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> I continue to insist on algorithm & data structure interviews for software engineer candidates. Not every project needs them as much, but in large enough inst

> I continue to insist on algorithm & data structure interviews for software engineer candidates. Not every project needs them as much, but in large enough institutions, every engineer is likely to run into at least one project that does. If they can't figure it out and can't get help from someone who can, their weak solution can easily cost the company and its other engineers far more than it would have cost to interview engineers properly and compensate the fewer qualified engineers commensurately. I strongly disagree with this assertion. Using algorithms&data structures trivia in interviews means you will reject candidates who might happen to fail a inane trivia question in spite of otherwise being perfect fits and the ideal candidate. Imposing trivia on algorithms&data structures as a requirement communicates the idea that you don't believe anyone, including the ideal candidate, is unable to learn and develop this skill while working at your organization. This is telling regarding the bar which is set at your organization to nurture development in this skill set. If your org is indeed large, odds are you can find a subject matter expert within your ranks, which means it's utterly pointless to expect your engineers must be able to come up with perfectly optimal solutions on their own. They are a Slack message away from that. The biggest blindspot you convey in your post is the ladder-pulling aspect of data structures & algorithms in today's recruitment process. Subpar engineers use it to depict themselves as competent or raising the bar within their organization by coming up with obscure puzzles that bear absolutely no relationship to the job they are hiring for. They spend days hand-picking a problem for which they have a solution to, they go over the problem as many times as they need, they proceed to grill candidates on this trivia, they make their hire/no hire decision on the 20minute performance a candidate has after being presented with a riddle, and then go back to not have to face that issue ever again in any production setting. The worst offenders are interviewers who pull this stunt in spite of they themselves completely failing to understand their own problem.

fl0ki 2y ago
> Using algorithms&data structures trivia in interviews I never said trivia. By definition, trivia is stuff that is not important. I interview for things that are important to the work we do, and I give plenty of hints along the way to give a candidate a chance to show their reasoning abilities even if they have gaps in their knowledge or memory. This is what critics of algorithm interviewing conveniently ignore to make the interview seem unfair and unreasonable. If you had a bad interviewer I'm sorry to hear that. Formal interview training in places like Google explicitly includes how to hint and unblock people effectively, and hiring committee feedback-on-feedback can instruct interviewers how to be more fair and better reflect the candidate's potential. Maybe your interviewer did a bad job and later received that feedback, but it had already soured your perception of algorithm interviews. It's also a total myth that candidates are completely rejected because of one bad algorithm interview. If you have a day of five interviews, your success is not an AND() of the five, but it's also not an OR(). Whoever looks at the feedback weighs the various positive and negative signals to determine if it's a fit for the role. Skills in some areas can outweigh skills in other areas. Algorithms are one of those areas for a reason but it's still only one area and probably only one or two of the five or more interviews people will do. If you know a better way to interview for these skills before hiring someone, please tell the rest of us and change the industry for the better. Until then, this seems to be the best we can do. If your organization has very different needs, you can interview your candidates however best meets those needs. I know my organization needs algorithms and data structure skills, not just trivia but actual fundamental skills that generalize to novel problems we encounter along the way, and I'm going to keep interviewing for those skills. It's still just one interview out of several, and we've hired people that totally flunked my interview, so I'm not even gatekeeping, I'm giving the hiring team the signal they asked me to give them and the rest is up to them.

fl0ki 2y ago

> Using algorithms&data structures trivia in interviews I never said trivia. By definition, trivia is stuff that is not important. I interview for things that are important to the work we do, and I give plenty of hints along the way to give a candidate a chance to show their reasoning abilities even if they have gaps in their knowledge or memory. This is what critics of algorithm interviewing conveniently ignore to make the interview seem unfair and unreasonable. If you had a bad interviewer I'm sorry to hear that. Formal interview training in places like Google explicitly includes how to hint and unblock people effectively, and hiring committee feedback-on-feedback can instruct interviewers how to be more fair and better reflect the candidate's potential. Maybe your interviewer did a bad job and later received that feedback, but it had already soured your perception of algorithm interviews. It's also a total myth that candidates are completely rejected because of one bad algorithm interview. If you have a day of five interviews, your success is not an AND() of the five, but it's also not an OR(). Whoever looks at the feedback weighs the various positive and negative signals to determine if it's a fit for the role. Skills in some areas can outweigh skills in other areas. Algorithms are one of those areas for a reason but it's still only one area and probably only one or two of the five or more interviews people will do. If you know a better way to interview for these skills before hiring someone, please tell the rest of us and change the industry for the better. Until then, this seems to be the best we can do. If your organization has very different needs, you can interview your candidates however best meets those needs. I know my organization needs algorithms and data structure skills, not just trivia but actual fundamental skills that generalize to novel problems we encounter along the way, and I'm going to keep interviewing for those skills. It's still just one interview out of several, and we've hired people that totally flunked my interview, so I'm not even gatekeeping, I'm giving the hiring team the signal they asked me to give them and the rest is up to them.