7 ms·

for me cracking the coding interview is stressful i prefer the bug squash question. i have 20 years of experience. i will probably do well. a fresh grad might

by b20000 2y ago

for me cracking the coding interview is stressful i prefer the bug squash question. i have 20 years of experience. i will probably do well. a fresh grad might fail. do i care? no. leetcode has benefited fresh grads and is being used to discriminate against those with anxiety and other disorders and those who are older. i think it is refreshing to try a different interview method, one that benefits those with experience.

ta_1138 2y ago
I administered bug squash questions a few dozen times. Experience definitely trumped the smartest, most prepared young programmers, because no matter how much they studied, they hadn't really faced a real test suite in a large codebase. We had to rate them on a different scale, because otherwise very few of them passed.
- b20000 2y ago
  why do young programmers need to pass? nobody gives a shit whether experienced people pass leetcode so give me one good reason why you should rate young programmers differently.
  - strken 2y ago
    A) I, and a lot of other people, do give a shit whether experienced candidates pass leetcode, and try not to give leetcode interviews unless forced to by HR fiat B) As an industry and as a society, it's not a good thing to refuse to hire new grads, since that leads to the kind of labour shortages we see in e.g. medicine and pulls up one of the best ladders for wealth mobility. Tech therefore needs some kind of funnel to evaluate candidates with less experience. A test that almost none of them can pass is not very useful for evaluation purposes
    - b20000 2y ago
      it’s not a good thing to refuse to hire older people and most older people do not pass leetcode without significant grinding
      - randomgiy3142 2y ago
        Yeah my first response to 99% of these kind of interview questions is why? I look at ROI and how working code impacts budget and investment. It pains me to say it but the biggest companies out there have horrible code in COBOL that frankly doesn’t make sense to change it over. Similarly bug squashing usually is how did it pass QA/static analysis/dev ops.
      - saagarjha 2y ago
        I don't think replacing an interview that fails older people that instead fails younger people is a good solution.
        lmz 2y ago
        I thought the point of affirmative action was that being unfair is ok if it is to compensate for a prior unfairness.
        saagarjha 2y ago
        We don’t typically do affirmative action by picking interview questions that make things harder for some candidates as opposed to others, though. We consider some questions to be easier for, say, men to answer (“tell me about a time you were asked to demonstrate leadership”) but we seek to remove that bias rather than asking questions that solely focus on things that can only be answered by those who experienced bias (e.g. “tell me about a time you experienced racism that affected your work” is not likely to be an interview question).
        lapcat 2y ago
        What do you think is a good solution?
  - cjblomqvist 2y ago
    Just because people in group A are treated badly, that's favoring group B, doesn't mean it's reasonable to do the reverse.
    - mattpallissard 2y ago
      The real reason is you can pay them less and they'll put up with more BS.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    You should have a mix of developers on any project, some senior, some mid level, some fresh out of school. The senior engineers should devote a significant amount of time to improving the junior. Your mix should skew to junior developers just because some developers will decide to switch to management, selling insurance, or some such. Note that I did not say younger - you will get a few "old" people switching to programming as well, and they start off as junior.
    - sqeaky 2y ago
      Do I really want a mix of programmers on my project? That's a very sweeping blanket statement and you're putting a lot of your beliefs on to other people. The smoothest projects I've worked on were always full of nothing but senior developers. But even though that is just my personal experience I know full well many projects benefit from Junior developers. Sometimes fresh perspective and energy are what you want to solve a problem instead of experience and expertise.
      - bluGill 2y ago
