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These kinds of questions aren't bad per se, but they should be used as a basis for an open-ended discussion with the candidate. Kind of like conversation starte
by lokedhs 5y ago
These kinds of questions aren't bad per se, but they should be used as a basis for an open-ended discussion with the candidate. Kind of like conversation starters: "Let's discuss how you would approach designing a simple solution that does X, Y and Z".
Asking the candidate to write down a system design on a whiteboard, or even worse, defining the API, is terrible. No one does that in a vacuum, and if they are forced to do it, it's pretty much random whether the person managed to tick all the boxes that the interviewer (or whoever wrote the test) considers important.
- musicale 5y ago> it's pretty much random That is an accurate summary of most whiteboard interviews.
- actually_a_dog 5y ago> That is an accurate summary of most interviews. FTFY.
- smilekzs 5y agoThis might not be truly universal, but by and large coding interviews can be and has been made more or less a standardized test, whiteboard or online collab (e.g. HackerRank, CoderPad, ...) alike. Like any standardized test, you can practice to become more or less consistent. It's true that some interviewers might hand out whacky and/or ill-defined problems, but my experience on both sides of the interview indicates that the average difficulty of problems has converged onto what is now known as "LeetCode Medium". The problem will be random, but the difficulty won't. Why this benefits interviewers is left as an exercise for the reader.
- smilekzs 5y ago> whether the person managed to tick all the boxes that the interviewer (or whoever wrote the test) considers important Exactly, and "API design" is one of the MANY boxes expected to be ticked early on. Just watch one of these "system design interview how-to" videos online.