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When I was a hiring manager at the previous company I was at, I gave an interview where I gave an exact description of what I wanted coded. No algorithm tricks
by dnautics 6y ago
When I was a hiring manager at the previous company I was at, I gave an interview where I gave an exact description of what I wanted coded. No algorithm tricks (you could solve it faster with a paradigm, but it wasn't necessary) actually this is a problem I remember having to solve for homework in intro HS CS class 25 years ago. I was checking to see if the candidate could
1. read documents.
2. ask questions.
3 identify corner cases.
4. identify why the problem was hard
5. actually try out their code instead of just thinking about it.
One candidate used a very troublesome technique to try and solve it, and proudly declared, "I am sure this works". I knew it didn't - but it took me one hour to find the bug, and in order to find the bug I had to write a property test. This is SUPER dangerous behavior IMO. Code Reviews will not catch everything, so if you have a dishonest coder you can wind up in trouble. He got hired for another team "this is literally the best hash table I have ever seen".
Unfortunately all of the candidates were clearly folks who had practiced their leetcoder skills. Nobody completed the problem correctly. However, I was okay with partial answers that fulfilled some of the softer qualities I was looking for The other folks who were interviewing gave one of the candidates who bombed my part rave reviews. I got steamrolled into hiring him onto my team, and sure enough he didn't read documents, he didn't try out his code. In the month that I worked with him he did not push any code. I left.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- _benj 6y agoThis is really interesting. On a previous company my coding test was "build a contact manager application with python and Vue.js" and I really loved that! It was something I could do in less than 10 hours or so. The role was full-stack web dev and I got it. I've been considering screening companies based on what their hiring process is. How do you think that could be assessed, say, companies that eveluate real-life experience vs. leetcoder skills?
- dnautics 6y agoone of the companies I interviewed at had a question where they showed me a bug in what looked to be an old version of their UI and I had to debug it as a pair with them piloting. I didn't get the job (probably in part because as an "almost totally backend" it took me a bit of time to decide to look at the web console), but it was literally the best interview I'd been on. It really exercised everything you could possibly want to know about a full stack dev, and was done in 25 minutes.
- _benj 6y agoI wish companies like that would be easier to find! From the feel of this thread it seems to me that a company that explicitly states on "Who's Hiring" that they don't do leetcode, but do actual pair programming for evaluating candidates would have an advantage above the rest!
- dnautics 6y agoMy PL of choice is Elixir. I had zero interviews with leetcode questions, but there was one where they asked me to verbally describe how a hash table works under the hood, they didn't seem to care too much about the answer so long as it was ballpark and you said "O(1)" or I think I said "fake, amortized O(1)".
- decafninja 6y agoOne company (fairly well known) gave me a homework assignment to write the snake game in JavaScript. It was pretty enjoyable, and feedback was that the hiring manager/team loved my coding. Then I got invited to the onsite where I was subjected to multiple stereotypical leetcode rounds. Got rejected.