10 ms·

Nowadays I am on the other part of the fence, I am the interviewer. We are not a FAANG, so we just use a SANE interview process. Single interview, we ask the ca

Nowadays I am on the other part of the fence, I am the interviewer. We are not a FAANG, so we just use a SANE interview process. Single interview, we ask the candidate about his CV and what his expectations are, what are his competences and we ask him to show us some code he has written. That's all. The process is fast and extremely effective. You can discriminate week candidates in minutes.

FirmwareBurner 2y ago
>we ask him to show us some code he has written How do you expect them to get access to the property internal Git repo codebase and approval from their employer's lawyers to show it to third parties during the interview? Sounds like you're only selecting Foss devs and nothing more.
- ramon156 2y ago
  Most people have still written code for school or a hobby project. Maybe I'm missing empathy, but I cannot understand how some developers have no code to show. If that's the case however, just let them make a small project over the weekend and then do another interview where you ask stuff about what they've made. It's not that deep
  - solumos 2y ago
    I don't code much outside of work. I have hobby projects from 10+ years ago, but they're not much more than landing pages copied from templates and wordpress installs. I mostly work in backend/data/platform engineering professionally. If I were asked to make a small project over a weekend, I'd be likely to decline rather than doing a more standard interview, or I'd use AI to do it in a reasonable timeframe (which seems to defeat the purpose as it relates to this discussion)
    - noirbot 2y ago
      This points to another issue - when I do code outside of work, it's often specifically to try out things I don't do at work. After a day of doing backend work, I'll maybe put together a basic web UI for something. That code is likely awful because I just need it to be functional more than good, and also probably not related to the work I'd be hired to do. My most recent real "side projects" are a terrible OSS monte carlo simulator tool that I contributed to, but cannot explain most of the code for, and a half-working React application that has performance issues I never fixed. Both are years old at this point. I'm not sure what an interviewer would gain from those.
      - tempoponet 2y ago
        This relates to another issue of using people's public github as a hiring signal. I don't share any of these repos because at a glance the code is ugly, broken, incomplete. Below the surface, I'm probably scratching a very interesting itch. Exploring a specific idea or problem, and then I stop when I get my answer.
  - FirmwareBurner 2y ago
    Who are these "most people"? School was over 10 years ago for me when schoolwork was not posted on GitHub nor is it relevant to my current job anymore, and I don't do hobby coding since I have other hobbies and responsibilities. WTF is this hobby coding bullshit expectations? What other professions expect you do more work after work as a hobby and show it? Do bus drivers film themselves driving busses after work as a hobby? Do surgeons cut up people in their spare time as a hobby?
    - realharo 2y ago
      The amount of time people spend grinding leetcode instead (if you believe what they say about it online) is just as much or more.
      - FirmwareBurner 2y ago
        Those are bubbles. I am aware such people exist but nobody I know grinds leetcode or does hobby programing.
        alabastervlog 2y ago
        It's that trimodal-comp thing. The 6-hour leetcode gauntlet is only the overwhelming norm in the top hump of that graph. It's not normal in the other two (not that it's never seen, but the companies dumb enough to do it without offering FAANG-tier comp are shooting themselves in the foot). I've had, IDK, ten plus tech jobs and have been solidly in the middle comp tier for most of those, and have exactly once encountered anything resembling a leetcode question in the wild. I've also done hiring, and have no idea what good leetcode would do me. I'm convinced these people thinking they "dodged a bullet" on "fakers" either spotted a real faker who they would have caught with a normal conversation anyway, or else are assuming someone with a good resume who failed their test did so because they were lying and not because they choked under the unique sort of pressure interviews present when you turn them into a dancing-monkey routine (it's approximately the same kind of stress as doing an open mic night or karaoke in front of a crowd of strangers—most people have trouble with that and lots of them fall apart at least some of the times they try it). Meanwhile, anyone who can talk about the job and their career in any depth, convincingly, without giving away that they're actually either very-green or have no idea what they're doing, while in fact not knowing how to do the job, possesses a skill at least as valuable as programming, and I find it hard to believe most such folks haven't figured out they can apply that skill directly in exchange for money instead of trying to fake their way through conversational tech interviews. I do see how leetcode is valuable if you want to ensure that most of the candidates in your pipeline would do fine before you even evaluate them, because you offer high comp and need a way to discourage candidates who definitely can't make it before they even apply, and/or if you want to make job-hopping painful as a wink-and-nudge collusion way to keep comp suppressed. It makes sense for FAANG, in a certain way, but not because it's a good way to evaluate candidates per se.
  - aleph_minus_one 2y ago
    > Most people have still written code for school or a hobby project. Maybe I'm missing empathy, but I cannot understand how some developers have no code to show. First: they might have private code, but not necessarily code to show (I, for example, am rather not willing to show quite some of the code that I wrote privately). Second: the kind of "code" that I tend to write privately (and into which I invest quite a lot of time) is really different from what I do at work, and what is actually considered "code" by many. It's more like (very incomplete) drawings and TeX notes about observations and proofs of properties and symmetries between some algorithms. Once finished, they will be very easy to systematically transform into a program in a computer language. This is about very novel stuff, which to explain would take quite a lot of time.
