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Because they are fun! But in an interview environment it can feel like being tested on whether you are cool under pressure and less like you are being assessed

Because they are fun! But in an interview environment it can feel like being tested on whether you are cool under pressure and less like you are being assessed for merit.

deathanatos 4y ago
Parsing a list of list of integers, finding the maximum, in a hour, in the coding environment of your choice: this shouldn't be "under pressure". (We do not ask in interviews questions of the same nature as the last third of AoC. If anything, most of our interview questions are below AoC day 1 in difficulty. And yet they screen absurd numbers of candidates.)
- xboxnolifes 4y ago
  I've never had such a trivial coding challenge before. If that was truly the norm, it would hardly be complained about.
  - deathanatos 4y ago
    Then people should be giving examples of questions they're encountering in interviews when they want to discuss why, then; industry norm is not rougher than AoC. While I've definitely encountered tougher than this AoC in interviews, I find I have a hard time maintaining that bar: I have to push to maintain even the bar of this day's AoC question (e.g., "write min()") as it turns away sufficient number of candidates that hiring managers start looking to lower the bar, which is absurd. (But that said, when I encounter tougher problems, they're not tougher than about mid-AoC, which is still well within reason, to me. They're still not the infamous sewer lid. Nobody is asking the sewer lid question anymore, and collectively we need to stop propagating that myth. It was banned at Google well over a decade ago…) (Ultimately, it seems to me to be an economics problem: we're not attracting good devs, which means we're not offering good devs something enticing enough; we're left with the subset for which our offer is enticing, but that isn't what we're looking for. But I can't solve that problem.)
- burnished 4y ago
  That is more time and an easier problem than I’ve seen, but that’s fine. The point is if you asked some one to tie their shoes while scrutinized they’d probably make a mistake, and the only solution is practice, but that practice is principally not for the purpose of improving your skill but for reducing the impact of being acutely observed. I don’t think this is a problem per se, I think it’s very egalitarian, but it’s also not difficult to see why people might be uncomfortable or complain.

Because they are fun! But in an interview environment it can feel like being tested on whether you are cool under pressure and less like you are being assessed for merit.

deathanatos 4y ago

Parsing a list of list of integers, finding the maximum, in a hour, in the coding environment of your choice: this shouldn't be "under pressure". (We do not ask in interviews questions of the same nature as the last third of AoC. If anything, most of our interview questions are below AoC day 1 in difficulty. And yet they screen absurd numbers of candidates.)

xboxnolifes 4y ago
I've never had such a trivial coding challenge before. If that was truly the norm, it would hardly be complained about.
- deathanatos 4y ago
  Then people should be giving examples of questions they're encountering in interviews when they want to discuss why, then; industry norm is not rougher than AoC. While I've definitely encountered tougher than this AoC in interviews, I find I have a hard time maintaining that bar: I have to push to maintain even the bar of this day's AoC question (e.g., "write min()") as it turns away sufficient number of candidates that hiring managers start looking to lower the bar, which is absurd. (But that said, when I encounter tougher problems, they're not tougher than about mid-AoC, which is still well within reason, to me. They're still not the infamous sewer lid. Nobody is asking the sewer lid question anymore, and collectively we need to stop propagating that myth. It was banned at Google well over a decade ago…) (Ultimately, it seems to me to be an economics problem: we're not attracting good devs, which means we're not offering good devs something enticing enough; we're left with the subset for which our offer is enticing, but that isn't what we're looking for. But I can't solve that problem.)
burnished 4y ago
That is more time and an easier problem than I’ve seen, but that’s fine. The point is if you asked some one to tie their shoes while scrutinized they’d probably make a mistake, and the only solution is practice, but that practice is principally not for the purpose of improving your skill but for reducing the impact of being acutely observed. I don’t think this is a problem per se, I think it’s very egalitarian, but it’s also not difficult to see why people might be uncomfortable or complain.