3 ms·

I agree 100%. There seems to be 2 camps when it comes to what makes a programmer great: aptitude versus domain knowledge. I think both are important but aptitud

by garretr 14y ago

I agree 100%. There seems to be 2 camps when it comes to what makes a programmer great: aptitude versus domain knowledge. I think both are important but aptitude is harder to train someone on. I'm a big proponent of tough, small problems in an interview, that the candidate has never seen before. Much like the author is against. This is because it has been the best indicator of performance in my experience.

Cookingboy 14y ago
The author is not against small, tough problems, by all means a well designed generic programming question that doesn't tie in to any specific domain knowledge can be a great test. What the author was against are the riddles, which are proven to be ineffective in determining the general aptitude of the engineers, and that's why the companies that used to use them (MS and Google, for example) have mostly banned those.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  I guess the question is, how do you design a programming problem that doesn't tie into specific domain knowledge? Even fairly general stuff like implementing balanced search trees will likely be biased towards younger candidates who are fresh from university.
  - Cookingboy 14y ago
    You can still do it, it doesn't have to involve a complicated CS topics such as self-balancing trees or graph theories or anything, but I've seen plenty of good algorithm questions that the solution involve nothing more than understanding of Strings and for-loops. You can also test the interviewee's knowledge of Big-O, time efficiency vs space efficiency, etc without going into obscure data structures.
    - jiggy2011 14y ago
      Big O would be something I was much more familiar with out of university, although I could probably muddle through some basic questions around it. For loops that manipulate strings in various ways however is probably something that most programmers will have wrestled with reasonably regularly I imagine.
- hackinthebochs 14y ago
  From reading the blog post the author does in-fact seem to be against challenging coding problems. Note that the examples given as good questions where all general that didn't require one to demonstrate any actual ability to solve problems by applying algorithms and logic. This is exactly what programming and logic "riddles" are designed to test.

by garretr 14y ago

Cookingboy 14y ago

The author is not against small, tough problems, by all means a well designed generic programming question that doesn't tie in to any specific domain knowledge can be a great test. What the author was against are the riddles, which are proven to be ineffective in determining the general aptitude of the engineers, and that's why the companies that used to use them (MS and Google, for example) have mostly banned those.

jiggy2011 14y ago
I guess the question is, how do you design a programming problem that doesn't tie into specific domain knowledge? Even fairly general stuff like implementing balanced search trees will likely be biased towards younger candidates who are fresh from university.
- Cookingboy 14y ago
  You can still do it, it doesn't have to involve a complicated CS topics such as self-balancing trees or graph theories or anything, but I've seen plenty of good algorithm questions that the solution involve nothing more than understanding of Strings and for-loops. You can also test the interviewee's knowledge of Big-O, time efficiency vs space efficiency, etc without going into obscure data structures.
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    Big O would be something I was much more familiar with out of university, although I could probably muddle through some basic questions around it. For loops that manipulate strings in various ways however is probably something that most programmers will have wrestled with reasonably regularly I imagine.
hackinthebochs 14y ago
From reading the blog post the author does in-fact seem to be against challenging coding problems. Note that the examples given as good questions where all general that didn't require one to demonstrate any actual ability to solve problems by applying algorithms and logic. This is exactly what programming and logic "riddles" are designed to test.