        For a short time only senior is better. However eventually someone will leave and it takes time to get the new person up to speed. Your seniors will retire and you need juniors trained up and ready to take over. If you are only a short term next quarter thinker you are right, but if you think long term some juniors that you bring up to senior are the better value. (note that this also requires retention of existing people, if your culture is change the team every project there is no value in this - I'm against such cultures, but it is very common in the real world to not value experience on your project) Of course there is value in bringing in external experts for a short time as well. You don't want to be isolated and not learn from the rest of the world, and of course sometimes you have money for a large project and sometimes you don't and want to fall back the the minimum staff needed to keep institutional knowledge alive. Last, ignoring everything else, you have a moral obligation to society to build a better world. That includes training the next generation. (and this helps you - when you are retired they will be the senior engineers building the tools to keep you alive)
  - javier123454321 2y ago
    Sometimes you want to hire for a potential, as opposed to just experience, sometimes, the reverse. It depends what you're optimizing for.
yonrg 2y ago
What is wrong with capitals?
- b20000 2y ago
  i don’t need them here, i am not writing a book
- ebcode 2y ago
  not wrong per se, but they take longer to type than lowercase
  - johnisgood 2y ago
    Wait, what?
    - saghm 2y ago
      Per letter, capitalization doesn't take much longer, but over the course of an entire sentence or paragraph, having to reach for shift can potentially add up. Sure, it's still small overall, but I think it's reasonable to give the benefit of the doubt to a stranger about whether the extra effort for them to type them is more than the amount of extra effort for you to read it.
      - johnisgood 2y ago
        It doesn't take longer for me as I have both of my hands on my keyboard and I can hold the Shift without any delay (or noticeable delay), simultaneously. You could even use "caps lock" in which case you wouldn't have to use shift at all.
        bluGill 2y ago
        The shift key is an uncomfortable stretch for my fingers. I can do it, but it isn't comfortable.
        deleted 2y ago
mattpallissard 2y ago
I can't speak to anxiety or other disorders but I have a hard time swallowing that leetcode discriminates against the older crowd. I'm not older, but I was in the industry prior to the leetcode style interview. I've never sat down and "grinded" leetcode but I've also never had a problem with those styles of interview once they became common. Neither have my former co-workers. I have a few friends that are still working, past retirement age, that would crush any problem you threw at them. In my experience, it's not much different than the whiteboard interview. Sure the presentation of a problem can stump you for a moment, but with a few good follow up questions a solution, however naive, becomes apparent. I had a mentor early in my career that repeatedly said "There is no such thing as an unsolved problem in computer science". I think that mostly holds true, you either recognize the pattern and implement, or you learn and implement next time. That all said, leetcode style interviews are the interview version of a "bad code smell" and I'd strongly prefer a bug-squash style, even if it was in a completely unfamiliar programming language. Actually, an unfamiliar programming language might make it fun.
- sureglymop 2y ago
  That is your personal anecdote, n=1. Not that your opinion doesn't matter or carry weight, but it doesn't say much more than the comment you replied to.
- protonbob 2y ago
  One reason they can discriminate against the older crowd is that they are hard for people with established jobs and familial responsibilities to study for. Working for a longer period of time leads to more experience bug squashing. Younger developers are much more likely to not have kids and more likely to have time to dedicate to grinding questions while having less experience with "real work" i.e day to day LOB software development that the bug hunt interviews optimize for.
  - sfn42 2y ago
    I think the point is that competent developers can solve the problem on the go. You don't have to study for it. I don't know, maybe some places do have ridiculously hard problems that you just have to memorize the algorithm for, but personally I haven't seen that. It's more like advent of code style stuff that you kind of just figure out by yourself.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