    - zemvpferreira 2y ago
      The objective in an interview like this shouldn't be to grade the quality of the code you bring in any sort of scale, but to have a discussion about the options you took. In that sense, it really matters very little what you present as long as we can do a small back-and-forth that lets me into what sort of person you are.
      - aleph_minus_one 2y ago
        > but to have a discussion about the options you took I can clearly state that this is not I commonly think about code that I write privately (and also for code that I write for the job only if I must). For private code, I rather commonly start with a "gut feeling" about some unexpected symmetry that the problem that I am working on likely has, then try to formulate these "gut feelings" as mathematical properties, and later theorems. At the end, everything "fits (for outsiders: unexpectly) together". Thus, there is hardly ever a "option that I took", but rather a "I let everything flow: from the source [my gut feeling] to the sea [which is - ironically - the source (code)]".
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    I’ve been working professionally for almost 30 years. I have never written a single line of code “for fun”. I write code for money. I then take that money to fund my hobbies. The absolutely last thing I want to do when I get off work is stare at a computer. If I already have a job, unless you are paying top of market, why would I spend my weekend writing code?
    - idispatch 2y ago
      It looks like you professionally sold 30 years of your life for money with no fun. You could have done something for fun all this time, and got payed for it, too. Much better that way.
      - scarface_74 2y ago
        I did no such thing, I spent the first 15 years as a part time fitness instructor mostly for the social aspect, hanging out with friends and training for and doing group runs and a little travel. I spent the next 8 years married (still married) and raising two step sons and spent the last two and half years traveling extensively including over a year doing the “digital nomad thing”. We have been averaging getting on a plane to do something on average over a dozen times a year since late 2021. Of course the Covid lockdown slowed us down for two years. When I am at home in Florida, I go swimming at one of the multiple pools or workout at one of the two gyms that’s part of our complex. It’s warm enough most of the year at least during the day. During the weekends, I go downstairs and hang out at the bar and just sip soda while hanging out with my friend the bartender and whoever else is down there. I “retired my wife” in 2020 when I was 46 and she was 44 8 years into my marriage so she could pursue her passion projects and we could pick up and travel as often as we wanted to - the joys of working remotely.
        adastra22 2y ago
        Great for you. You are almost certainly not the type of candidate these companies are looking for.
  - dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
    >Maybe I'm missing empathy, Worse actually. There is more to life than code - unless you are a savant. Most of us aren't. But it is the way you are, you probably know no better and you are doing your best, what you can do is to refuse to interview.
  - user99999999 2y ago
    Please share your GitHub @
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    School was a few decades ago, and the code I have on Github is mostly toy stuff I do in rainy weekends, most of us have a life without room to code outside work most of the time. Friends, family, stuff to take care of.
    - dingnuts 2y ago
      So? That's all that's on our Githubs, too. Show us, talk about it. Let us see we're the same.
      - pjmlp 2y ago
        I am lucky, that closing 50 years old, still get to code out of work. Not everyone gets to do so.
  - mr_toad 2y ago
    I’ve written code for hobby projects. It’s mostly HTML, JavaScript and Bash. I’m a data engineer, so at work I mostly use SQL, Python and Bash. There’s not much overlap.
  - williamdclt 2y ago
    > Most people have still written code for school or a hobby project School was years and years ago, and has nothing to do with my current skills. From the people i personally know, most do _not_ have a hobby project, even fewer have hobby projects that showcases their technical skills. Nor should they be expected to. Most people have non-programming hobbies. > I cannot understand how some developers have no code to show. It's really not that deep, I'm worried if you really cannot understand. I don't code outside of work, I'm not interested in doing it. I'm good at software engineering, not passionate about it. I have a bunch of other hobbies. There's no reason I'd have any code to show now or at any point in the future. > let them make a small project over the weekend and then do another interview where you ask stuff about what they've made If I'm paid for it, sure why not I could do that. I won't love it but hey I'm looking for a job, I'll put the legwork in. But if this is the only or the "preferred" interview process for a company, I need to point out that it is deeply discriminatory as it advantages people who have the time to do a weekend project: for example it benefits males disproportionally (women do most of the care work in any country, also the most house work, also have a higher chance to be a single parent, all of which impacts the time they can put in a "weekend project" if they can do it at all).
    - ryandrake 2y ago
      > It's really not that deep, I'm worried if you really cannot understand. I don't code outside of work, I'm not interested in doing it. I'm good at software engineering, not passionate about it. I have a bunch of other hobbies. There's no reason I'd have any code to show now or at any point in the future. It's like asking a dentist interview candidate to show you examples of fillings and crowns they did at home as a hobby. I don't understand why there is this automatic assumption that people who program at work also do it outside of work.
