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I think this is more of an expression that coding interviews are horribly poor for assessing effectiveness at delivering code to solve business problems. Those

by mlthoughts2018 6y ago

I think this is more of an expression that coding interviews are horribly poor for assessing effectiveness at delivering code to solve business problems. Those people you say “can’t code” actually can code very well - it’s just that the question “can you pass this timed hazing trivia test in coderpad or on a whiteboard?” has no relationship to “can you code?”

marketingPro 6y ago
I don't think a coding interview can figure out if you can solve a complex business problem. It will show you if someone knows basic programming.
- mlthoughts2018 6y ago
  Not really. “Basic programming” - like little helper methods for linked lists or array & tree manipulation, algorithms like sorting or hash table implementations - is an activity that professional programmers do slowly and methodically, with the benefit of whatever references they want, and with no short term time pressure or anyone actively surveilling every part of their intermediate problem solving approach, and with no requirement to also simultaneously verbalize all those choices in a way that seems to meet the social expectations of a complete stranger who is evaluating you on murky criteria. It’s truly, truly nothing at all similar to the actual activity of “basic programming.” Highly skilled people will get flustered, forget basic facts, put their foot in their mouth, none of which has anything to do with whether they are skilled or unskilled at coding.
  - marketingPro 6y ago
    That's what you consider basic programming? I was going to make sure they understood loops and maybe classes/methods. You can ask them data questions without needing to code on the spot. Which one of us is terrible at coming up with relevant interview questions? The guy who considers tree manipulation basic or the one who considers loops basic?
    - mlthoughts2018 6y ago
      I’ve never heard of any organization asking software interview questions about the basics of loops or classes. If you are asking that, it is very, very weird of you. Meanwhile asking about data structures and algorithms is an extremely ubiquitous industry standard for interviewing new grads and entry level programmers up through experienced veterans - and is practiced by nearly every tech company and tech recruiting agency under the sun. Your expression of surprise about this suggests you are not very aware of the tech industry or software hiring practices. But regardless, all the same issues would apply to asking about loops or classes that apply to asking about linked lists or sorting. In professional work, none of that is ever addressed in a time crunch with someone actively surveilling you and assessing intermediate explanations - so concluding someone is bad at coding from a poor interview performance is just flat wrong.
      - marketingPro 6y ago
        Ahh you are talking about job interviews, I'm talking about 200 or 300 level college classes. Both of my programming interviews had some tech questions but no white board coding. That said neither were exactly entry level.
cultofmetatron 6y ago
The coding tests have gotten ridiculous. I got turned down from codementor's fulltime platform because my "tic tac toe" in react wasn't complete. I didn't handle the diagonal case (which I was explicitly aware of) nor did it have unit tests. Did I mention I had to do it from scratch live with the interviewer within 1 hour. Thats 1 hour to plan and implement from a blank slate from "hey write me tic tac toe with react"? Never mind that It was functional, had a hook for me to handle the diagonal case if I had time and aside from that, worked! Nevermind that I had completed a few projects on their platform already and have a great rating. That I have experience working in a few startups in Silicon valley under my belt. Nevermind that I have open source contributions and was a key speaker in a js conference. I can't write a complete tic tac toe from scratch WITH unit tests from a cold start and a blank slate in less than an hour. Sometimes I feel like its becoming a race to the bottom. As CTO of a startup right now, I spent days deliberating and planning out the db schema we use to optimize for our main use cases while allowing some deeper queries for analytics. I write stored procedures and convert business rules into working software that scales. Under our last load test, 90% of the reqs were served in less that 250 ms. I do code reviews in js, elxir and sql on the regular have trained other engineers on obscure sql like nested joing an unnest() ing json arrays for analytics. Yet somehow my value can be arbitrarily broken down to "he's not good enough because he can't scope, plan and impliment a full app with unit tests within an hour" /endrant

marketingPro 6y ago

I don't think a coding interview can figure out if you can solve a complex business problem. It will show you if someone knows basic programming.

mlthoughts2018 6y ago
Not really. “Basic programming” - like little helper methods for linked lists or array & tree manipulation, algorithms like sorting or hash table implementations - is an activity that professional programmers do slowly and methodically, with the benefit of whatever references they want, and with no short term time pressure or anyone actively surveilling every part of their intermediate problem solving approach, and with no requirement to also simultaneously verbalize all those choices in a way that seems to meet the social expectations of a complete stranger who is evaluating you on murky criteria. It’s truly, truly nothing at all similar to the actual activity of “basic programming.” Highly skilled people will get flustered, forget basic facts, put their foot in their mouth, none of which has anything to do with whether they are skilled or unskilled at coding.
- marketingPro 6y ago
  That's what you consider basic programming? I was going to make sure they understood loops and maybe classes/methods. You can ask them data questions without needing to code on the spot. Which one of us is terrible at coming up with relevant interview questions? The guy who considers tree manipulation basic or the one who considers loops basic?
  - mlthoughts2018 6y ago
    I’ve never heard of any organization asking software interview questions about the basics of loops or classes. If you are asking that, it is very, very weird of you. Meanwhile asking about data structures and algorithms is an extremely ubiquitous industry standard for interviewing new grads and entry level programmers up through experienced veterans - and is practiced by nearly every tech company and tech recruiting agency under the sun. Your expression of surprise about this suggests you are not very aware of the tech industry or software hiring practices. But regardless, all the same issues would apply to asking about loops or classes that apply to asking about linked lists or sorting. In professional work, none of that is ever addressed in a time crunch with someone actively surveilling you and assessing intermediate explanations - so concluding someone is bad at coding from a poor interview performance is just flat wrong.
    - marketingPro 6y ago
      Ahh you are talking about job interviews, I'm talking about 200 or 300 level college classes. Both of my programming interviews had some tech questions but no white board coding. That said neither were exactly entry level.

cultofmetatron 6y ago

The coding tests have gotten ridiculous. I got turned down from codementor's fulltime platform because my "tic tac toe" in react wasn't complete. I didn't handle the diagonal case (which I was explicitly aware of) nor did it have unit tests. Did I mention I had to do it from scratch live with the interviewer within 1 hour. Thats 1 hour to plan and implement from a blank slate from "hey write me tic tac toe with react"? Never mind that It was functional, had a hook for me to handle the diagonal case if I had time and aside from that, worked! Nevermind that I had completed a few projects on their platform already and have a great rating. That I have experience working in a few startups in Silicon valley under my belt. Nevermind that I have open source contributions and was a key speaker in a js conference. I can't write a complete tic tac toe from scratch WITH unit tests from a cold start and a blank slate in less than an hour. Sometimes I feel like its becoming a race to the bottom. As CTO of a startup right now, I spent days deliberating and planning out the db schema we use to optimize for our main use cases while allowing some deeper queries for analytics. I write stored procedures and convert business rules into working software that scales. Under our last load test, 90% of the reqs were served in less that 250 ms. I do code reviews in js, elxir and sql on the regular have trained other engineers on obscure sql like nested joing an unnest() ing json arrays for analytics. Yet somehow my value can be arbitrarily broken down to "he's not good enough because he can't scope, plan and impliment a full app with unit tests within an hour" /endrant