5 ms·

If you don't think modern interviewing practices are a problem, this should be proof enough. Not only do we have an entire programming book sub-genre dedicated

by dvt 5y ago

If you don't think modern interviewing practices are a problem, this should be proof enough. Not only do we have an entire programming book sub-genre dedicated to this nonsense, but now we're also wasting class time on memorizing sorting algorithms. Fantastic. Of course, we're going to see the inevitable arguments that "40% of the people I interview lie on resumes" or "I interviewed this guy once, and he couldn't even write one line of code"—let me pre-empt that by saying if you ever get to that stage, your screening process must absolutely suck and it's still your fault. I've interviewed dozens of people and never had that experience, because I check OSS contributions, professional history, published material, and ask for code samples before I even engage with a candidate in a technical discussion. It's not rocket science. I've told at least 5 or 6 companies that wanted to white-board me to suck it. It's honestly insulting that I'm forced to white-board when I have two books with my name on them (published by Apress), contributions to Golang (small commits, but they still got me in the AUTHORS file), and OSS projects with hundreds of stars on GitHub.

santiagobasulto 5y ago
I agree with you; the whole interview process is broken. But looking at the bright sight, teaching young people how to “work the system” is not a bad thing. Again, we should fix interview. But in the meantime, a class specializes on “how to beat the man”, looks like a fun class where you can learn more than just CS.
barry-cotter 5y ago
> I've interviewed dozens of people and never had that experience, because I check OSS contributions, professional history, and ask for code samples before I even engage with a candidate in a technical discussion. How are you supposed to hire 50,000 people a year with a process like that? It seems unlikely there are much more than 100,000 people with significant OSS contributions in total. Published material isn’t going to be much more than that if it b even gets that high. And most people who are good at programming will have nothing for either. If you’re not going to spend at least ten, more likely 20 hours calling up references your going to be fishing from a pretty narrow pool there.
- dvt 5y ago
  > How are you supposed to hire 50,000 people a year with a process like that? This is a straw-man. What company has to hire 50,000 engineers a year? Facebook has (in total) ~10,000 engineers (hired over a decade+). Someone has nothing published and no OSS? Great, ask for code samples and the candidate to walk you through the code. It's completely trivial to fix the busted status quo, but people are invested in this nonsense—there are entire companies that serve at the white-board interviewing altar (Triplebyte, Coderbyte, Hackerrank, Leetcode, Turing, Toptal).
  - barry-cotter 5y ago
    If it is completely trivial to fix the busted status quo you should be able to make a great deal of money doing so. Those companies you named exist to get people hired. If you have an alternative system that works you will be fishing from a different pool of candidates. That didn’t work for starfighter.io. If you can make it work for you you’ll get very rich.
    - Apocryphon 5y ago
      Did any company even take Starfighter seriously? The companies the previous comment mentioned are at least used in industry. Even Google or ex-Google employees have gotten into this with Byteboard: https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/26/byteboard-nabs-5m-seed-to-change-the-way-engineers-get-hired/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/26/byteboard-nabs-5m-seed-to-...
  - jmchuster 5y ago
    It's pretty simple to get a rough estimate of how many people you need to hire a year. You take your engineering count, say ~10,000, how long engineers stay at each company, say 4 years, and you come out to 2,500 engineers you need to hire every year, assuming you don't need to grow, to maintain the status quo. So then you take a larger company like google, with ~100,000 engineers, and they'll need to hire at least 25,000 engineers a year.
    - 5y ago
pthread_t 5y ago
> OSS projects with hundreds of stars on GitHub I'm in the same boat, yet most companies don't seem to care about OSS contributions, despite their rhetoric. They want us to solve a few leetcode medium/hard questions within the span of an interview.
carabiner 5y ago
Do you think companies would make more money if they altered their interview practices? Or is this way of interviewing somehow morally wrong ("insulting")?
Swizec 5y ago
The problem with looking at OSS and publications is that this penalizes a lot of people with real lives outside of work. Especially problematic if you’re into equitable hiring processes aiming to hire people who aren’t in their 20’s anymore. Looking at past work penalizes people who primarily have experience in large systems where their work is NDA’d, impossible to understand without a loooot of background, or simply unshareable for any number of reasons. Also really bad for new entrants into the industry. They don’t have past work. The take-home exam penalizes people who have lives. The “do smol thing together so we can talk about it” interview penalizes people with performance anxiety. There is no silver bullet. But if I’d have to choose, I’d pick the least bad typical interview approach that judges everyone based on their performance on a small job-relevant task. At least you avoid a lot of bias. source: I’ve interviewed over 100 engineers over the past 18 months as we scaled the engineering org roughly 3x. I honestly don’t even look at candidates’ resumes anymore (this is after initial screens have been made) because it always leads to bias.