      - cess11 2y ago
        I ask for code, and if they have none prepared I ask that they spend at most two hours building something they enjoy. I expect a decent developer to be able to bootstrap and write most of a fun toy project in a domain they know well or at worst some kata from the Internet within half an hour. Then we spend some time screen sharing and talking about it, similar to pair programming but less problem focused. If you can't do it you'll likely struggle a lot when working with us because we commonly use throwaway prototypes.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - justin_oaks 2y ago
    Like many of the other commenters, I have no code to show. I'm strongly motivated at work to solve problems and create correct, performant, maintainable code. I appreciate a job well done. Outside of work, I just don't have the motivation to code anything. I don't have sufficient at-home problems where code will fix them. In an interview, ask me anything! ... except to show you code on Github.
  - acheron 2y ago
    School? You want to see my 1999 Java code? I’ll go dig out the 3.5 floppy for you.
  - apocalyptic0n3 2y ago
    I started writing code when I was 12 and started doing it professionally at 22. I'm now in my mid-30s and outside of work, I haven't written anything more than one-off scripts for my homelab in close to a decade. I'm already spending upwards of 50 hours with code each week and I need to do something else at night and on the weekends to release my brain from it. I also didn't go to school for CS, and even if I did... it was over a decade ago. So I have ~25 years of experience writing code but could not show you a single line of it. And even if I could, how would you know I was the one to write it? This is an extremely flawed interview process in my opinion and the last time I encountered it led to an awkward scenario that led to me walking out. Personally, when I conduct interviews, it's a mix of things. We talk about your past work, I quiz you a bit on some topics you'd encounter in your day-to-day here, and then we'll spend an hour doing some combination of a code review of a working-but-flawed demo project I created, a 30-40 minute coding exercise, and/or a problem-solving scenario where I give you a problem and then we talk through how, as a pair, how we could solve it.
- ttyprintk 2y ago
  Maybe you forked a library because of reasons. You can tour the original repo and explain the problems. I have at least one of those examples for each time the legal or confidentiality department stepped in.
  - FirmwareBurner 2y ago
    >Maybe The word maybe is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. What if you never had to do that? Not everyone's work is public. Inf act I'd say most people's work is not public. Sometimes even the product is not public since it's B-2-B.
    - ttyprintk 2y ago
      But if you’ve worked on something mature and nontrivial, you’ve forked a dependency and are able to tour it. Looks like I’ve done it on average twice per year.
      - LPisGood 2y ago
        I’ve worked on a piece of software you have at least heard of, probably used, and it is so far from publicly available it’s funny.
      - FirmwareBurner 2y ago
        I never had to for anything public.
- user99999999 2y ago
  My worst code is always what I wrote yesterday. Often what’s missing is context, unless I comment ad nauseam. Sure I didn’t write complete test, obey open closed principles abstract into factory functions. The code I send from my hobby projects is likely a mess, because finishing on my own time by my own unpaid constraints wills it to be so
_the_inflator 2y ago
Do you reevaluate them in predetermined intervals to see how your initial expectation matches the outcome?
- itomato 2y ago
  With each Sprint, presumably.
Clubber 2y ago
We do this too, works fine. We ask open ended questions like, "What's your favorite thing you've done in your career and why?" and "What was the most challenging project in your career and why?" If you listen, you can get a lot of insight from just those two questions. If they don't give enough detail, we'll probe a little. Our "gotcha," which doesn't apply to most languages anymore is, "What's the difference between a function and a procedure." It's a one sentence answer, but people who didn't know it would give some pretty enlightening answers. Edit: From the replies I can see people are a little defensive about not knowing it. Not knowing it is ok because it was a question I asked people 20 years ago relevant to a language long dead in the US. I blame the defensiveness on how FUBAR the current landscape is. Giving a nuanced answer to show your depth of knowledge is actually preferred. A once sentence answer is minimal. I'm editing this because HN says I'm posting too fast, which is super annoying, but what can I do?
- bdavisx 2y ago
  Here's an interesting thought on your "gotcha" - I'm 57 years old, been programming as a career for over 30 years, a lot of languages and I have no idea what the difference is.
  - Clubber 2y ago
    A function returns a value. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/721090/what-is-the-difference-between-a-function-and-a-procedure https://stackoverflow.com/questions/721090/what-is-the-diffe...
    - aleph_minus_one 2y ago
      > A function returns a value ... in Pascal/Delphi.
      - Clubber 2y ago
        Yup, it was for a Delphi job in 1998.
masterj 2y ago
> Single interview, we ask the candidate about *his* CV and what *his* expectations are, what are *his* competences and we ask *him* to show us some code *he* has written You... might want to think about what implicit biases you might be bringing here
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
downrightmike 2y ago
*weak
mparnisari 2y ago
That process might work for your company precisely because you are not FAANG. You don't get hundreds of applicants that are dying to get in, so people don't have that strong of a motivation to do anything it takes (including lying) to get the job.
- adastra22 2y ago
  I’ve worked at a company with 150,000 employees. The interview process was pretty much as described here. There is absolutely no reason a Big Co needs to operate any differently.

