so it's a fair question. It's amazing to me how many times engineers will pass on candidates who have over 5-10 years of experience doing essentially the job for which their applying for, just because they don't remember some esoteric thing like linked lists which has little to do with modern software engineering, etc.
- rafiki6 6y ago
  You be surprised at how many people would fail their own interviews. I think if companies ACTUALLY cared about hiring the right people for the job they would focus on adjusting their interview and recruiting process. Put your own people through the same interviews you're about to give candidates. If not every single person who's doing the same job can pass, it's a bad process, or you have bad people, but it can't be both.

Having been on both ends it's also very true that there's a difference between "skills needed to pass interview" and "skills needed to do the job." The gap in the former is arbitrary depending on how pedantically silly the interview is made and it does not necessarily correlate to an equal gap in the latter.

Kalium 6y ago
Very true. That said, sometimes they're basic skills. In one job a few back, I did a lot of resume-reading and phone screening. I used basic questions. A solid 50% of screenees failed FizzBuzz. Now, it's absolutely possible that many of these were just nerves. Not everyone handled interview tension well! But it strains credulity for me to accept that being nervous makes half of software engineers forget how to do a loop, conditional, and modulo.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  As a note, that doesn't mean 50% of engineers lack the skill. Those lacking skills will interview the most so for any position the distribution will be biased towards them. For example, if 10% of people on the market lack skills but they interview at 9 times as many places (failing at each) then each company will see 50% of applicants lacking skills.
  - Kalium 6y ago
    Also true! That said, it continues to strain credulity that 50% of interviewees for engineering jobs suffer from forgetting the most fundamental of tools in the face of an interview. So I am led inescapably to the conclusion that there are indeed many people out there who only have skills on paper.
    - newen 6y ago
      > that 50% of interviewees for engineering jobs... that in 50% of interviews for engineering jobs, the interviewees... Fixed to be more precise.
- _qulr 6y ago
  > But it strains credulity for me to accept that being nervous makes half of software engineers forget how to do a loop, conditional, and modulo. Which is more improbable, that programmers who tend to be socially awkward and work alone in front of a computer and are not stage performers get "stage fright" during interviews, or that people with many years of experience getting paid as a programmer can't do anything? To me, the latter strains credulity.
  - Kalium 6y ago
    I've worked with enough people in both groups to have little difficulty believing either. More than once I've had an engineer on my team that we worked with by confining their work to somewhere where they couldn't do much damage.
  - marcinzm 6y ago
    Wasn't there a recent study that found that the main things modern interviews test for is lack of anxiety? And when you're told that your career rests on how perfectly you do in this interview and that any deviations from perfection will make you fail, is it any wonder people get anxious? I once almost failed the most common leetcode easy problem because my mind blanked and I implemented the wrong solution at first. Interviewer probably labeled me as someone with fake credentials as I didn't have time for their second problem as a result.

zadkey 6y ago

I've asked in an interview for people to implement a multiply function using just addition, and a surprising number of candidates struggled with that one. Of course if they struggled with that one, there was likely no way the would get the question where we asked them to write a function that takes an integer and return an integer that is the result of each of it's digits being squared.

quacked 6y ago
What's the elegant mathematical way to do this? I learned engineering school programming (read: programming with no standards or formal theory whatsoever) and the only thing that's coming to mind is num2str/split/multiply/concatenate/str2num, but that seems too easy for a real programming interview.
- linuxftw 6y ago
  You can detect each digit like this: For example, take 999 (N). Using only math, how can I determine the value of each digit? (be sure to take abs(N) and record value of N/abs(N) for later) res = N - (N - 1). Digit = res + 1; If Digit == 10, Digit = 0. So, given that function to find each digit, you can build a loop using 10^i to detect each digit (subtracting the sum of all preceding digits and dividing by 10^i to trim the lower order digits you've already resolved). We'll need a place to store each digit, such as an array. Of course, this assumes integers in base 10. If they are another base (8, 16), replace the 10^i above with the base. It's also ambiguous as to if the function should just return a concatenated version of the results or some possibly a sum. In any case, using a cast to string would be way easier.
  - quacked 6y ago
    Thanks!
- pmiller2 6y ago
  If you want to be tricky about it, you can do it in one line in Python. Let d be your original integer. Then [(d%10**(n+1) - d%10**n) / 10**n for n in reversed(xrange(int(log10(d)+1)))] will be a list containing the base 10 digits of d as integers. Technically, you need to do from math import log10 to make this work, but you can fit that on the same line with a little hacking around using __import__, such as this quick and very dirty attempt: [ [(d%10**(n+1) - d%10**n) / 10**n for n in reversed(xrange(int(log10(d)+1)))] for log10 in [__import__("math", fromlist=["log10"]).log10]][0] Edit: Just to carry this a little further, if we interpret "a new integer that's the result of each of the original integer's digits squared" as doing something like this: 129 -> 1481 (i.e. 9 gets replaced with 81), then we can do it in one line like this: int(''.join([str(x**2) for x in [(d%10**(n+1) - d%10**n) / 10**n for n in reversed(xrange(int(log10(d)+1)))]]))

pascalxus 6y ago

Where are you located? I've worked for over half a dozen software companies in the bay area and we never had problems finding highly qualified candidates. I was part of the hiring process durring a period of rapid growth. I noticed that difficulties in hiring had more to do with our own ineptitude in hiring people rather than short comings of the candidates. Simply put: engineers suck at interviewing other engineers. Often times, engineers would ask unreasonable questions or questions that had nothing to do with the job, etc. And it's not just engineers, even engineering managers and engineering leads often don't know what they're doing in interviewing until they get some experience with it. And even then, some of them insist on passing on highly talented people just so they can build up their own ego. My advice to any company who thinks there's a "skills gap" is take a look at those so called skills and make sure you're asking the right questions. For each tech question you ask, first ask yourself whether that skill/knowledge is used on the job, if so it's a fair question. It's amazing to me how many times engineers will pass on candidates who have over 5-10 years of experience doing essentially the job for which their applying for, just because they don't remember some esoteric thing like linked lists which has little to do with modern software engineering, etc.

rafiki6 6y ago
You be surprised at how many people would fail their own interviews. I think if companies ACTUALLY cared about hiring the right people for the job they would focus on adjusting their interview and recruiting process. Put your own people through the same interviews you're about to give candidates. If not every single person who's doing the same job can pass, it's a bad process, or you have bad people, but it can't be both.