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I understand this sentiment for experienced developers. It is an imperfect signal. But what is in your opinion a better signal for junior or new grads? Every a

by shihab 2y ago

I understand this sentiment for experienced developers. It is an imperfect signal. But what is in your opinion a better signal for junior or new grads? Every alternative I can think of is either worse, or sounds nice but impractical to implement in practice at scale. I don’t know about you, but most interviewers out there don’t have the ability to judge the technical merit of a bullshitters’s contribution to a class or internship project in half an hour, specially if it’s in a domain interviewer has no familiarity with. And by the way, not all of them are completely dumb, they do know computer science, just perhaps not as well as an honest competitor.

johnnyanmac 2y ago
>But what is in your opinion a better signal for junior or new grads? They are juniors, I don't expect them to be experts, I expect eagerness and passion. They spent 4 or more years focusing on schooling, show me the results of your projects. Let them talk and see how well they understand what they did. Side projects are even better to stand out. And you know... apparently people can still fail fizzbuzz in 2025. If you really question their ability to code, ask the basics, not if they can write a Sudoku verifier on the spot. If you aren't a sudoku game studio I don't see the application outside of "can they work with arrays?" >I don’t know about you, but most interviewers out there don’t have the ability to judge the technical merit of a bullshitters’s contribution to a class or internship project in half an hour, specially if it’s in a domain interviewer has no familiarity with. everyone has a different style. Personally I care a lot less about programming proficiency and a lot more about technical communication. If they only wrote 10 lines of code for a group project but can explain every aspect of the project as if they written it themselves, what am I really missing? The odds of that sort of technical reaspning being accompanied by poor coding is a lot rarer than the alternative of a Leetcode wizard who can't grasp architectural concept nor adjust to software tooling, in my experiences.
- vanceism7_ 2y ago
  Yea I totally agree. During one of my interviews, the interviewers asked me to write "snake game" in react. I had spent the last week studying their open source project and learning how things were structured, and then the two part interview consisted of parsing json and outputting it as markdown, and writing snake game. They're weren't a game ship, so it really didn't make any sense that they would've asked about that... It was really lame
the_snooze 2y ago
>But what is in your opinion a better signal for junior or new grads? For students specifically, the strongest signal is if they've done research with a past collaborator of mine and my collaborator vouches for them. It's a great signal because it's very high barrier to entry and absolutely does not scale. Realistically, being able to speak confidently about something they did/built during their education is a decent proxy. If they can handle open-ended follow-up questions like "what did you learn?" and "what trade-offs did you make?" and "how would you tweak it under X different requirements?" then that's a great signal too. These aren't "gotcha" questions, but they insist on the candidate being reasonably competent and (most importantly) an actual human who can think on their feet.

by shihab 2y ago

johnnyanmac 2y ago

>But what is in your opinion a better signal for junior or new grads? They are juniors, I don't expect them to be experts, I expect eagerness and passion. They spent 4 or more years focusing on schooling, show me the results of your projects. Let them talk and see how well they understand what they did. Side projects are even better to stand out. And you know... apparently people can still fail fizzbuzz in 2025. If you really question their ability to code, ask the basics, not if they can write a Sudoku verifier on the spot. If you aren't a sudoku game studio I don't see the application outside of "can they work with arrays?" >I don’t know about you, but most interviewers out there don’t have the ability to judge the technical merit of a bullshitters’s contribution to a class or internship project in half an hour, specially if it’s in a domain interviewer has no familiarity with. everyone has a different style. Personally I care a lot less about programming proficiency and a lot more about technical communication. If they only wrote 10 lines of code for a group project but can explain every aspect of the project as if they written it themselves, what am I really missing? The odds of that sort of technical reaspning being accompanied by poor coding is a lot rarer than the alternative of a Leetcode wizard who can't grasp architectural concept nor adjust to software tooling, in my experiences.

vanceism7_ 2y ago
Yea I totally agree. During one of my interviews, the interviewers asked me to write "snake game" in react. I had spent the last week studying their open source project and learning how things were structured, and then the two part interview consisted of parsing json and outputting it as markdown, and writing snake game. They're weren't a game ship, so it really didn't make any sense that they would've asked about that... It was really lame

the_snooze 2y ago

>But what is in your opinion a better signal for junior or new grads? For students specifically, the strongest signal is if they've done research with a past collaborator of mine and my collaborator vouches for them. It's a great signal because it's very high barrier to entry and absolutely does not scale. Realistically, being able to speak confidently about something they did/built during their education is a decent proxy. If they can handle open-ended follow-up questions like "what did you learn?" and "what trade-offs did you make?" and "how would you tweak it under X different requirements?" then that's a great signal too. These aren't "gotcha" questions, but they insist on the candidate being reasonably competent and (most importantly) an actual human who can think on their feet.