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In my opinion the reason why programming interviews are the way they are is that they are primarily testing for a kind of person rather than programming ability

In my opinion the reason why programming interviews are the way they are is that they are primarily testing for a kind of person rather than programming ability. They are testing for the kind of person that is willing to jump through hoops.

rco8786 4y ago
To offer a counterpoint, you can also say it’s testing for people who are willing to do the work to get the task at hand done, and filter out people who say “well I could do that I just choose not to”.
gopalv 4y ago
> They are testing for the kind of person that is willing to jump through hoops. That's true, but it is meant as a different filter when applied to a large number of candidates. I went through a bunch of leetcode style interviews last year with some very odd interviewers - the oddest was a Sr Principal engineer asking me to manipulate linked lists with recursion. And the comment he made after I wrote the code was that "We don't care if you write code at work, but we want to know you like writing code enough to not see it as beneath you to do. To make sure you're not some whiteboard architect, because everyone you are supposed to lead will be writing code." I had been looking at the interview as a sort of idiot catcher before that point, but suddenly it seemed like a good filter for respecting the effort at the lowest level of the profession.
hervature 4y ago
I see this meme a lot and don't think it is a useful framing of what is going on. I'm sure there is one company out there, but I'm willing to bet that none of the companies that matter have actively sat down and a group of people decided to have programming questions explicitly to find people "willing to jump through hoops". Clearly, there are much better ways to test for that specific trait. Including actually asking them to jump through a hoop. I'm not debating that it is a welcomed side-effect that only fails in rare cases like the brew developer at Google. Mostly, I think this is just the result of companies looking to satisfy mainly three competing tasks. One, how do we assess someone can code. Two, making a standardized interviewing approach that many different people can perform. Three, doing it all in a time/resource efficient manner. Obviously code reviews satisfies the first but present very serious reproducibility and time requirement issues. I posit that programming leetcode style questions is the solution that most companies think balances the three. It feels bad as the interviewee because it is a fairly specific skill of programming that you need to practice and you cannot opt for another method to better illustrate your ability.
seti0Cha 4y ago
What makes you say that? I've been involved in a lot of hiring processes, and I would say that is nearly the opposite of their intent. Don't attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
- vouaobrasil 4y ago
  I don't think it's malice. I think it's just an emergent property of the process. Large tech companies want people who will be a cog in their machine, it's as simple as that.
  - seti0Cha 4y ago
    Oh, I see, you're talking about the FAANG sort, where people do tons of prep before applying. I guess I could see that.
    - vouaobrasil 4y ago
      Yeah, for what it's worth, I went through some programming interviews at smaller places. And then it was much more normal, not leet-code.
disambiguation 4y ago
You're giving it too much credit. Google invented this interview style 2 decades ago basically as an intelligence test, and it's been the status quo ever since. That's all there is to it.

rco8786 4y ago

To offer a counterpoint, you can also say it’s testing for people who are willing to do the work to get the task at hand done, and filter out people who say “well I could do that I just choose not to”.

gopalv 4y ago

> They are testing for the kind of person that is willing to jump through hoops. That's true, but it is meant as a different filter when applied to a large number of candidates. I went through a bunch of leetcode style interviews last year with some very odd interviewers - the oddest was a Sr Principal engineer asking me to manipulate linked lists with recursion. And the comment he made after I wrote the code was that "We don't care if you write code at work, but we want to know you like writing code enough to not see it as beneath you to do. To make sure you're not some whiteboard architect, because everyone you are supposed to lead will be writing code." I had been looking at the interview as a sort of idiot catcher before that point, but suddenly it seemed like a good filter for respecting the effort at the lowest level of the profession.

hervature 4y ago

I see this meme a lot and don't think it is a useful framing of what is going on. I'm sure there is one company out there, but I'm willing to bet that none of the companies that matter have actively sat down and a group of people decided to have programming questions explicitly to find people "willing to jump through hoops". Clearly, there are much better ways to test for that specific trait. Including actually asking them to jump through a hoop. I'm not debating that it is a welcomed side-effect that only fails in rare cases like the brew developer at Google. Mostly, I think this is just the result of companies looking to satisfy mainly three competing tasks. One, how do we assess someone can code. Two, making a standardized interviewing approach that many different people can perform. Three, doing it all in a time/resource efficient manner. Obviously code reviews satisfies the first but present very serious reproducibility and time requirement issues. I posit that programming leetcode style questions is the solution that most companies think balances the three. It feels bad as the interviewee because it is a fairly specific skill of programming that you need to practice and you cannot opt for another method to better illustrate your ability.

seti0Cha 4y ago

What makes you say that? I've been involved in a lot of hiring processes, and I would say that is nearly the opposite of their intent. Don't attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.

vouaobrasil 4y ago
I don't think it's malice. I think it's just an emergent property of the process. Large tech companies want people who will be a cog in their machine, it's as simple as that.
- seti0Cha 4y ago
  Oh, I see, you're talking about the FAANG sort, where people do tons of prep before applying. I guess I could see that.
  - vouaobrasil 4y ago
    Yeah, for what it's worth, I went through some programming interviews at smaller places. And then it was much more normal, not leet-code.

disambiguation 4y ago

You're giving it too much credit. Google invented this interview style 2 decades ago basically as an intelligence test, and it's been the status quo ever since. That's all there is to it.