3 ms·

So... you (the writer) have noticed that the more experienced a candidate is, the less likely they are to get your interview question "right" (i.e., done the wa

by jnbiche 12y ago

So... you (the writer) have noticed that the more experienced a candidate is, the less likely they are to get your interview question "right" (i.e., done the way you want). And...you haven't questioned this process? Sometimes, I think half the reason developers stay in unsatisfactory jobs is that they don't want to go through interviews led by interviewers like this guy. Who I think is probably similar to the majority of interviewers, based on my experience.

na85 12y ago
Agree. I also note without surprise that there's no qualification as to why the recursive solution is "better". Indeed I think the author does a great job explaining why the recursive solution is usually worse, namely: harder to maintain, less intuitive, and only marginally faster.
- troels 12y ago
  Also, depending on the language you work in, a function call may be quite expensive, compared to a straight loop.
nilkn 12y ago
> Sometimes, I think half the reason developers stay in unsatisfactory jobs is that they don't want to go through interviews led by interviewers like this guy. There's really no doubt about it. I myself have refrained to apply or turned down a number of recruiters at various places that I'd otherwise be interested in because I know what the interview process is going to be like and whatever respectable pay raise they might offer isn't worth the trouble. Interviewing really takes a chunk out of you sometimes. That said, I'd gladly take a booming industry with incredibly annoying interviews over a dead or dying industry.
- jnbiche 12y ago
  >That said, I'd gladly take a booming industry with incredibly annoying interviews over a dead or dying industry. Absolutely. Other than the interviews and the occasional death march, it's a great profession (I mean that seriously).
RogerL 12y ago
"I used to take that as an indicator of how good a coder the candidate was, but more recently I’ve realised that it’s a much better indicator of how long it is since they went to college" I would take this as evidence that he is questioning the process.
- jnbiche 12y ago
  >I would take this as evidence that he is questioning the process. So I thought, but then he goes on to talk about how "sadly" no one uses the recursive solution these days. I take that as evidence that his questioning is feeble at best.
georgemcbay 12y ago
Yeah without meaning to I think the author wrote the most effective condemnation of white-board-coding interviews I've ever seen. And for whatever it is worth, I've been hacking code since 6510 assembler on the C64 and I'm (still) enamored with recursion as a concept but would virtually always avoid using it both in real code and as an interview answer (unless requested) because it is firmly in the bucket of programming concepts that are Cool and sometimes (though VERY rarely) The Right Thing, but are usually just unnecessary abstract complexity when trying to reason about a system during debug/maintenance. Of course, this is something you have to internalize after being bitten by doing the Cool thing multiple times in the past, which is likely why the interviewer is seeing people with more real world experience avoiding the overly clever solution. Counting this against them is insanity. And, yeah, the whole interviewing developers thing is a complete mess from start to finish, with dozens and dozens of different "best-practice" systems, none of which even come close to approximating actual work conditions (and all fraught with deficiencies allowing for all sorts of false positive and false negative results). I don't think there's a single job I've eventually left due to unhappiness where I didn't stay quite a bit longer than I should have just because dealing with interviews is such a terrible chore, almost completely divorced from the work it is supposed to test proficiency for.
curun1r 12y ago
I'm somewhat the opposite. I try to go on interviews on a regular basis, even when I have no interest in switching jobs. I figure that the more I do something, the better I'll be at it. I also like problem solving, so the majority of questions I get asked are fun to work through. One of the things you get with practice is the presence of mind to not get flustered and to always remember to ask the necessary questions. In the case of this interviewer, once he's asked the question, the first step is not to write either a recursive or iterative solution. The first step is to ask, "How big is my stack?" and/or "What are my bounds (max number of disks)?" Interviewers often ask questions that are deliberately vague to judge the candidate not only based off the answers they give, but also the questions they ask. I've had interviews where I missed answers and still got an offer because I took the time to fully understand the problems they were giving me. I can't recommend practice interviewing highly enough. It may seem like a waste of time, and it will eat entire days of vacation time, but the experience is very valuable and I think I'm a better interviewee and interviewer because of it.

by jnbiche 12y ago

na85 12y ago

Agree. I also note without surprise that there's no qualification as to why the recursive solution is "better". Indeed I think the author does a great job explaining why the recursive solution is usually worse, namely: harder to maintain, less intuitive, and only marginally faster.

troels 12y ago
Also, depending on the language you work in, a function call may be quite expensive, compared to a straight loop.

nilkn 12y ago

> Sometimes, I think half the reason developers stay in unsatisfactory jobs is that they don't want to go through interviews led by interviewers like this guy. There's really no doubt about it. I myself have refrained to apply or turned down a number of recruiters at various places that I'd otherwise be interested in because I know what the interview process is going to be like and whatever respectable pay raise they might offer isn't worth the trouble. Interviewing really takes a chunk out of you sometimes. That said, I'd gladly take a booming industry with incredibly annoying interviews over a dead or dying industry.

jnbiche 12y ago
>That said, I'd gladly take a booming industry with incredibly annoying interviews over a dead or dying industry. Absolutely. Other than the interviews and the occasional death march, it's a great profession (I mean that seriously).

RogerL 12y ago

"I used to take that as an indicator of how good a coder the candidate was, but more recently I’ve realised that it’s a much better indicator of how long it is since they went to college" I would take this as evidence that he is questioning the process.

jnbiche 12y ago
>I would take this as evidence that he is questioning the process. So I thought, but then he goes on to talk about how "sadly" no one uses the recursive solution these days. I take that as evidence that his questioning is feeble at best.

georgemcbay 12y ago

Yeah without meaning to I think the author wrote the most effective condemnation of white-board-coding interviews I've ever seen. And for whatever it is worth, I've been hacking code since 6510 assembler on the C64 and I'm (still) enamored with recursion as a concept but would virtually always avoid using it both in real code and as an interview answer (unless requested) because it is firmly in the bucket of programming concepts that are Cool and sometimes (though VERY rarely) The Right Thing, but are usually just unnecessary abstract complexity when trying to reason about a system during debug/maintenance. Of course, this is something you have to internalize after being bitten by doing the Cool thing multiple times in the past, which is likely why the interviewer is seeing people with more real world experience avoiding the overly clever solution. Counting this against them is insanity. And, yeah, the whole interviewing developers thing is a complete mess from start to finish, with dozens and dozens of different "best-practice" systems, none of which even come close to approximating actual work conditions (and all fraught with deficiencies allowing for all sorts of false positive and false negative results). I don't think there's a single job I've eventually left due to unhappiness where I didn't stay quite a bit longer than I should have just because dealing with interviews is such a terrible chore, almost completely divorced from the work it is supposed to test proficiency for.

curun1r 12y ago

I'm somewhat the opposite. I try to go on interviews on a regular basis, even when I have no interest in switching jobs. I figure that the more I do something, the better I'll be at it. I also like problem solving, so the majority of questions I get asked are fun to work through. One of the things you get with practice is the presence of mind to not get flustered and to always remember to ask the necessary questions. In the case of this interviewer, once he's asked the question, the first step is not to write either a recursive or iterative solution. The first step is to ask, "How big is my stack?" and/or "What are my bounds (max number of disks)?" Interviewers often ask questions that are deliberately vague to judge the candidate not only based off the answers they give, but also the questions they ask. I've had interviews where I missed answers and still got an offer because I took the time to fully understand the problems they were giving me. I can't recommend practice interviewing highly enough. It may seem like a waste of time, and it will eat entire days of vacation time, but the experience is very valuable and I think I'm a better interviewee and interviewer because of it.