FirmwareBurner 2y ago

>we ask him to show us some code he has written How do you expect them to get access to the property internal Git repo codebase and approval from their employer's lawyers to show it to third parties during the interview? Sounds like you're only selecting Foss devs and nothing more.

ramon156 2y ago
Most people have still written code for school or a hobby project. Maybe I'm missing empathy, but I cannot understand how some developers have no code to show. If that's the case however, just let them make a small project over the weekend and then do another interview where you ask stuff about what they've made. It's not that deep
- solumos 2y ago
  I don't code much outside of work. I have hobby projects from 10+ years ago, but they're not much more than landing pages copied from templates and wordpress installs. I mostly work in backend/data/platform engineering professionally. If I were asked to make a small project over a weekend, I'd be likely to decline rather than doing a more standard interview, or I'd use AI to do it in a reasonable timeframe (which seems to defeat the purpose as it relates to this discussion)
  - noirbot 2y ago
    This points to another issue - when I do code outside of work, it's often specifically to try out things I don't do at work. After a day of doing backend work, I'll maybe put together a basic web UI for something. That code is likely awful because I just need it to be functional more than good, and also probably not related to the work I'd be hired to do. My most recent real "side projects" are a terrible OSS monte carlo simulator tool that I contributed to, but cannot explain most of the code for, and a half-working React application that has performance issues I never fixed. Both are years old at this point. I'm not sure what an interviewer would gain from those.
    - tempoponet 2y ago
      This relates to another issue of using people's public github as a hiring signal. I don't share any of these repos because at a glance the code is ugly, broken, incomplete. Below the surface, I'm probably scratching a very interesting itch. Exploring a specific idea or problem, and then I stop when I get my answer.
- FirmwareBurner 2y ago
  Who are these "most people"? School was over 10 years ago for me when schoolwork was not posted on GitHub nor is it relevant to my current job anymore, and I don't do hobby coding since I have other hobbies and responsibilities. WTF is this hobby coding bullshit expectations? What other professions expect you do more work after work as a hobby and show it? Do bus drivers film themselves driving busses after work as a hobby? Do surgeons cut up people in their spare time as a hobby?
  - realharo 2y ago
    The amount of time people spend grinding leetcode instead (if you believe what they say about it online) is just as much or more.
    - FirmwareBurner 2y ago
      Those are bubbles. I am aware such people exist but nobody I know grinds leetcode or does hobby programing.
      - alabastervlog 2y ago
        It's that trimodal-comp thing. The 6-hour leetcode gauntlet is only the overwhelming norm in the top hump of that graph. It's not normal in the other two (not that it's never seen, but the companies dumb enough to do it without offering FAANG-tier comp are shooting themselves in the foot). I've had, IDK, ten plus tech jobs and have been solidly in the middle comp tier for most of those, and have exactly once encountered anything resembling a leetcode question in the wild. I've also done hiring, and have no idea what good leetcode would do me. I'm convinced these people thinking they "dodged a bullet" on "fakers" either spotted a real faker who they would have caught with a normal conversation anyway, or else are assuming someone with a good resume who failed their test did so because they were lying and not because they choked under the unique sort of pressure interviews present when you turn them into a dancing-monkey routine (it's approximately the same kind of stress as doing an open mic night or karaoke in front of a crowd of strangers—most people have trouble with that and lots of them fall apart at least some of the times they try it). Meanwhile, anyone who can talk about the job and their career in any depth, convincingly, without giving away that they're actually either very-green or have no idea what they're doing, while in fact not knowing how to do the job, possesses a skill at least as valuable as programming, and I find it hard to believe most such folks haven't figured out they can apply that skill directly in exchange for money instead of trying to fake their way through conversational tech interviews. I do see how leetcode is valuable if you want to ensure that most of the candidates in your pipeline would do fine before you even evaluate them, because you offer high comp and need a way to discourage candidates who definitely can't make it before they even apply, and/or if you want to make job-hopping painful as a wink-and-nudge collusion way to keep comp suppressed. It makes sense for FAANG, in a certain way, but not because it's a good way to evaluate candidates per se.
- aleph_minus_one 2y ago