by b20000 2y ago

ta_1138 2y ago

I administered bug squash questions a few dozen times. Experience definitely trumped the smartest, most prepared young programmers, because no matter how much they studied, they hadn't really faced a real test suite in a large codebase. We had to rate them on a different scale, because otherwise very few of them passed.

b20000 2y ago
why do young programmers need to pass? nobody gives a shit whether experienced people pass leetcode so give me one good reason why you should rate young programmers differently.
- strken 2y ago
  A) I, and a lot of other people, do give a shit whether experienced candidates pass leetcode, and try not to give leetcode interviews unless forced to by HR fiat B) As an industry and as a society, it's not a good thing to refuse to hire new grads, since that leads to the kind of labour shortages we see in e.g. medicine and pulls up one of the best ladders for wealth mobility. Tech therefore needs some kind of funnel to evaluate candidates with less experience. A test that almost none of them can pass is not very useful for evaluation purposes
  - b20000 2y ago
    it’s not a good thing to refuse to hire older people and most older people do not pass leetcode without significant grinding
    - randomgiy3142 2y ago
      Yeah my first response to 99% of these kind of interview questions is why? I look at ROI and how working code impacts budget and investment. It pains me to say it but the biggest companies out there have horrible code in COBOL that frankly doesn’t make sense to change it over. Similarly bug squashing usually is how did it pass QA/static analysis/dev ops.
    - saagarjha 2y ago
      I don't think replacing an interview that fails older people that instead fails younger people is a good solution.
      - lmz 2y ago
        I thought the point of affirmative action was that being unfair is ok if it is to compensate for a prior unfairness.
        saagarjha 2y ago
        We don’t typically do affirmative action by picking interview questions that make things harder for some candidates as opposed to others, though. We consider some questions to be easier for, say, men to answer (“tell me about a time you were asked to demonstrate leadership”) but we seek to remove that bias rather than asking questions that solely focus on things that can only be answered by those who experienced bias (e.g. “tell me about a time you experienced racism that affected your work” is not likely to be an interview question).
      - lapcat 2y ago
        What do you think is a good solution?
- cjblomqvist 2y ago
  Just because people in group A are treated badly, that's favoring group B, doesn't mean it's reasonable to do the reverse.
  - mattpallissard 2y ago
    The real reason is you can pay them less and they'll put up with more BS.
- bluGill 2y ago
  You should have a mix of developers on any project, some senior, some mid level, some fresh out of school. The senior engineers should devote a significant amount of time to improving the junior. Your mix should skew to junior developers just because some developers will decide to switch to management, selling insurance, or some such. Note that I did not say younger - you will get a few "old" people switching to programming as well, and they start off as junior.
  - sqeaky 2y ago
    Do I really want a mix of programmers on my project? That's a very sweeping blanket statement and you're putting a lot of your beliefs on to other people. The smoothest projects I've worked on were always full of nothing but senior developers. But even though that is just my personal experience I know full well many projects benefit from Junior developers. Sometimes fresh perspective and energy are what you want to solve a problem instead of experience and expertise.
    - bluGill 2y ago
      For a short time only senior is better. However eventually someone will leave and it takes time to get the new person up to speed. Your seniors will retire and you need juniors trained up and ready to take over. If you are only a short term next quarter thinker you are right, but if you think long term some juniors that you bring up to senior are the better value. (note that this also requires retention of existing people, if your culture is change the team every project there is no value in this - I'm against such cultures, but it is very common in the real world to not value experience on your project) Of course there is value in bringing in external experts for a short time as well. You don't want to be isolated and not learn from the rest of the world, and of course sometimes you have money for a large project and sometimes you don't and want to fall back the the minimum staff needed to keep institutional knowledge alive. Last, ignoring everything else, you have a moral obligation to society to build a better world. That includes training the next generation. (and this helps you - when you are retired they will be the senior engineers building the tools to keep you alive)
- javier123454321 2y ago
  Sometimes you want to hire for a potential, as opposed to just experience, sometimes, the reverse. It depends what you're optimizing for.

yonrg 2y ago

What is wrong with capitals?

b20000 2y ago
i don’t need them here, i am not writing a book
ebcode 2y ago
not wrong per se, but they take longer to type than lowercase
- johnisgood 2y ago
  Wait, what?
  - saghm 2y ago
    Per letter, capitalization doesn't take much longer, but over the course of an entire sentence or paragraph, having to reach for shift can potentially add up. Sure, it's still small overall, but I think it's reasonable to give the benefit of the doubt to a stranger about whether the extra effort for them to type them is more than the amount of extra effort for you to read it.
    - johnisgood 2y ago
      It doesn't take longer for me as I have both of my hands on my keyboard and I can hold the Shift without any delay (or noticeable delay), simultaneously. You could even use "caps lock" in which case you wouldn't have to use shift at all.
      - bluGill 2y ago
        The shift key is an uncomfortable stretch for my fingers. I can do it, but it isn't comfortable.
      - deleted 2y ago

mattpallissard 2y ago

I can't speak to anxiety or other disorders but I have a hard time swallowing that leetcode discriminates against the older crowd. I'm not older, but I was in the industry prior to the leetcode style interview. I've never sat down and "grinded" leetcode but I've also never had a problem with those styles of interview once they became common. Neither have my former co-workers. I have a few friends that are still working, past retirement age, that would crush any problem you threw at them. In my experience, it's not much different than the whiteboard interview. Sure the presentation of a problem can stump you for a moment, but with a few good follow up questions a solution, however naive, becomes apparent. I had a mentor early in my career that repeatedly said "There is no such thing as an unsolved problem in computer science". I think that mostly holds true, you either recognize the pattern and implement, or you learn and implement next time. That all said, leetcode style interviews are the interview version of a "bad code smell" and I'd strongly prefer a bug-squash style, even if it was in a completely unfamiliar programming language. Actually, an unfamiliar programming language might make it fun.

sureglymop 2y ago
That is your personal anecdote, n=1. Not that your opinion doesn't matter or carry weight, but it doesn't say much more than the comment you replied to.
protonbob 2y ago
One reason they can discriminate against the older crowd is that they are hard for people with established jobs and familial responsibilities to study for. Working for a longer period of time leads to more experience bug squashing. Younger developers are much more likely to not have kids and more likely to have time to dedicate to grinding questions while having less experience with "real work" i.e day to day LOB software development that the bug hunt interviews optimize for.
- sfn42 2y ago
  I think the point is that competent developers can solve the problem on the go. You don't have to study for it. I don't know, maybe some places do have ridiculously hard problems that you just have to memorize the algorithm for, but personally I haven't seen that. It's more like advent of code style stuff that you kind of just figure out by yourself.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]