- pthread_t 5y ago
  > The “do smol thing together so we can talk about it” interview penalizes people with performance anxiety. Does this apply to the Leetcode style interviews?
  - Swizec 5y ago
    If they’re any good. But really, it depends what people think of when they say “Leetcode style interview”. There’s a lot of coding interviews that superficially look like stupid leetcode, but the job really does benefit from that. A basic example: I ask you to model some toy problem as a state machine. Is that a stupid leetcode challenge? Maybe. But many if not most complex UI interactions really are state machines and if you’re the kind of person who intuitively thinks in state machines, you’re going to write more maintainable code. My personal blind spot is that thinking in graphs is difficult for me. I just fail to see ”Oh, this is a graph problem!”. A lot of times the code I write would be much easier to maintain and write had I realized I’m solving a graph problem. Better performance too. edit: if you mean the performance anxiety party, yes. Several research papers have shown that anxiety induced by the interview context impacts people’s performance.
interview_anon 5y ago
paradygm 5y ago
> I've told at least 5 or 6 companies that wanted to white-board me to suck it. It's honestly insulting that I'm forced to white-board when I have two books with my name on them (published by Apress), contributions to Golang (small commits, but they still got me in the AUTHORS file), and OSS projects with hundreds of stars on GitHub That is all commendable but none of that tells me if I can work with you. When I interview candidates I use whiteboarding as a collaborative opportunity to see how the interviewee thinks. I treat it as a similar experience when I am the one being interviewed, which is why I have never understood the hostility toward whiteboarding. How else in the limited window of time that is the interview can I learn as much about the people I would be working with?
- pthread_t 5y ago
  > a collaborative opportunity to see how the interviewee thinks. In principle, this sounds great. In reality, if the interviewee fails to come up with the correct/optimal solution for the duration of the interview, they are going to be rejected.
  - Ancalagon 5y ago
    lmao yeah, ask my ziprecruiter interviewer how well I "collaborated" despite being rejected for not getting the optimal dp solution in 45 minutes
- literallyWTF 5y ago
  This is the dumbest excuse for white boarding/l33t code that isn’t even applied in real life. You can be the most pleasant person who’s articulating their thoughts in simple and easy to understand ways and if you don’t solve the bullshit problem in o(-1) time you’ll get rejected.
- gedy 5y ago
  > I have never understood the hostility toward whiteboarding Maybe you haven't been blown off and treated like an idiot by some interviewer when you couldn't answer their pet question? Even when you're more experienced and skilled than they were?
ignoramous 5y ago
> Not only do we have an entire programming book sub-genre dedicated to this nonsense... Mate, wake up: ~billion dollar "interview prep" start-ups are a thing.
- giantg2 5y ago
  Sell shovels to the miners instead of mining for gold yourself.
tuckerman 5y ago
The class is being taught in the Computer Science department, not the software engineering or programming department. I think the bigger issue is the conflation of CS and SWE. To your point about how you interview, unless there is an alternative I would never be able to apply to your company. I have no open source contributions or code samples to share and no interest in writing a book. I also have no interest in applying to places with take home exams where the company gets me to spend time interviewing without a commensurate investment of time on their part. Where does that leave us? I guess it’s not ideal but, at least for me, the current process seems like it’s at least a local maximum.
- pthread_t 5y ago
  > without a commensurate investment of time on their part Doesn't grinding LeetCode apply here as well?
  - tuckerman 5y ago
    Perhaps it’s a bit of an unfair/vicious cycle, but I found doing interviews at my previous company was enough to keep me feeling practiced enough. While I have studied up a bit before previous interviews, I’ve never used LeetCode.
lmm 5y ago
> I've told at least 5 or 6 companies that wanted to white-board me to suck it. It's honestly insulting that I'm forced to white-board when I have two books with my name on them (published by Apress), contributions to Golang (small commits, but they still got me in the AUTHORS file), and OSS projects with hundreds of stars on GitHub. So you've done a bunch of stuff that's easy to game, that requires me to learn a bunch to even evaluate whether it's good or not, and you feel insulted by being asked to do some honest coding? I'd far rather hire a fresh grad who did decently on leetcode and was able to hold a vaguely normal conversation in the interview. In my experience that has a much higher rate of finding people who will contribute positively to actually getting the work done. There's nothing wrong with the interview process, just a bunch of entitled prima donnas who are always going to think they're better than any standard process. You're better off without those anyway.
TheCoelacanth 5y ago
No matter what criteria you used in interviews, these people would still be practicing it, because, other than people whose parents donated buildings, that's the type of people who get into elite universities. It doesn't tell you anything about the interviews, just about the achievement-driven personalities that the universities select for in their admissions process.