  > Most people have still written code for school or a hobby project. Maybe I'm missing empathy, but I cannot understand how some developers have no code to show. First: they might have private code, but not necessarily code to show (I, for example, am rather not willing to show quite some of the code that I wrote privately). Second: the kind of "code" that I tend to write privately (and into which I invest quite a lot of time) is really different from what I do at work, and what is actually considered "code" by many. It's more like (very incomplete) drawings and TeX notes about observations and proofs of properties and symmetries between some algorithms. Once finished, they will be very easy to systematically transform into a program in a computer language. This is about very novel stuff, which to explain would take quite a lot of time.
  - zemvpferreira 2y ago
    The objective in an interview like this shouldn't be to grade the quality of the code you bring in any sort of scale, but to have a discussion about the options you took. In that sense, it really matters very little what you present as long as we can do a small back-and-forth that lets me into what sort of person you are.
    - aleph_minus_one 2y ago
      > but to have a discussion about the options you took I can clearly state that this is not I commonly think about code that I write privately (and also for code that I write for the job only if I must). For private code, I rather commonly start with a "gut feeling" about some unexpected symmetry that the problem that I am working on likely has, then try to formulate these "gut feelings" as mathematical properties, and later theorems. At the end, everything "fits (for outsiders: unexpectly) together". Thus, there is hardly ever a "option that I took", but rather a "I let everything flow: from the source [my gut feeling] to the sea [which is - ironically - the source (code)]".
- scarface_74 2y ago
  I’ve been working professionally for almost 30 years. I have never written a single line of code “for fun”. I write code for money. I then take that money to fund my hobbies. The absolutely last thing I want to do when I get off work is stare at a computer. If I already have a job, unless you are paying top of market, why would I spend my weekend writing code?
  - idispatch 2y ago
    It looks like you professionally sold 30 years of your life for money with no fun. You could have done something for fun all this time, and got payed for it, too. Much better that way.
    - scarface_74 2y ago
      I did no such thing, I spent the first 15 years as a part time fitness instructor mostly for the social aspect, hanging out with friends and training for and doing group runs and a little travel. I spent the next 8 years married (still married) and raising two step sons and spent the last two and half years traveling extensively including over a year doing the “digital nomad thing”. We have been averaging getting on a plane to do something on average over a dozen times a year since late 2021. Of course the Covid lockdown slowed us down for two years. When I am at home in Florida, I go swimming at one of the multiple pools or workout at one of the two gyms that’s part of our complex. It’s warm enough most of the year at least during the day. During the weekends, I go downstairs and hang out at the bar and just sip soda while hanging out with my friend the bartender and whoever else is down there. I “retired my wife” in 2020 when I was 46 and she was 44 8 years into my marriage so she could pursue her passion projects and we could pick up and travel as often as we wanted to - the joys of working remotely.
      - adastra22 2y ago
        Great for you. You are almost certainly not the type of candidate these companies are looking for.
- dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
  >Maybe I'm missing empathy, Worse actually. There is more to life than code - unless you are a savant. Most of us aren't. But it is the way you are, you probably know no better and you are doing your best, what you can do is to refuse to interview.
- user99999999 2y ago
  Please share your GitHub @
- pjmlp 2y ago
  School was a few decades ago, and the code I have on Github is mostly toy stuff I do in rainy weekends, most of us have a life without room to code outside work most of the time. Friends, family, stuff to take care of.
  - dingnuts 2y ago
    So? That's all that's on our Githubs, too. Show us, talk about it. Let us see we're the same.
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      I am lucky, that closing 50 years old, still get to code out of work. Not everyone gets to do so.
- mr_toad 2y ago
  I’ve written code for hobby projects. It’s mostly HTML, JavaScript and Bash. I’m a data engineer, so at work I mostly use SQL, Python and Bash. There’s not much overlap.
- williamdclt 2y ago
