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This may work out great if you happen to have worked on Rails for your last job. However, I doubt that everyone you interview is actually that familiar with Rai

by Aunche 2y ago

This may work out great if you happen to have worked on Rails for your last job. However, I doubt that everyone you interview is actually that familiar with Rails but rather is pursuing any sort of opportunity that they can get. In that case, they would actually more time to brush up multiple different tech stacks than simply on algorithms.

angoragoats 2y ago
In that case, the interview question is working as intended. For most of our roles, we want several years of Rails experience, and we are clear about that fact in the job listing. If someone applies without Rails experience, they either didn't read the job listing, or are desperate to find any job. While I empathize with folks in the latter situation, our positions really do require the experience, and the job market isn't so bad right now that a smart candidate should be going a long time without finding something. If you happen to have Rails experience but it was several jobs ago, the task we give you is basic enough that you should be able to Google what you need during the task to refresh your memory fairly quickly. In fact, I did this when I applied, having not worked with Rails in a number of years. Edit: My main point is, even if you technically do have to "study" (really, just Google a few basic Rails concepts) if you're rusty, everything you do is preparing you for the actual job. Studying how to implement a hashmap, or computing the longest palindrome from a string of characters, or whatever other harebrained problem FAANG etc want to ask, is 99% of the time not really helping you prepare for those jobs.
- emodendroket 2y ago
  This leaves those who don’t wish to limit their candidate pool by previous stack experience with no option.
  - angoragoats 2y ago
    No, it doesn’t. I was just giving an example from personal experience. For any given job, I believe there’s a way to design an assessment that allows the candidate to demonstrate skills directly relevant to the job, even if the job doesn’t have requirements that are as specific as “Rails developer with a few years of experience.” I have yet to see a single job listing in several decades in the industry where I think to myself “ah yes, the only way to find qualified candidates for the job would be to ask them to implement a quadtree.”
    - emodendroket 2y ago
      I've done a lot of whiteboarding interviews in my life and it's never been "implement a quadtree." It's always, at its core, a small coding probably that could plausibly be part of a real-world problem, and therefore it is directly relevant to the job.
      - angoragoats 2y ago
        I've also never been asked a question like this, but it's because I specifically avoid the companies that are known to ask them. Sounds like you have as well (knowingly or not). But the OP is about LeetCode-style interviews, so that's what I was discussing.
        emodendroket 2y ago
        No, I've been applying to companies all-in on the "leetcode" style of testing and I think you are misconstruing it.
        angoragoats 2y ago
        Are you claiming that no company asks irrelevant leetcode-style questions as part of its interview process? If so, that’ll require some more evidence than “well, I haven’t been asked any such questions.”
        emodendroket 2y ago
        I'm rejecting your characterization of "leetcode-style" questions as 1) irrelevant 2) primarily about simply implementing some obscure data structure (as opposed to correctly using data structures).
        angoragoats 2y ago
        I'm sorry if I wasn't clear; I didn't mean to say that all LC questions are irrelevant. I was just asking if you're claiming that no company uses LC questions which are irrelevant. Because if you are, that seems like a pretty difficult claim to prove given all the stories out there on every company review/discussion site like Blind or Glassdoor. And my "implement a quadtree" example was hyperbole; again I'm sorry if you didn't recognize it as such. I do suspect we have wildly different definitons of what questions qualify as "relevant to the position," though, so I'm not sure how far we're going to get in this discussion.

by Aunche 2y ago

angoragoats 2y ago

In that case, the interview question is working as intended. For most of our roles, we want several years of Rails experience, and we are clear about that fact in the job listing. If someone applies without Rails experience, they either didn't read the job listing, or are desperate to find any job. While I empathize with folks in the latter situation, our positions really do require the experience, and the job market isn't so bad right now that a smart candidate should be going a long time without finding something. If you happen to have Rails experience but it was several jobs ago, the task we give you is basic enough that you should be able to Google what you need during the task to refresh your memory fairly quickly. In fact, I did this when I applied, having not worked with Rails in a number of years. Edit: My main point is, even if you technically do have to "study" (really, just Google a few basic Rails concepts) if you're rusty, everything you do is preparing you for the actual job. Studying how to implement a hashmap, or computing the longest palindrome from a string of characters, or whatever other harebrained problem FAANG etc want to ask, is 99% of the time not really helping you prepare for those jobs.

emodendroket 2y ago
This leaves those who don’t wish to limit their candidate pool by previous stack experience with no option.
- angoragoats 2y ago
  No, it doesn’t. I was just giving an example from personal experience. For any given job, I believe there’s a way to design an assessment that allows the candidate to demonstrate skills directly relevant to the job, even if the job doesn’t have requirements that are as specific as “Rails developer with a few years of experience.” I have yet to see a single job listing in several decades in the industry where I think to myself “ah yes, the only way to find qualified candidates for the job would be to ask them to implement a quadtree.”
  - emodendroket 2y ago
    I've done a lot of whiteboarding interviews in my life and it's never been "implement a quadtree." It's always, at its core, a small coding probably that could plausibly be part of a real-world problem, and therefore it is directly relevant to the job.
    - angoragoats 2y ago
      I've also never been asked a question like this, but it's because I specifically avoid the companies that are known to ask them. Sounds like you have as well (knowingly or not). But the OP is about LeetCode-style interviews, so that's what I was discussing.
      - emodendroket 2y ago
        No, I've been applying to companies all-in on the "leetcode" style of testing and I think you are misconstruing it.
        angoragoats 2y ago
        Are you claiming that no company asks irrelevant leetcode-style questions as part of its interview process? If so, that’ll require some more evidence than “well, I haven’t been asked any such questions.”
        emodendroket 2y ago
        I'm rejecting your characterization of "leetcode-style" questions as 1) irrelevant 2) primarily about simply implementing some obscure data structure (as opposed to correctly using data structures).
        angoragoats 2y ago
        I'm sorry if I wasn't clear; I didn't mean to say that all LC questions are irrelevant. I was just asking if you're claiming that no company uses LC questions which are irrelevant. Because if you are, that seems like a pretty difficult claim to prove given all the stories out there on every company review/discussion site like Blind or Glassdoor. And my "implement a quadtree" example was hyperbole; again I'm sorry if you didn't recognize it as such. I do suspect we have wildly different definitons of what questions qualify as "relevant to the position," though, so I'm not sure how far we're going to get in this discussion.