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It's like people forget the purposes of interviewing. "Can this candidate do the job we're asking them to do?". If the candidate has a proven, public, track rec

It's like people forget the purposes of interviewing. "Can this candidate do the job we're asking them to do?". If the candidate has a proven, public, track record doing the things you're going to ask them to do, then you can skip the jumping through hoops part. We use shitty algorithmic questions as a proxy for answering the above question (in the vast majority of cases).

deanCommie 6y ago
That's assuming you want to hire the first person that can do the job. The companies that popularized this were and still are EXTREMELY lucrative, and get a TON of competition. They can afford to be choosey. So they can try to find not only the person who can do the job but also do it BEST. And that's really hard to tell from just looking at their work experience. You want to see how their brain works under pressure, dealing with an ambiguous new problem they've never seen before. A lot of people who rag on modern tech interviewing don't get this. Unfortunately, so do a lot of people DOING these modern tech interviews. "He said the algorithm was O(n log n) but the answer is actually O (k log n). Not inclined" And so, we spiral.
- purpleidea 6y ago
  > They can afford to be choosey. So they can try to find not only the person who can do the job but also do it BEST. Selecting people based on how well they can code some linked-list traversal, in a web editor, while someone is timing them is not a good metric for overall "best". In fact you might reject candidates that think more about larger design problems, and overall your code might suffer.
  - totony 6y ago
    >in a web editor This is the part I dislike the most. They usually disable copy-pasting too because they know it's that easy to google so you can't just code in your IDE and paste.
  - therealdrag0 6y ago
    Isn’t it usually both? My compy’s on-site has multiple coding sessions and multiple design sessions.
- stormbeard 6y ago
  I've done my fair share of algorithmic hoop-jumping and have worked at a few of these companies over the last 10 years. I'm not convinced that the people performing these interviews are able to tell how a candidate's brain works at all in 45 minutes. At some point it's all just signaling and wild guesses.

deanCommie 6y ago

That's assuming you want to hire the first person that can do the job. The companies that popularized this were and still are EXTREMELY lucrative, and get a TON of competition. They can afford to be choosey. So they can try to find not only the person who can do the job but also do it BEST. And that's really hard to tell from just looking at their work experience. You want to see how their brain works under pressure, dealing with an ambiguous new problem they've never seen before. A lot of people who rag on modern tech interviewing don't get this. Unfortunately, so do a lot of people DOING these modern tech interviews. "He said the algorithm was O(n log n) but the answer is actually O (k log n). Not inclined" And so, we spiral.

purpleidea 6y ago
> They can afford to be choosey. So they can try to find not only the person who can do the job but also do it BEST. Selecting people based on how well they can code some linked-list traversal, in a web editor, while someone is timing them is not a good metric for overall "best". In fact you might reject candidates that think more about larger design problems, and overall your code might suffer.
- totony 6y ago
  >in a web editor This is the part I dislike the most. They usually disable copy-pasting too because they know it's that easy to google so you can't just code in your IDE and paste.
- therealdrag0 6y ago
  Isn’t it usually both? My compy’s on-site has multiple coding sessions and multiple design sessions.
stormbeard 6y ago
I've done my fair share of algorithmic hoop-jumping and have worked at a few of these companies over the last 10 years. I'm not convinced that the people performing these interviews are able to tell how a candidate's brain works at all in 45 minutes. At some point it's all just signaling and wild guesses.