  > Most people have still written code for school or a hobby project School was years and years ago, and has nothing to do with my current skills. From the people i personally know, most do _not_ have a hobby project, even fewer have hobby projects that showcases their technical skills. Nor should they be expected to. Most people have non-programming hobbies. > I cannot understand how some developers have no code to show. It's really not that deep, I'm worried if you really cannot understand. I don't code outside of work, I'm not interested in doing it. I'm good at software engineering, not passionate about it. I have a bunch of other hobbies. There's no reason I'd have any code to show now or at any point in the future. > let them make a small project over the weekend and then do another interview where you ask stuff about what they've made If I'm paid for it, sure why not I could do that. I won't love it but hey I'm looking for a job, I'll put the legwork in. But if this is the only or the "preferred" interview process for a company, I need to point out that it is deeply discriminatory as it advantages people who have the time to do a weekend project: for example it benefits males disproportionally (women do most of the care work in any country, also the most house work, also have a higher chance to be a single parent, all of which impacts the time they can put in a "weekend project" if they can do it at all).
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    > It's really not that deep, I'm worried if you really cannot understand. I don't code outside of work, I'm not interested in doing it. I'm good at software engineering, not passionate about it. I have a bunch of other hobbies. There's no reason I'd have any code to show now or at any point in the future. It's like asking a dentist interview candidate to show you examples of fillings and crowns they did at home as a hobby. I don't understand why there is this automatic assumption that people who program at work also do it outside of work.
    - cess11 2y ago
      I ask for code, and if they have none prepared I ask that they spend at most two hours building something they enjoy. I expect a decent developer to be able to bootstrap and write most of a fun toy project in a domain they know well or at worst some kata from the Internet within half an hour. Then we spend some time screen sharing and talking about it, similar to pair programming but less problem focused. If you can't do it you'll likely struggle a lot when working with us because we commonly use throwaway prototypes.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- justin_oaks 2y ago
  Like many of the other commenters, I have no code to show. I'm strongly motivated at work to solve problems and create correct, performant, maintainable code. I appreciate a job well done. Outside of work, I just don't have the motivation to code anything. I don't have sufficient at-home problems where code will fix them. In an interview, ask me anything! ... except to show you code on Github.
- acheron 2y ago
  School? You want to see my 1999 Java code? I’ll go dig out the 3.5 floppy for you.
- apocalyptic0n3 2y ago
  I started writing code when I was 12 and started doing it professionally at 22. I'm now in my mid-30s and outside of work, I haven't written anything more than one-off scripts for my homelab in close to a decade. I'm already spending upwards of 50 hours with code each week and I need to do something else at night and on the weekends to release my brain from it. I also didn't go to school for CS, and even if I did... it was over a decade ago. So I have ~25 years of experience writing code but could not show you a single line of it. And even if I could, how would you know I was the one to write it? This is an extremely flawed interview process in my opinion and the last time I encountered it led to an awkward scenario that led to me walking out. Personally, when I conduct interviews, it's a mix of things. We talk about your past work, I quiz you a bit on some topics you'd encounter in your day-to-day here, and then we'll spend an hour doing some combination of a code review of a working-but-flawed demo project I created, a 30-40 minute coding exercise, and/or a problem-solving scenario where I give you a problem and then we talk through how, as a pair, how we could solve it.
ttyprintk 2y ago
Maybe you forked a library because of reasons. You can tour the original repo and explain the problems. I have at least one of those examples for each time the legal or confidentiality department stepped in.
- FirmwareBurner 2y ago
  >Maybe The word maybe is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. What if you never had to do that? Not everyone's work is public. Inf act I'd say most people's work is not public. Sometimes even the product is not public since it's B-2-B.
  - ttyprintk 2y ago
    But if you’ve worked on something mature and nontrivial, you’ve forked a dependency and are able to tour it. Looks like I’ve done it on average twice per year.
    - LPisGood 2y ago
      I’ve worked on a piece of software you have at least heard of, probably used, and it is so far from publicly available it’s funny.
    - FirmwareBurner 2y ago
      I never had to for anything public.
user99999999 2y ago
My worst code is always what I wrote yesterday. Often what’s missing is context, unless I comment ad nauseam. Sure I didn’t write complete test, obey open closed principles abstract into factory functions. The code I send from my hobby projects is likely a mess, because finishing on my own time by my own unpaid constraints wills it to be so

