4 ms·

People cheat their way through credentials all the time, having a masters degree doesn't tell you anything about a person except they maybe sat in a room on the

People cheat their way through credentials all the time, having a masters degree doesn't tell you anything about a person except they maybe sat in a room on their phone while someone discussed the nuances of Church's Thesis. And most interviewers aren't valued enough by a company to really give a shit who you are, there is just too much happening and too many interviews, so they just can't be asked to look at your Github. The game and well are poisoned at many levels. There's just too much money on the table at most modern tech companies to trust anything.

cogman10 5y ago
Bingo. I do quite a few coding interviews for my company and, frankly, the pass rate on the coding interview is dismal. It's one of our most effective filters for bad candidates. What sort of torturous questions do I ask? Merge 2 sorted arrays is one of my favorite. How many people can pass that? less than 50%. A good number of people don't even get to the "concat the 2 arrays into 1 array and sort" sort of solution. It's really that bad. These are people with "15 years of software development experience" failing really basic coding problems. I really wish I didn't have to ask that sort of question, but at the same time, I don't want to work with anyone that can't solve it (even "under pressure"). The fact is, a lot of programmers will go off the deep end with simple problems. This joke[1] still relatively accurately describes the mentality of a bunch of programmers in the industry. [1] http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Hk1mt-RKYLc/UOkxShm6NrI/AAAAAAAACqo/LVmqHOfWV7g/s1600/20091116-so-large.gif http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Hk1mt-RKYLc/UOkxShm6NrI/AAAAAAAACq...
- JoeAltmaier 5y ago
  I got to wonder, are all those people really incompetent? See, another take is that they all clutch when being interviewed. And maybe not every interview; maybe it matters how the interviewer approaches it. It's not 'under pressure'. Real pressure is schedules and deployments and compute constraints. Not somebody looking over their shoulder.
  - cogman10 5y ago
    I'd love a different solution, but this is about the best I've got. I can certainly see that there are some false negatives, but to me, I'd rather take that risk than take the risk of hiring someone that's a true negative. Having worked with some in the past, I really don't want to touch code written by a dev that can't code.
  - SQueeeeeL 5y ago
    I'm not sure how people couldn't merge two sorted arrays when a competent fifth grader could figure that question out without ever touching a computer. Some people, even those with 100s of hours of schooling, just never learn how to think computationally. They just "fake it till they make it", which really just means they have no ability to provide value to any company.
    - milesvp 5y ago
      Did you know that there are Go problems that professional players can't solve, but that newbies solve trivially? Becoming a professional go player creates blind spots, basically any board that could never happen in a real game just don't make any sense to someone at that level. And while, I don't equate merging 2 sorted arrays with being an unsolvable problem for an experienced dev, I have personally experienced similar increasing difficulty to toy problems as I gain increasing real world experience. Common things like timestamps and full names are not as simple as they seem, and so now, I'm less likely to just jump to an answer that would have seemed obvious to me 20 years ago. And it's not like I come up with the solution and discard it, it's more like the previously obvious solution is no longer the first things I think about.
  - handrous 5y ago
    I can definitely write code. I've been doing it quite a while. I've been the "smart guy" to go to with hard problems, at more than one place. Feedback has been very good at most places I've worked. I'm the guy who figures out weird platforms and things like that. I also clean up alright and can talk to people. I'm not bad at the job, and would be, so far as the technical side of things, a good hire for probably 95+% of all software development jobs there are that even somewhat fit in the set of things I've already worked on (which is broad). I'm good under on-the-job pressure (great, even—I kind of like emergencies, in a perverse way. Clears the mind, demands focus on a clear goal.) I am also 100% certain that I've given interviewers the impression I don't know how to code whatsoever on at least three occasions, including as recently as a