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Best interview experience I had was a 3 hour after-work meetup with 3 people from the company. No coding challenges, but nice and insightful engineering chat. I

Best interview experience I had was a 3 hour after-work meetup with 3 people from the company. No coding challenges, but nice and insightful engineering chat. I got to meet the team and had an offer ready within week Worst was when a company told me they used my open-source project and wanted me to do 5 interview rounds, two of them being whiteboard-style. I didn’t expect that

ok_dad 3y ago
My favorite interview involve no code. If you can only tell if someone is proficient at coding from a coding quiz, you’re a bad software dev manager.
- blauditore 3y ago
  I very much disagree with this. There are bad engineers good at "sounding good", as long as it never gets too deep. Interviewed many people myself where they only started showing their real face while actually coding.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  Any SWE should already have a professional portfolio ready to share with employers. Even an entry-level coder should have some class projects and hobbies to show at that point. If you don't go around with a portfolio, then yeah, you can expect employers to be skeptical, and subject you to coding on the whiteboard, or leetcode or something, which isn't really going to reflect your actual coding ability, but it's more geared toward weeding out fakers in interviews. On the other hand, if you have a portfolio, especially a public one shared on GitHub or such, then you can directly point to it and take credit for a good, hopefully working project, and you can explain it at length, and your prospective employer should hopefully take this as a strong signal that your skills are commensurate with your CV.
  - josephg 3y ago
    If you run an opensource project on github, it’s remarkable how many times your repository will be forked into weird github accounts - that on closer inspection are just big lists of forked projects with nary an original patch to be found. I have no idea why people do this; but I suspect it might be to look good in interviews. No idea if it works - it’s pretty obvious if you look closer that they didn’t author any of the commits. But I wonder how many people are out there claiming credit for other people’s work to get hired.
    - sokoloff 3y ago
      I do a fair amount of that in my own github account. If I have no commits in a forked repo, it was probably just a form of "bookmarking".
    - StreetChief 3y ago
      You can also fork to preserve a repo, although apparently GitHub can removed forked repos alongside the original during takedown action. (To avoid, do the fork manually).
  - mvdtnz 3y ago
    I've spent my entire career behind the firewall. No I don't have a portfolio I can show you.
- josephg 3y ago
  Hard disagree on this one. I’ve done over 400 SWE interviews for a recruiting company. I’ve seen a steady stream of candidates who could talk the talk, but had incredibly weak programming skills when put to the test. And the reverse - I’ve seen plenty of candidates who were awkward socially but ask them a programming problem and they’re right at home. If you’re hiring for a programming role, assess their programming skills. Not just their social skills. A conversation only tells you half the picture.
- sokoloff 3y ago
  I have, personally, interviewed a lead software engineer candidate, claiming 8+ years of experience coding, who could not write a simple 5-minute exercise, in any language of his choosing. It wasn't FizzBuzz exactly, but if I'd thought to ask FizzBuzz, he'd have busted that as well. "Write a function that takes a list of numbers [array, list, or equivalent] and returns the average." That's it. Wasn’t that they got hung up on the details of whether the average of ints should be an int, float, or double, or how to handle overflow, but just couldn't even get started at all in any language. I was the third on-site interviewer. He'd BSed his way past the phone screen and two others and I caught a whiff of "Johnny can't code" and decided to check by asking him one of our (at the time) new college grad questions.
  - ionwake 3y ago
    You remind me of many interviewers who had no idea who I was and asked me basic grad tests which I would struggle with mostly because I refused to be tested on fizzbuzz style questions I found it too easy to get caught out without recent revision which I often didn’t do as I was building critical software for paying customers. I’m not saying you may have thrown out competent coders and made a completely incorrect decision I’m saying many who interviewed me seemed to ( when they hadn’t checked my background ) and were quick to assume idiocy. I only typed this out for you mate.
  - jjav 3y ago
    > just couldn't even get started at all in any language Let's apply Occam's razor. You have someone who has been programming 8+ years professionally. Maybe they did good work or bad work, we don't know, but we know they've been programming as a profession getting paid to do it for 8+ years. We also all know you can't really go through a week, or even usually a day, of programming without handling something as basic as an array or a list. So, which is actually more likely: a) Someone did 8+ years of programming without ever implementing an array loop or b) They know how to do it, but the test is flawed due to conditions (on a whiteboard in a high stress environment while being criticized). A lot of people with deep expertise in programming are completely incapable of putting on a whiteboard performance under stress. I can never believe the number of interviewers who go "Gotcha!! They don't know how to code despite doing it for years!" instead of considering the simple correct answer is usually (b).