by dvt 5y ago

santiagobasulto 5y ago

I agree with you; the whole interview process is broken. But looking at the bright sight, teaching young people how to “work the system” is not a bad thing. Again, we should fix interview. But in the meantime, a class specializes on “how to beat the man”, looks like a fun class where you can learn more than just CS.

barry-cotter 5y ago

> I've interviewed dozens of people and never had that experience, because I check OSS contributions, professional history, and ask for code samples before I even engage with a candidate in a technical discussion. How are you supposed to hire 50,000 people a year with a process like that? It seems unlikely there are much more than 100,000 people with significant OSS contributions in total. Published material isn’t going to be much more than that if it b even gets that high. And most people who are good at programming will have nothing for either. If you’re not going to spend at least ten, more likely 20 hours calling up references your going to be fishing from a pretty narrow pool there.

dvt 5y ago
> How are you supposed to hire 50,000 people a year with a process like that? This is a straw-man. What company has to hire 50,000 engineers a year? Facebook has (in total) ~10,000 engineers (hired over a decade+). Someone has nothing published and no OSS? Great, ask for code samples and the candidate to walk you through the code. It's completely trivial to fix the busted status quo, but people are invested in this nonsense—there are entire companies that serve at the white-board interviewing altar (Triplebyte, Coderbyte, Hackerrank, Leetcode, Turing, Toptal).
- barry-cotter 5y ago
  If it is completely trivial to fix the busted status quo you should be able to make a great deal of money doing so. Those companies you named exist to get people hired. If you have an alternative system that works you will be fishing from a different pool of candidates. That didn’t work for starfighter.io. If you can make it work for you you’ll get very rich.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    Did any company even take Starfighter seriously? The companies the previous comment mentioned are at least used in industry. Even Google or ex-Google employees have gotten into this with Byteboard: https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/26/byteboard-nabs-5m-seed-to-change-the-way-engineers-get-hired/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/26/byteboard-nabs-5m-seed-to-...
- jmchuster 5y ago
  It's pretty simple to get a rough estimate of how many people you need to hire a year. You take your engineering count, say ~10,000, how long engineers stay at each company, say 4 years, and you come out to 2,500 engineers you need to hire every year, assuming you don't need to grow, to maintain the status quo. So then you take a larger company like google, with ~100,000 engineers, and they'll need to hire at least 25,000 engineers a year.
  - 5y ago

pthread_t 5y ago

> OSS projects with hundreds of stars on GitHub I'm in the same boat, yet most companies don't seem to care about OSS contributions, despite their rhetoric. They want us to solve a few leetcode medium/hard questions within the span of an interview.

carabiner 5y ago

Do you think companies would make more money if they altered their interview practices? Or is this way of interviewing somehow morally wrong ("insulting")?

Swizec 5y ago

The problem with looking at OSS and publications is that this penalizes a lot of people with real lives outside of work. Especially problematic if you’re into equitable hiring processes aiming to hire people who aren’t in their 20’s anymore. Looking at past work penalizes people who primarily have experience in large systems where their work is NDA’d, impossible to understand without a loooot of background, or simply unshareable for any number of reasons. Also really bad for new entrants into the industry. They don’t have past work. The take-home exam penalizes people who have lives. The “do smol thing together so we can talk about it” interview penalizes people with performance anxiety. There is no silver bullet. But if I’d have to choose, I’d pick the least bad typical interview approach that judges everyone based on their performance on a small job-relevant task. At least you avoid a lot of bias. source: I’ve interviewed over 100 engineers over the past 18 months as we scaled the engineering org roughly 3x. I honestly don’t even look at candidates’ resumes anymore (this is after initial screens have been made) because it always leads to bias.

