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My only real problem with coding interviews is that you never know whether or not people lack knowledge, or if they're just folding under pressure. I've seen ve

My only real problem with coding interviews is that you never know whether or not people lack knowledge, or if they're just folding under pressure. I've seen very competent people start to fumble, when they're being put on the spot - which in turn makes a bad first impression, for the people that have just met them. Some people are very good at whiteboard interviews, others at take-home exams.

asd88 5y ago
Hot take: Having false negatives is perfectly fine as long as you’re minimizing false positives.
- AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  That is a bullcrap phrase all interviewers and HR say. Look, how would you know your interview process isn't filtering critical numbers of good engineers? You have no control group for that assertion. None. And engineers are known to be neurodivergent more than your usual meatsack. For example, your assertion works really well if the subconscious goal is to only hire white people. After all, black people sue for discrimination to better to be safe and avoid them.
sokoloff 5y ago
If the folding under pressure is episodic/random, then those very competent people will likely make a correctly good impression in the next 1 or 2 interviews they attend and end up landing a job soon. From their perspective, it's still fine. From a company perspective, if you really can't tell whether they lack competence or just folded under pressure, you pretty much have to pass on them and try again with the next candidate.
- keskival 5y ago
  Why would it be random? I have seen people describe this as related to performance anxiety, and maybe some part of it is that. I have myself come to conclusion that this is largely due to brain architecture. Notably the same part of the brain is responsible for coding as for speaking. Asking people to explain their thinking to an unknown person with unknown criteria takes a huge amount of brain capacity exactly from the parts of the brain one needs to program. Additionally, the normal way experienced programmers approach these types of problems is to utilize background processing in the brain. They first encounter the problem, then they aim to understand it well. Then they go take a coffee, or even sleep on it, while the brain is working in the background unconsciously, and then at some point an innovation comes almost unbidden. The coding interview set up doesn't measure this real problem solving capability in any way. This is why experienced people become stumped, because it is not the way they actually solve the problems in the real life, and they might not even be aware of why their brain seems to not work suddenly. This might even flare up their impostor syndrome which is a common professional hazard if they think they have failed in something they should have succeeded in. It is not only a bad way to interview and screen people, it is discriminatory and materially abusive.
  - erik_seaberg 5y ago
    How do they handle pager duty?
    - keskival 5y ago
      If you're asking how people solve problems with systems they know from head to toe, with which they have worked for ages and they know common issue types, and procedures how to diagnose and debug by endless repetition, you're right, they don't need to sleep on it, they just do it by muscle memory. That's not unlike math olympiad competitors or competitive coders who by repetition generate a skill for those types of problems exactly.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    I used "if" in the sense of "if (i < 95)..." It's not arguing that i is always less than 95, just saying what the consequent is in the event that it is. For many people, it is episodic/random; performance is variable by day, hour, and situation.
- throwmeawaycs 5y ago
  I personally implemented major APIs and libraries that are currently being used in deployment by over 25m+ systems with 99.999% uptime. When I get called into interviews and some guy starts trying to get me to implement or work on some random crap in some random IDE and doesn’t want me to use a search engine to do so? Guess what, I just turn off the laptop and go hiking. For a year. And then after that year I’ll try again. You’re not playing the game you think you are.

asd88 5y ago

Hot take: Having false negatives is perfectly fine as long as you’re minimizing false positives.

AtlasBarfed 5y ago
That is a bullcrap phrase all interviewers and HR say. Look, how would you know your interview process isn't filtering critical numbers of good engineers? You have no control group for that assertion. None. And engineers are known to be neurodivergent more than your usual meatsack. For example, your assertion works really well if the subconscious goal is to only hire white people. After all, black people sue for discrimination to better to be safe and avoid them.

sokoloff 5y ago

If the folding under pressure is episodic/random, then those very competent people will likely make a correctly good impression in the next 1 or 2 interviews they attend and end up landing a job soon. From their perspective, it's still fine. From a company perspective, if you really can't tell whether they lack competence or just folded under pressure, you pretty much have to pass on them and try again with the next candidate.

keskival 5y ago
Why would it be random? I have seen people describe this as related to performance anxiety, and maybe some part of it is that. I have myself come to conclusion that this is largely due to brain architecture. Notably the same part of the brain is responsible for coding as for speaking. Asking people to explain their thinking to an unknown person with unknown criteria takes a huge amount of brain capacity exactly from the parts of the brain one needs to program. Additionally, the normal way experienced programmers approach these types of problems is to utilize background processing in the brain. They first encounter the problem, then they aim to understand it well. Then they go take a coffee, or even sleep on it, while the brain is working in the background unconsciously, and then at some point an innovation comes almost unbidden. The coding interview set up doesn't measure this real problem solving capability in any way. This is why experienced people become stumped, because it is not the way they actually solve the problems in the real life, and they might not even be aware of why their brain seems to not work suddenly. This might even flare up their impostor syndrome which is a common professional hazard if they think they have failed in something they should have succeeded in. It is not only a bad way to interview and screen people, it is discriminatory and materially abusive.
- erik_seaberg 5y ago
  How do they handle pager duty?
  - keskival 5y ago
    If you're asking how people solve problems with systems they know from head to toe, with which they have worked for ages and they know common issue types, and procedures how to diagnose and debug by endless repetition, you're right, they don't need to sleep on it, they just do it by muscle memory. That's not unlike math olympiad competitors or competitive coders who by repetition generate a skill for those types of problems exactly.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  I used "if" in the sense of "if (i < 95)..." It's not arguing that i is always less than 95, just saying what the consequent is in the event that it is. For many people, it is episodic/random; performance is variable by day, hour, and situation.
throwmeawaycs 5y ago
I personally implemented major APIs and libraries that are currently being used in deployment by over 25m+ systems with 99.999% uptime. When I get called into interviews and some guy starts trying to get me to implement or work on some random crap in some random IDE and doesn’t want me to use a search engine to do so? Guess what, I just turn off the laptop and go hiking. For a year. And then after that year I’ll try again. You’re not playing the game you think you are.