ok_dad 3y ago

My favorite interview involve no code. If you can only tell if someone is proficient at coding from a coding quiz, you’re a bad software dev manager.

blauditore 3y ago
I very much disagree with this. There are bad engineers good at "sounding good", as long as it never gets too deep. Interviewed many people myself where they only started showing their real face while actually coding.
NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
Any SWE should already have a professional portfolio ready to share with employers. Even an entry-level coder should have some class projects and hobbies to show at that point. If you don't go around with a portfolio, then yeah, you can expect employers to be skeptical, and subject you to coding on the whiteboard, or leetcode or something, which isn't really going to reflect your actual coding ability, but it's more geared toward weeding out fakers in interviews. On the other hand, if you have a portfolio, especially a public one shared on GitHub or such, then you can directly point to it and take credit for a good, hopefully working project, and you can explain it at length, and your prospective employer should hopefully take this as a strong signal that your skills are commensurate with your CV.
- josephg 3y ago
  If you run an opensource project on github, it’s remarkable how many times your repository will be forked into weird github accounts - that on closer inspection are just big lists of forked projects with nary an original patch to be found. I have no idea why people do this; but I suspect it might be to look good in interviews. No idea if it works - it’s pretty obvious if you look closer that they didn’t author any of the commits. But I wonder how many people are out there claiming credit for other people’s work to get hired.
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    I do a fair amount of that in my own github account. If I have no commits in a forked repo, it was probably just a form of "bookmarking".
  - StreetChief 3y ago
    You can also fork to preserve a repo, although apparently GitHub can removed forked repos alongside the original during takedown action. (To avoid, do the fork manually).
- mvdtnz 3y ago
  I've spent my entire career behind the firewall. No I don't have a portfolio I can show you.
josephg 3y ago
Hard disagree on this one. I’ve done over 400 SWE interviews for a recruiting company. I’ve seen a steady stream of candidates who could talk the talk, but had incredibly weak programming skills when put to the test. And the reverse - I’ve seen plenty of candidates who were awkward socially but ask them a programming problem and they’re right at home. If you’re hiring for a programming role, assess their programming skills. Not just their social skills. A conversation only tells you half the picture.
sokoloff 3y ago
I have, personally, interviewed a lead software engineer candidate, claiming 8+ years of experience coding, who could not write a simple 5-minute exercise, in any language of his choosing. It wasn't FizzBuzz exactly, but if I'd thought to ask FizzBuzz, he'd have busted that as well. "Write a function that takes a list of numbers [array, list, or equivalent] and returns the average." That's it. Wasn’t that they got hung up on the details of whether the average of ints should be an int, float, or double, or how to handle overflow, but just couldn't even get started at all in any language. I was the third on-site interviewer. He'd BSed his way past the phone screen and two others and I caught a whiff of "Johnny can't code" and decided to check by asking him one of our (at the time) new college grad questions.
- ionwake 3y ago
  You remind me of many interviewers who had no idea who I was and asked me basic grad tests which I would struggle with mostly because I refused to be tested on fizzbuzz style questions I found it too easy to get caught out without recent revision which I often didn’t do as I was building critical software for paying customers. I’m not saying you may have thrown out competent coders and made a completely incorrect decision I’m saying many who interviewed me seemed to ( when they hadn’t checked my background ) and were quick to assume idiocy. I only typed this out for you mate.
- jjav 3y ago
  > just couldn't even get started at all in any language Let's apply Occam's razor. You have someone who has been programming 8+ years professionally. Maybe they did good work or bad work, we don't know, but we know they've been programming as a profession getting paid to do it for 8+ years. We also all know you can't really go through a week, or even usually a day, of programming without handling something as basic as an array or a list. So, which is actually more likely: a) Someone did 8+ years of programming without ever implementing an array loop or b) They know how to do it, but the test is flawed due to conditions (on a whiteboard in a high stress environment while being criticized). A lot of people with deep expertise in programming are completely incapable of putting on a whiteboard performance under stress. I can never believe the number of interviewers who go "Gotcha!! They don't know how to code despite doing it for years!" instead of considering the simple correct answer is usually (b).