3 ms·

I have to disagree with you. This isn't supposed to insult you and it can be prior to the in person interview. I did an interview once and asked them to interc

by nkassis 15y ago

I have to disagree with you. This isn't supposed to insult you and it can be prior to the in person interview. I did an interview once and asked them to interchange the value of two variables in any language they wanted. In the end maybe 2 out of the 20 applicants that past our HR dept checks got through this. This one only one question, I there was much harder questions on my test but none that I or another person on the team couldn't answer in less than 1 minute. It was a disaster and I ended getting forced to hire someone from that pool anyway. That hire didn't mesh well at all.

robomartin 15y ago
I guess my point is that there has to be something wrong with the hiring process if 2 out of 20 applicants can't swap the values of two variables. Either that or there's something very seriously wrong with CS programs. How can someone walk into an interview with a degree and fail something like that? If the quality of candidates is that bad, then, OK, maybe I'm wrong about the "hello world" test. In my reality someone wouldn't even get an interview without evidence of prior non-trivial work. Hence my rejection of the "hello world" test. I also recognize that if you are hiring massive numbers of people you need to mechanize things a bit. I couldn't see sitting down with someone, their laptop and a projector for an hour under those circumstances. Thankfully that is not my world...at the moment.
- nkassis 15y ago
  I posit that some of it is just people lying. I had someone send in a huge perl script he claimed to be his own work yet failed that variable swapping test. Basically our setup was HR gets a bunch of resumes and scans for minimum requirements (degree, prior experience) then we get them. You get really good looking resumes that you need to prove somehow. That's where that basic litmus test comes in. Things like Github improve this a bit although I'm not even a huge user of public github repos (something I'm working on fixing since I realize my online profile is a bit sparse at the moment). I don't it's perfect either as a lot of very good candidates don't have time or are shy to show they work in public. Heck I love working on my professional project in my spare time and can't show that code publicly most of the time.
- prodigal_erik 15y ago
  The way I read that, 2 out of 20 succeeded rather than failed. This doesn't greatly surprise me. Rockstar salaries have attracted so many idiots and frauds that we have to sift a massive number of candidates to find any that aren't useless. And the only evidence I could accept is someone I know and trust saying they personally saw you get through non-trivial work. Anyone else needs to show me they can solve a toy problem they didn't come in prepared for.
- mseebach 15y ago
  > Either that or there's something very seriously wrong with CS programs I've been involved in hiring. I've seen top uni CS grads fail (not borderline - train wreck) a programming exercise not much more complicated than fizzbuzz. And a variation: cheat on the exercise. I've interviewed people who clearly were not the authors of the code sample they'd submitted. We administer the test online and the candidate can take it on their own time. A decent programmer can easily complete it in less than 20 minutes, a good one in five, and judging from the proportion of people who get it wrong, I'd argue it's a good filter to make sure we're not wasting each others time. And I think it goes both ways: It costs us very little to evaluate a response, so we can filter very lightly at the top of the funnel. The first round of interviews are much more costly, so if they were the first point of contact, we'd have to filter much harder on CVs, which isn't always fair to candidates who didn't take the beaten path (and excessively fair to candidate with good degrees). It should be mentioned that we skip the programming exercise if a candidate come through a personal recommendation.
- ig1 15y ago
  I once interviewed a CS graduate who couldn't even tell me what an integer was. I was tempted to write a letter of complain to the university in question.
msh 15y ago
>I did an interview once and asked them to interchange the value of two variables in any language they wanted. In the end maybe 2 out of the 20 applicants that past our HR dept checks got through this. That sounds insane!?! What kind of background did these guys have that let them througt the HR process?
- pavel_lishin 15y ago
  Not all companies have an HR department, and those that do don't necessarily populate it with people who know code when they see it. At my current job, I have six coworkers. At my previous one, I had three. What HR?
  - msh 15y ago
    No, but the post I refered to specifically mentioned a HR department and the coding problem was very simple leading me to believe they had absolutely no coding experience.

by nkassis 15y ago

robomartin 15y ago

I guess my point is that there has to be something wrong with the hiring process if 2 out of 20 applicants can't swap the values of two variables. Either that or there's something very seriously wrong with CS programs. How can someone walk into an interview with a degree and fail something like that? If the quality of candidates is that bad, then, OK, maybe I'm wrong about the "hello world" test. In my reality someone wouldn't even get an interview without evidence of prior non-trivial work. Hence my rejection of the "hello world" test. I also recognize that if you are hiring massive numbers of people you need to mechanize things a bit. I couldn't see sitting down with someone, their laptop and a projector for an hour under those circumstances. Thankfully that is not my world...at the moment.

nkassis 15y ago
I posit that some of it is just people lying. I had someone send in a huge perl script he claimed to be his own work yet failed that variable swapping test. Basically our setup was HR gets a bunch of resumes and scans for minimum requirements (degree, prior experience) then we get them. You get really good looking resumes that you need to prove somehow. That's where that basic litmus test comes in. Things like Github improve this a bit although I'm not even a huge user of public github repos (something I'm working on fixing since I realize my online profile is a bit sparse at the moment). I don't it's perfect either as a lot of very good candidates don't have time or are shy to show they work in public. Heck I love working on my professional project in my spare time and can't show that code publicly most of the time.
prodigal_erik 15y ago
The way I read that, 2 out of 20 succeeded rather than failed. This doesn't greatly surprise me. Rockstar salaries have attracted so many idiots and frauds that we have to sift a massive number of candidates to find any that aren't useless. And the only evidence I could accept is someone I know and trust saying they personally saw you get through non-trivial work. Anyone else needs to show me they can solve a toy problem they didn't come in prepared for.
mseebach 15y ago
> Either that or there's something very seriously wrong with CS programs I've been involved in hiring. I've seen top uni CS grads fail (not borderline - train wreck) a programming exercise not much more complicated than fizzbuzz. And a variation: cheat on the exercise. I've interviewed people who clearly were not the authors of the code sample they'd submitted. We administer the test online and the candidate can take it on their own time. A decent programmer can easily complete it in less than 20 minutes, a good one in five, and judging from the proportion of people who get it wrong, I'd argue it's a good filter to make sure we're not wasting each others time. And I think it goes both ways: It costs us very little to evaluate a response, so we can filter very lightly at the top of the funnel. The first round of interviews are much more costly, so if they were the first point of contact, we'd have to filter much harder on CVs, which isn't always fair to candidates who didn't take the beaten path (and excessively fair to candidate with good degrees). It should be mentioned that we skip the programming exercise if a candidate come through a personal recommendation.
ig1 15y ago
I once interviewed a CS graduate who couldn't even tell me what an integer was. I was tempted to write a letter of complain to the university in question.

msh 15y ago

>I did an interview once and asked them to interchange the value of two variables in any language they wanted. In the end maybe 2 out of the 20 applicants that past our HR dept checks got through this. That sounds insane!?! What kind of background did these guys have that let them througt the HR process?

pavel_lishin 15y ago
Not all companies have an HR department, and those that do don't necessarily populate it with people who know code when they see it. At my current job, I have six coworkers. At my previous one, I had three. What HR?
- msh 15y ago
  No, but the post I refered to specifically mentioned a HR department and the coding problem was very simple leading me to believe they had absolutely no coding experience.