pthread_t 5y ago
> The “do smol thing together so we can talk about it” interview penalizes people with performance anxiety. Does this apply to the Leetcode style interviews?
- Swizec 5y ago
  If they’re any good. But really, it depends what people think of when they say “Leetcode style interview”. There’s a lot of coding interviews that superficially look like stupid leetcode, but the job really does benefit from that. A basic example: I ask you to model some toy problem as a state machine. Is that a stupid leetcode challenge? Maybe. But many if not most complex UI interactions really are state machines and if you’re the kind of person who intuitively thinks in state machines, you’re going to write more maintainable code. My personal blind spot is that thinking in graphs is difficult for me. I just fail to see ”Oh, this is a graph problem!”. A lot of times the code I write would be much easier to maintain and write had I realized I’m solving a graph problem. Better performance too. edit: if you mean the performance anxiety party, yes. Several research papers have shown that anxiety induced by the interview context impacts people’s performance.

interview_anon 5y ago

paradygm 5y ago

> I've told at least 5 or 6 companies that wanted to white-board me to suck it. It's honestly insulting that I'm forced to white-board when I have two books with my name on them (published by Apress), contributions to Golang (small commits, but they still got me in the AUTHORS file), and OSS projects with hundreds of stars on GitHub That is all commendable but none of that tells me if I can work with you. When I interview candidates I use whiteboarding as a collaborative opportunity to see how the interviewee thinks. I treat it as a similar experience when I am the one being interviewed, which is why I have never understood the hostility toward whiteboarding. How else in the limited window of time that is the interview can I learn as much about the people I would be working with?

pthread_t 5y ago
> a collaborative opportunity to see how the interviewee thinks. In principle, this sounds great. In reality, if the interviewee fails to come up with the correct/optimal solution for the duration of the interview, they are going to be rejected.
- Ancalagon 5y ago
  lmao yeah, ask my ziprecruiter interviewer how well I "collaborated" despite being rejected for not getting the optimal dp solution in 45 minutes
literallyWTF 5y ago
This is the dumbest excuse for white boarding/l33t code that isn’t even applied in real life. You can be the most pleasant person who’s articulating their thoughts in simple and easy to understand ways and if you don’t solve the bullshit problem in o(-1) time you’ll get rejected.
gedy 5y ago
> I have never understood the hostility toward whiteboarding Maybe you haven't been blown off and treated like an idiot by some interviewer when you couldn't answer their pet question? Even when you're more experienced and skilled than they were?

ignoramous 5y ago

> Not only do we have an entire programming book sub-genre dedicated to this nonsense... Mate, wake up: ~billion dollar "interview prep" start-ups are a thing.

giantg2 5y ago
Sell shovels to the miners instead of mining for gold yourself.

tuckerman 5y ago

The class is being taught in the Computer Science department, not the software engineering or programming department. I think the bigger issue is the conflation of CS and SWE. To your point about how you interview, unless there is an alternative I would never be able to apply to your company. I have no open source contributions or code samples to share and no interest in writing a book. I also have no interest in applying to places with take home exams where the company gets me to spend time interviewing without a commensurate investment of time on their part. Where does that leave us? I guess it’s not ideal but, at least for me, the current process seems like it’s at least a local maximum.

pthread_t 5y ago
> without a commensurate investment of time on their part Doesn't grinding LeetCode apply here as well?
- tuckerman 5y ago
  Perhaps it’s a bit of an unfair/vicious cycle, but I found doing interviews at my previous company was enough to keep me feeling practiced enough. While I have studied up a bit before previous interviews, I’ve never used LeetCode.

lmm 5y ago

> I've told at least 5 or 6 companies that wanted to white-board me to suck it. It's honestly insulting that I'm forced to white-board when I have two books with my name on them (published by Apress), contributions to Golang (small commits, but they still got me in the AUTHORS file), and OSS projects with hundreds of stars on GitHub. So you've done a bunch of stuff that's easy to game, that requires me to learn a bunch to even evaluate whether it's good or not, and you feel insulted by being asked to do some honest coding? I'd far rather hire a fresh grad who did decently on leetcode and was able to hold a vaguely normal conversation in the interview. In my experience that has a much higher rate of finding people who will contribute positively to actually getting the work done. There's nothing wrong with the interview process, just a bunch of entitled prima donnas who are always going to think they're better than any standard process. You're better off without those anyway.

TheCoelacanth 5y ago

No matter what criteria you used in interviews, these people would still be practicing it, because, other than people whose parents donated buildings, that's the type of people who get into elite universities. It doesn't tell you anything about the interviews, just about the achievement-driven personalities that the universities select for in their admissions process.