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I once had an interview that I really liked. It was for a bank. They give the candidate some messy, done-in-a-hurry code (but not purposefully obfuscated) and
by yreg 2y ago
I once had an interview that I really liked. It was for a bank.
They give the candidate some messy, done-in-a-hurry code (but not purposefully obfuscated) and ask them to refactor it to the best of their ability. The interviewer sits next to the candidate and talks to them throughout the whole process. It's pretty much pair programming, but the candidate has the initiative.
I found it to be a breath of fresh air after all the leetcode interviews. Of course, they have the luxury of doing this, because they know what exact technologies they are using and they don't need to measure candidate's ability to learn new tech, etc. In their situation they are more interested in topics like whether the candidate can produce maintainable code, name things properly or communicate with co-workers.
- palata 2y ago> because they know what exact technologies they are using and they don't need to measure candidate's ability to learn new tech, etc Well leetcode interviews do not measure the candidate's ability to learn new tech either, do they?
- kamaal 2y agoLeetcode is mostly small time snippets, that tests how intelligently you can write nested for loops and if statements. That's mostly it. If you are looking to hire people to write < 50 line snippets, it works fine. Pretty much useless for everything else.
- Aurornis 2y agoLeetCode is a filter mechanism, not an entire interview system. The big companies that have LeetCode in their process also have system design, behavioral, resume review, and experience review as part of the process. I’m sure some bad companies are using LeetCode as the entire interview process, but it’s not how it’s normally used.
- yreg 2y agoTo be fair I think it is a proof that the person can learn all of the leetcode stuff and therefore they might be clever/disciplined enough to learn new tech as well. Although I don't find it very relevant. When I was fresh out of university, I was good with algorithms / data structures (neither of which I use much in actual work), therefore able to pass leetcode interviews just fine. Yet it was at the time challenging for me to learn new frameworks and I found all of the tooling I never heard of rather confusing.
- hobs 2y agoThis is an interview style I do often. The first bit is just super basic shit (since I mostly do database stuff) and then a code review section. What's super interesting is I have actually had people pretty much fail the basic stuff (which was probably nerves) and then go on and kill the code review section in ways that shows their serious expertise. IMO interviews are pretty bad at demonstrating people's ability to work, but if you can zoom in and out on a problem and do good enough on the coding stuff its usually a win.