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None of the code/design/architecture I wrote this year will help convince an interviewer I can program. Can’t even show it to them because it breaks the apples

None of the code/design/architecture I wrote this year will help convince an interviewer I can program. Can’t even show it to them because it breaks the apples to apples system they are trying to do with their robotic standardized questions. Still have to play the game: leetcode drills, whiteboard practice, learning to talk and make jokes while white boarding, re-learning Java for the sole reason of needing it for interviews, picking a good “biggest flaw” ahead of time, etc. I wish I got to write algorithms all day but if you actually want to learn to contribute to a project, design and just reading code trumps algorithms, especially since the algorithms can just be looked up the once-per-year they are needed There are (edit:almost) zero programmers who can’t write a while loop. There are just 199/200 people who are stressed out by the bizzaro interview process that was designed by aliens to promote leetcode. There are however millions of programmers who can’t write maintainable or readable code

orf 6y ago
I interviewed at Apple once. In the second technical call on codepad I was struggling with something really basic in Python (which I have 15+ years experience with) due to nerves and the general weirdness of the situation. My struggling stressed me out, which made it harder to concentrate, which stressed me out, etc. While I was struggling the interviewer said "come on, if you can't answer this then how am I going to convince anyone you're a good programmer?". That spun me out and I crashed even harder. In his eyes I'm one of those 199 people who "can't even code". Fuck 'em, if coding is knowing how to implement weird palindrome-related algorithms in a completely alien browser-based IDE (if you can call it that) over a call with a several second delay in your kitchen at 9pm local-time after a hard days work then maybe I can't code.
- _qulr 6y ago
  > I interviewed at Apple once. In the second technical call on codepad I was struggling with something really basic I had a very similar experience. Moreover, on the phone call there seemed to be some kind of soft ticking sound in the background, like a clock. It was very distracting. I wonder if the interviewer was actually timing me.
- tharkun__ 6y ago
  That sounds like an absolutely horrible experience. I detest live programming exercises for the same reason. From both a candidate perspective and mine as a hiring manager now. At my current place (and before as well) we give the candidates a 'take home test'. The problem is a bit larger than FizzBuzz, so that we can see how they would structure things, if they can write clean code, write tests etc. The 'take home' nature solves quite a few of the problems you mentioned, both for the candidate and us if you ask me. And even there you have to be careful that things don't get out of hand. Nobody good who currently has a job is going to spend any time on a take home test that the employer expects them to spend hours upon hours on over a short period of time. Of course there are always managers that fear it's too easy to cheat but if you ask me, that's either never happened to us or if so, it was very clear after talking to the candidate in person about their code, that we wouldn't hire them anyway, so at best they cheated us out of some interview time.
kordlessagain 6y ago
> UPDATE: If you think that I just claimed that 199 out of 200 working programmers cannot code, stop immediately and either read my follow-up explaining the math, or read Joel’s article on why companies aren’t as picky as they think they are. Thank you. http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/01/dont-overthink-fizzbuzz.html http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/01/dont-overthink-fizzbuzz.... I will note the person making this observation is apparently incapable of securing their website with SSL!
- perryizgr8 6y ago
  That's an http page, why would you expect it to be encrypted with SSL??
emrah 6y ago
It's not bizzaro if you think like where the concept originated. It comes from FAANG size companies that do thousands of interviews and need a "standardized" way to evaluate candidates, compare them to each other. Very similar to how SAT scores are supposed to evaluate & compare millions of students. Smaller companies should absolutely break away from this way of interviewing to find developers that can do great work for them but the pressure (or envy?) to conform is too strong I guess.
- _qulr 6y ago
  > It comes from FAANG size companies that do thousands of interviews and need a "standardized" way to evaluate candidates, compare them to each other. The irony is that the founders and initial employees of these companies were never interviewed in this way. They were mostly just school friends. So it's highly dubious whether these specific hiring practices were even crucial to the success of those companies. People are emulating the wrong things and just cargo culting.
  - emrah 6y ago
    Haha yes exactly! The issue is that the list of people you have worked with and can trust without some vetting process turns out not to be that long. So after a while, you run out of those people and have to resort to some kind of interviewing if you need dozens of hundreds of engineers.

orf 6y ago

I interviewed at Apple once. In the second technical call on codepad I was struggling with something really basic in Python (which I have 15+ years experience with) due to nerves and the general weirdness of the situation. My struggling stressed me out, which made it harder to concentrate, which stressed me out, etc. While I was struggling the interviewer said "come on, if you can't answer this then how am I going to convince anyone you're a good programmer?". That spun me out and I crashed even harder. In his eyes I'm one of those 199 people who "can't even code". Fuck 'em, if coding is knowing how to implement weird palindrome-related algorithms in a completely alien browser-based IDE (if you can call it that) over a call with a several second delay in your kitchen at 9pm local-time after a hard days work then maybe I can't code.

_qulr 6y ago
> I interviewed at Apple once. In the second technical call on codepad I was struggling with something really basic I had a very similar experience. Moreover, on the phone call there seemed to be some kind of soft ticking sound in the background, like a clock. It was very distracting. I wonder if the interviewer was actually timing me.
tharkun__ 6y ago
That sounds like an absolutely horrible experience. I detest live programming exercises for the same reason. From both a candidate perspective and mine as a hiring manager now. At my current place (and before as well) we give the candidates a 'take home test'. The problem is a bit larger than FizzBuzz, so that we can see how they would structure things, if they can write clean code, write tests etc. The 'take home' nature solves quite a few of the problems you mentioned, both for the candidate and us if you ask me. And even there you have to be careful that things don't get out of hand. Nobody good who currently has a job is going to spend any time on a take home test that the employer expects them to spend hours upon hours on over a short period of time. Of course there are always managers that fear it's too easy to cheat but if you ask me, that's either never happened to us or if so, it was very clear after talking to the candidate in person about their code, that we wouldn't hire them anyway, so at best they cheated us out of some interview time.

kordlessagain 6y ago

> UPDATE: If you think that I just claimed that 199 out of 200 working programmers cannot code, stop immediately and either read my follow-up explaining the math, or read Joel’s article on why companies aren’t as picky as they think they are. Thank you. http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/01/dont-overthink-fizzbuzz.html http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/01/dont-overthink-fizzbuzz.... I will note the person making this observation is apparently incapable of securing their website with SSL!

perryizgr8 6y ago
That's an http page, why would you expect it to be encrypted with SSL??

emrah 6y ago

It's not bizzaro if you think like where the concept originated. It comes from FAANG size companies that do thousands of interviews and need a "standardized" way to evaluate candidates, compare them to each other. Very similar to how SAT scores are supposed to evaluate & compare millions of students. Smaller companies should absolutely break away from this way of interviewing to find developers that can do great work for them but the pressure (or envy?) to conform is too strong I guess.

_qulr 6y ago
> It comes from FAANG size companies that do thousands of interviews and need a "standardized" way to evaluate candidates, compare them to each other. The irony is that the founders and initial employees of these companies were never interviewed in this way. They were mostly just school friends. So it's highly dubious whether these specific hiring practices were even crucial to the success of those companies. People are emulating the wrong things and just cargo culting.
- emrah 6y ago
  Haha yes exactly! The issue is that the list of people you have worked with and can trust without some vetting process turns out not to be that long. So after a while, you run out of those people and have to resort to some kind of interviewing if you need dozens of hundreds of engineers.