_the_inflator 2y ago

Do you reevaluate them in predetermined intervals to see how your initial expectation matches the outcome?

itomato 2y ago
With each Sprint, presumably.

Clubber 2y ago

We do this too, works fine. We ask open ended questions like, "What's your favorite thing you've done in your career and why?" and "What was the most challenging project in your career and why?" If you listen, you can get a lot of insight from just those two questions. If they don't give enough detail, we'll probe a little. Our "gotcha," which doesn't apply to most languages anymore is, "What's the difference between a function and a procedure." It's a one sentence answer, but people who didn't know it would give some pretty enlightening answers. Edit: From the replies I can see people are a little defensive about not knowing it. Not knowing it is ok because it was a question I asked people 20 years ago relevant to a language long dead in the US. I blame the defensiveness on how FUBAR the current landscape is. Giving a nuanced answer to show your depth of knowledge is actually preferred. A once sentence answer is minimal. I'm editing this because HN says I'm posting too fast, which is super annoying, but what can I do?

bdavisx 2y ago
Here's an interesting thought on your "gotcha" - I'm 57 years old, been programming as a career for over 30 years, a lot of languages and I have no idea what the difference is.
- Clubber 2y ago
  A function returns a value. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/721090/what-is-the-difference-between-a-function-and-a-procedure https://stackoverflow.com/questions/721090/what-is-the-diffe...
  - aleph_minus_one 2y ago
    > A function returns a value ... in Pascal/Delphi.
    - Clubber 2y ago
      Yup, it was for a Delphi job in 1998.

masterj 2y ago

> Single interview, we ask the candidate about *his* CV and what *his* expectations are, what are *his* competences and we ask *him* to show us some code *he* has written You... might want to think about what implicit biases you might be bringing here

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

downrightmike 2y ago

*weak

mparnisari 2y ago

That process might work for your company precisely because you are not FAANG. You don't get hundreds of applicants that are dying to get in, so people don't have that strong of a motivation to do anything it takes (including lying) to get the job.

adastra22 2y ago
I’ve worked at a company with 150,000 employees. The interview process was pretty much as described here. There is absolutely no reason a Big Co needs to operate any differently.