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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 program
by 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 agoA) 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 agoit’s not a good thing to refuse to hire older people and most older people do not pass leetcode without significant grinding
- randomgiy3142 2y agoYeah 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 agoI don't think replacing an interview that fails older people that instead fails younger people is a good solution.
- lmz 2y agoI thought the point of affirmative action was that being unfair is ok if it is to compensate for a prior unfairness.
- saagarjha 2y agoWe 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 agoWhat do you think is a good solution?
- bluGill 2y agoNumber one: there is research on how to interview find it and read it. All comments I've seen here give no indication that the commenter is even aware of it. I'm aware the research exists, but I have not read it (my company trained me in interviewing, and the class mentioned research but I haven't checked to see if it is the latest research that I'm trained in) If the above doesn't answer your question, then different questions for different levels. You should know if you are hiring a junior, mid, or senior engineer. (you may have different levels), and ask them different questions.
- strken 2y agoI agree. It's not a good idea to refuse to hire either young or old candidates. It's also not a good idea to refuse to hire experienced or inexperienced candidates. These candidates have, as groups, different characteristic strengths and weaknesses. You need to give them multiple tests to see those. Leetcode is not a good test, but you do have to test a new grad on something, which might mean a vaguely leetcode-adjacent test like "go print this json tree of directories to the console then tell me what you did in your third year of uni".
- cjblomqvist 2y agoJust 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 agoThe real reason is you can pay them less and they'll put up with more BS.
- bluGill 2y agoYou 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 agoDo 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 agoFor 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 agoSometimes you want to hire for a potential, as opposed to just experience, sometimes, the reverse. It depends what you're optimizing for.