couple years ago. Hell, I'll probably do it at least a couple more times before my career's up. I guarantee that the interviewers were chatting after and were like, "see this is why we have to do this, because you get guys like that lying piece-of-shit yahoo, who've somehow had a full career and have great references and can talk about software and processes and architecture and all that, but inexplicably can't code at all". I'm terribly self-conscious when people watch me code in the context of an interview where they're explicitly judging me so I get very slow even at using tools I'm familiar with ("I think that shortcut does what I want but... what if it doesn't? I'll just do it the slow way, oh no, now I look clumsy and stupid, fuck fuck fuck!"), and I tend to do stuff like forget the syntax to invoke a method in [language X that I've written 500 lines of in the last two weeks] when I start writing with a blank file (no existing syntax to crib off of, and c'mon, can you ask to google shit that basic in an interview? LOL no). Basically I have intense social anxiety but only for specific parts of interviews. What I can do is talk through architecture, and any amount of conceptually-how-things-fit-together I have in my head, including low-level stuff. I can do 100% of the talking parts of an interview just fine. I'm told I come off exceptionally good in that part, actually (I can't tell, I just go by feedback). I'm sure this just reinforces the impression that I'm some kind of god-tier social manipulator who's, for some unknown reason, decided to scam his way into mid-tier tech jobs rather than applying such outstanding bullshitting skills to something that would pay for them more directly, and probably even be compensated higher if I were that good.
- t0mbstone 5y ago
  In my 20+ year career as a web developer and software engineer, I have never ONCE had to merge two sorted arrays as part of my job. If you asked me that question in a whiteboard interview without access to my favorite IDE, a REPL, or google, there is a good possibility that I would fail to impress you. Never mind the fact that I have been involved with the development of multiple highly successful, multi-million dollar projects where I wrote massive portions of the codebase. At my current company, they didn't give me a code test or anything like that. They just gave me a small project as contract work (migrating some of their infrastructure to the cloud). I knocked it out, they paid me for the work, and then they hired me full time. I've been here for two and a half years and the CEO once publicly stated that hiring me was one of the best things the previous CTO ever did.
  - cogman10 5y ago
    > In my 20+ year career as a web developer and software engineer, I have never ONCE had to merge two sorted arrays as part of my job. Cool. It doesn't come up in my job either. That's not the point of the question. The point of the question is "given an algorithm specification, can you implement it" and that problem, particularly at my current work place, comes up very frequently. > If you asked me that question in a whiteboard interview without access to my favorite IDE, a REPL, or google, there is a good possibility that I would fail to impress you. All my coding interviews are done via hackerrank which has an OK IDE. I generally also allow googling or questions from the interviewer. > Never mind the fact that I have been involved with the development of multiple highly successful, multi-million dollar projects where I wrote massive portions of the codebase. > At my current company, they didn't give me a code test or anything like that. They just gave me a small project as contract work (migrating some of their infrastructure to the cloud). I knocked it out, they paid me for the work, and then they hired me full time. I've been here for two and a half years and the CEO once publicly stated that hiring me was one of the best things the previous CTO ever did. Congratulations! Honestly, I think you are letting this sort of question intimidate you too much. It is an easy question to answer and if you sat down for a few minutes I'm sure you could solve it. It's not a trick question. It's not one that's designed to filter someone of your qualifications. It's simply a "can you write an algorithm" question. Something that's really important in finance because a lot of what we deal with (particularly where I'm at, financial reporting) is writing code that matches financial models and algorithms. There's not a library you can reach for that computes everything we do. Give it a shot in your favorite language and I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at how easily you can write a solution.

