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The Leetcode-driven hiring process is designed as a short hurdle for the just-graduated B.S. in Compsci degree holder; the knowledge to pass these interviews is

The Leetcode-driven hiring process is designed as a short hurdle for the just-graduated B.S. in Compsci degree holder; the knowledge to pass these interviews is arcane to anyone who has worked 'in the real world' for any length of time and inevitably had to defrag their brain to fit in other arcane knowledge, like how to develop a web app in 2023. Obviously companies have realized that they can tune their hiring process (Leetcode, et al) to be a short hurdle for the fresh B.S. Compsci grad that they can convince to work ungodly hours before forcing them out due to burnout in a few years and repeating the process. All of this to say my brain is not big enough to fit both 'Dijkstra's algorithm' and the CSS 'grid' property shorthand at the same time.

larodi 4y ago
hmm... now you saying this I realize that I can spit out Dijkstra, but stopped following CSS's vast amount of positioning quirks at some point. my favorite (provocative) challenge to software developers/engineers is to produce the formula for the solution of a quadratic equation. since it's vastly irrelevant to web or systems development, like 90% of all respondents do not know it. even though they graduated top marks from top universities. the you can ask them which language of their daily-used is based on ternary logic (hint: one for DB queries) and they'redone. in reality most large IT shops tend to have their own churches with important dogmas to respect/follow. very often also large amounts of wrongly/weirdly implemented stuff (not only code) back in the day, which just stayed... in production. so you're going to have to defrag your mind to keep the legacy stuff in while taking the transcendental knowledge out. how pity, isn't it.
- wizzwizz4 4y ago
  > you can ask them which language of their daily-used is based on ternary logic (hint: one for DB queries) and they'redone. It might be better to phrase this as "tri-state logic"; that's the usual term in electrical engineering, and is probably more familiar to programmers. When you said "ternary logic", I thought this was referring to the language philosophy, and spent a few minutes trying to work out how SQL was based on ternary expressions. Though, if you're testing your interviewees' ability to ask sensible follow-up questions (and they're in an environment where they expect to be expected / permitted to do so), then perhaps the confusing use of terminology is okay.
- pc86 4y ago
  Do you give people the formula and just have them implement it? That seems just like a weird test to see if you have the stdlib of your language memorized or not. And if you don't give them the formula it seems like you're just testing their memory of 8th grade [pre?] algebra. Regardless that sounds like a question I would probably get right (maybe not to your bar though) and then remove myself from consideration based on inane interviewing. The best interview loop I was ever on was for my current job. 45-ish minutes in coderpad with a staff engineer going over actual data and writing a few actually-used methods doing specific things. A 90-ish minute system design session with a few senior SREs designing a feature that already existed but had a lot of interesting edge cases. And a 60 minute behavioral interview with a couple managers. On the longer side but all on different days and all using real-world things from that job. Google whatever you want to google. Ask whatever questions you want to ask. Nothing remotely approaching a quiz, gotcha questions, inane trivia or unrelated math.
- Gerardo1 4y ago
  What do those two interview questions reveal to you about a candidate?

larodi 4y ago

hmm... now you saying this I realize that I can spit out Dijkstra, but stopped following CSS's vast amount of positioning quirks at some point. my favorite (provocative) challenge to software developers/engineers is to produce the formula for the solution of a quadratic equation. since it's vastly irrelevant to web or systems development, like 90% of all respondents do not know it. even though they graduated top marks from top universities. the you can ask them which language of their daily-used is based on ternary logic (hint: one for DB queries) and they'redone. in reality most large IT shops tend to have their own churches with important dogmas to respect/follow. very often also large amounts of wrongly/weirdly implemented stuff (not only code) back in the day, which just stayed... in production. so you're going to have to defrag your mind to keep the legacy stuff in while taking the transcendental knowledge out. how pity, isn't it.

wizzwizz4 4y ago
> you can ask them which language of their daily-used is based on ternary logic (hint: one for DB queries) and they'redone. It might be better to phrase this as "tri-state logic"; that's the usual term in electrical engineering, and is probably more familiar to programmers. When you said "ternary logic", I thought this was referring to the language philosophy, and spent a few minutes trying to work out how SQL was based on ternary expressions. Though, if you're testing your interviewees' ability to ask sensible follow-up questions (and they're in an environment where they expect to be expected / permitted to do so), then perhaps the confusing use of terminology is okay.
pc86 4y ago
Do you give people the formula and just have them implement it? That seems just like a weird test to see if you have the stdlib of your language memorized or not. And if you don't give them the formula it seems like you're just testing their memory of 8th grade [pre?] algebra. Regardless that sounds like a question I would probably get right (maybe not to your bar though) and then remove myself from consideration based on inane interviewing. The best interview loop I was ever on was for my current job. 45-ish minutes in coderpad with a staff engineer going over actual data and writing a few actually-used methods doing specific things. A 90-ish minute system design session with a few senior SREs designing a feature that already existed but had a lot of interesting edge cases. And a 60 minute behavioral interview with a couple managers. On the longer side but all on different days and all using real-world things from that job. Google whatever you want to google. Ask whatever questions you want to ask. Nothing remotely approaching a quiz, gotcha questions, inane trivia or unrelated math.
Gerardo1 4y ago
What do those two interview questions reveal to you about a candidate?