3 ms·

I interview a lot of people and I ask all of them to write code (standard for our company). There's plenty of people that can talk about all sorts of stuff but

by YZF 4y ago

I interview a lot of people and I ask all of them to write code (standard for our company). There's plenty of people that can talk about all sorts of stuff but can't code. Who do you hire to write software? Also do you want to work somewhere where software engineers can't write software? Do you want to work somewhere where the people doing the planning can't write software?

scarface74 4y ago
I keep hearing this like there are millions of experience developers that have spent an entire career fooling company after company without being able to code well enough to do your typical line of business CRUD app and let’s not fool ourselves. That’s all most of the 2.7 million developers are doing as far as coding. I’m not saying the jobs are simple just that the complexity is figuring out what to write, how to organize it, how to deploy it, etc. And before the gatekeeping starts, I programmed in assembly on four processors as a hobby by the time I graduated in 1996 and my third job around 2007 was to maintain a complete proprietary tool chain (compiler, VM (language VM), IDE) for Windows mobile. I spent my first decade plus out of college bit twiddling in C.
- YZF 4y ago
  We do a lot of stuff that's not one line CRUD. I've no interest in people that can only do that. And let's not fool ourselves, even in orgs where they do the most vanilla stick blocks together software work there's a few people that do most of the work and lots of others that do very little. The other part of this is that there aren't that many good people looking for a job, most of them have one most of the time and when they switch it's usually through their network of connections. You're obviously the kind of person I'd want to hire ;) Why would you mind writing some code in an interview? I don't ask anything that requires memorizing your data structures and algorithms textbook. All I'm looking for is people that can "think in code" which in the population of job seekers isn't as common as you'd think.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    Don’t get me wrong. Back when I was C bit twiddling from 1999-2008, we had nothing but a compiler and no libraries besides the ones we wrote since our code had to compile across x86 PCs and a couple of mainframes. I had to implement most of the data structures myself. I’ve had one coding interview in 25 years between 8 jobs. That one was in 2012. They had a Visual Studio IDE with skeleton code abs failing unit test and I had to make the unit tests pass as a pair programming exercise. I thought that was a very practical type of coding interview that I copied when I had to filter a bunch of contractors when I was a dev lead. But now, if I leave my job at BigTech as a “cloud architect specializing in application modernization” - basically enterprise app dev/DevOps [sic], training, etc., before I retire, it will be at some startup looking for a more strategic role, even though I would be hands on. It’s automatically a red flag about the job that I prefer if I’m not being asked about strategy and given a coding interview.
    - YZF 4y ago
      We do both but writing some code is a requirement. After you do that we talk (with the more senior people) about their approaches to solving bigger problems.

by YZF 4y ago

scarface74 4y ago

I keep hearing this like there are millions of experience developers that have spent an entire career fooling company after company without being able to code well enough to do your typical line of business CRUD app and let’s not fool ourselves. That’s all most of the 2.7 million developers are doing as far as coding. I’m not saying the jobs are simple just that the complexity is figuring out what to write, how to organize it, how to deploy it, etc. And before the gatekeeping starts, I programmed in assembly on four processors as a hobby by the time I graduated in 1996 and my third job around 2007 was to maintain a complete proprietary tool chain (compiler, VM (language VM), IDE) for Windows mobile. I spent my first decade plus out of college bit twiddling in C.

YZF 4y ago
We do a lot of stuff that's not one line CRUD. I've no interest in people that can only do that. And let's not fool ourselves, even in orgs where they do the most vanilla stick blocks together software work there's a few people that do most of the work and lots of others that do very little. The other part of this is that there aren't that many good people looking for a job, most of them have one most of the time and when they switch it's usually through their network of connections. You're obviously the kind of person I'd want to hire ;) Why would you mind writing some code in an interview? I don't ask anything that requires memorizing your data structures and algorithms textbook. All I'm looking for is people that can "think in code" which in the population of job seekers isn't as common as you'd think.
- scarface74 4y ago
  Don’t get me wrong. Back when I was C bit twiddling from 1999-2008, we had nothing but a compiler and no libraries besides the ones we wrote since our code had to compile across x86 PCs and a couple of mainframes. I had to implement most of the data structures myself. I’ve had one coding interview in 25 years between 8 jobs. That one was in 2012. They had a Visual Studio IDE with skeleton code abs failing unit test and I had to make the unit tests pass as a pair programming exercise. I thought that was a very practical type of coding interview that I copied when I had to filter a bunch of contractors when I was a dev lead. But now, if I leave my job at BigTech as a “cloud architect specializing in application modernization” - basically enterprise app dev/DevOps [sic], training, etc., before I retire, it will be at some startup looking for a more strategic role, even though I would be hands on. It’s automatically a red flag about the job that I prefer if I’m not being asked about strategy and given a coding interview.
  - YZF 4y ago
    We do both but writing some code is a requirement. After you do that we talk (with the more senior people) about their approaches to solving bigger problems.