cogman10 5y ago

Bingo. I do quite a few coding interviews for my company and, frankly, the pass rate on the coding interview is dismal. It's one of our most effective filters for bad candidates. What sort of torturous questions do I ask? Merge 2 sorted arrays is one of my favorite. How many people can pass that? less than 50%. A good number of people don't even get to the "concat the 2 arrays into 1 array and sort" sort of solution. It's really that bad. These are people with "15 years of software development experience" failing really basic coding problems. I really wish I didn't have to ask that sort of question, but at the same time, I don't want to work with anyone that can't solve it (even "under pressure"). The fact is, a lot of programmers will go off the deep end with simple problems. This joke[1] still relatively accurately describes the mentality of a bunch of programmers in the industry. [1] http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Hk1mt-RKYLc/UOkxShm6NrI/AAAAAAAACqo/LVmqHOfWV7g/s1600/20091116-so-large.gif http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Hk1mt-RKYLc/UOkxShm6NrI/AAAAAAAACq...

JoeAltmaier 5y ago
I got to wonder, are all those people really incompetent? See, another take is that they all clutch when being interviewed. And maybe not every interview; maybe it matters how the interviewer approaches it. It's not 'under pressure'. Real pressure is schedules and deployments and compute constraints. Not somebody looking over their shoulder.
- cogman10 5y ago
  I'd love a different solution, but this is about the best I've got. I can certainly see that there are some false negatives, but to me, I'd rather take that risk than take the risk of hiring someone that's a true negative. Having worked with some in the past, I really don't want to touch code written by a dev that can't code.
- SQueeeeeL 5y ago
  I'm not sure how people couldn't merge two sorted arrays when a competent fifth grader could figure that question out without ever touching a computer. Some people, even those with 100s of hours of schooling, just never learn how to think computationally. They just "fake it till they make it", which really just means they have no ability to provide value to any company.
  - milesvp 5y ago
    Did you know that there are Go problems that professional players can't solve, but that newbies solve trivially? Becoming a professional go player creates blind spots, basically any board that could never happen in a real game just don't make any sense to someone at that level. And while, I don't equate merging 2 sorted arrays with being an unsolvable problem for an experienced dev, I have personally experienced similar increasing difficulty to toy problems as I gain increasing real world experience. Common things like timestamps and full names are not as simple as they seem, and so now, I'm less likely to just jump to an answer that would have seemed obvious to me 20 years ago. And it's not like I come up with the solution and discard it, it's more like the previously obvious solution is no longer the first things I think about.
- handrous 5y ago
  I can definitely write code. I've been doing it quite a while. I've been the "smart guy" to go to with hard problems, at more than one place. Feedback has been very good at most places I've worked. I'm the guy who figures out weird platforms and things like that. I also clean up alright and can talk to people. I'm not bad at the job, and would be, so far as the technical side of things, a good hire for probably 95+% of all software development jobs there are that even somewhat fit in the set of things I've already worked on (which is broad). I'm good under on-the-job pressure (great, even—I kind of like emergencies, in a perverse way. Clears the mind, demands focus on a clear goal.) I am also 100% certain that I've given interviewers the impression I don't know how to code whatsoever on at least three occasions, including as recently as a couple years ago. Hell, I'll probably do it at least a couple more times before my career's up. I guarantee that the interviewers were chatting after and were like, "see this is why we have to do this, because you get guys like that lying piece-of-shit yahoo, who've somehow had a full career and have great references and can talk about software and processes and architecture and all that, but inexplicably can't code at all". I'm terribly self-conscious when people watch me code in the context of an interview where they're explicitly judging me so I get very slow even at using tools I'm familiar with ("I think that shortcut does what I want but... what if it doesn't? I'll just do it the slow way, oh no, now I look clumsy and stupid, fuck fuck fuck!"), and I tend to do stuff like forget the syntax to invoke a method in [language X that I've written 500 lines of in the last two weeks] when I start writing with a blank file (no existing syntax to crib off of, and c'mon, can you ask to google shit that basic in an interview? LOL no). Basically I have intense social anxiety but only for specific parts of interviews. What I can do is talk through architecture, and any amount of conceptually-how-things-fit-together I have in my head, including low-level stuff. I can do 100% of the talking parts of an interview just fine. I'm told I come off exceptionally good in that part, actually (I can't tell, I just go by feedback). I'm sure this just reinforces the impression that I'm some kind of god-tier social manipulator who's, for some unknown reason, decided to scam his way into mid-tier tech jobs rather than applying such outstanding bullshitting skills to something that would pay for them more directly, and probably even be compensated higher if I were that good.
t0mbstone 5y ago
In my 20+ year career as a web developer and software engineer, I have never ONCE had to merge two sorted arrays as part of my job. If you asked me that question in a whiteboard interview without access to my favorite IDE, a REPL, or google, there is a good possibility that I would fail to impress you. Never mind the fact that I have been involved with the development of multiple highly successful, multi-million dollar projects where I wrote massive portions of the codebase. At my current company, they didn't give me a code test or anything like that. They just gave me a small project as contract work (migrating some of their infrastructure to the cloud). I knocked it out, they paid me for the work, and then they hired me full time. I've been here for two and a half years and the CEO once publicly stated that hiring me was one of the best things the previous CTO ever did.
- cogman10 5y ago
  > In my 20+ year career as a web developer and software engineer, I have never ONCE had to merge two sorted arrays as part of my job. Cool. It doesn't come up in my job either. That's not the point of the question. The point of the question is "given an algorithm specification, can you implement it" and that problem, particularly at my current work place, comes up very frequently. > If you asked me that question in a whiteboard interview without access to my favorite IDE, a REPL, or google, there is a good possibility that I would fail to impress you. All my coding interviews are done via hackerrank which has an OK IDE. I generally also allow googling or questions from the interviewer. > Never mind the fact that I have been involved with the development of multiple highly successful, multi-million dollar projects where I wrote massive portions of the codebase. > At my current company, they didn't give me a code test or anything like that. They just gave me a small project as contract work (migrating some of their infrastructure to the cloud). I knocked it out, they paid me for the work, and then they hired me full time. I've been here for two and a half years and the CEO once publicly stated that hiring me was one of the best things the previous CTO ever did. Congratulations! Honestly, I think you are letting this sort of question intimidate you too much. It is an easy question to answer and if you sat down for a few minutes I'm sure you could solve it. It's not a trick question. It's not one that's designed to filter someone of your qualifications. It's simply a "can you write an algorithm" question. Something that's really important in finance because a lot of what we deal with (particularly where I'm at, financial reporting) is writing code that matches financial models and algorithms. There's not a library you can reach for that computes everything we do. Give it a shot in your favorite language and I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at how easily you can write a solution.