[HN Gopher] Caltech's CS interview prep course ___________________________________________________________________ Caltech's CS interview prep course Author : b8 Score : 116 points Date : 2022-02-27 20:38 UTC (2 hours ago) (HTM) web link (courses.cms.caltech.edu) (TXT) w3m dump (courses.cms.caltech.edu) | wsh wrote: | Other than the course outline, is there any substantive content | available? | | I saw only a link to the first problem set, and even that | requires a Caltech login. | tzs wrote: | I'm a bit confused. The course number on the page and in the URL | is CS 11. But the Caltech course catalog lists CS 11 as "Computer | Language Lab" [1] and the description is nothing like the CS 11 | at the submitted URL. | | [1] | https://catalog.caltech.edu/current/courses/department/CS/20... | enjoyyourlife wrote: | It seems to change topics depending on the term | im_down_w_otp wrote: | Are there other major economic sectors which have circled the | wagons around making job applicants do remedial coursework as | live performance art? | darkstar999 wrote: | Actuary? | TrackerFF wrote: | I feel that it's mostly a certain part of the tech scene. FAANG | companies, startups, and those cargo-culting those. I've | actually been to dev. interviews that were 1-2 interviews long, | almost zero technical questions. | | Now, those places were in now way "prestigious", or paying | $250k starting salaries. Just your garden variety F500 | companies / gov. agencies / non-tech companies. | | Also, my experience with "traditional" engineering companies | have been similar, 1/10th duration of tech interviews, some | fundamental questions related to your trade, then mostly | questions on personality, you experience, etc. | | The closest I've been to tech, was finance. It's very much a | predictable process - you know what kind of questions you'll be | asked, what the next round will include, and all that...but | still not anywhere near the rigor of prestigious or trendy tech | firms. | barry-cotter wrote: | No. Normal economic sectors without decades long explosive | growth have some kind of licensing system to keep people out so | that insiders make more money. Merely being able to teach, | engineer or reason about the law taking into account precedent | is not sufficient to get a license for it. In some cases this | probably has some attached quality control implications but we | know education degrees have no effect on teacher | effectiveness[1] so there's at least one case where that's pure | rent seeking, where the insiders benefit and everyone else | pays. | | [1] It's easier to pick a good teacher than to train one: | Familiar and new results on the correlates of teacher | effectiveness | https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02727... | mattkrause wrote: | I wonder how many "engineering" jobs actually require PE. | | Biotech is an another counterexample to this: there's no | licensing requirement (though many jobs do require a masters | or PhD) and the interviews also (mostly) aren't quiz show | lunacy. You usually talk about your past work and answer | questions about how you'd approach new problems; no one makes | you (say) sketch crystal structures on the board or recite | the Krebs Cycle. | barry-cotter wrote: | You can get into software engineering completely self | taught or after a (3-12 month) boot camp. If biotech was | that open they'd have similar interviews checking for basic | familiarity with the field. Must have a Master's at minimum | is very different from must pass an interview as a minimum | hiring filter. | zizee wrote: | This is largely a result of low barriers to entry into the | profession. You do not need to have a qualification from an | accredited institution to be a practicing software | engineer/programmer/developer. | | Unlike doctors, lawyers, dentists, civil engineers... | | So you have a well paying profession, hot demand, good working | conditions, and no external framework to ensure a base level of | competence. Of course people will try and game the system | (wittingly or otherwise). | | IMO this is a good thing. It allows people from all walks of | life to get into the industry, and has helped it to grow more | rapidly. But it does introduce a big issue, that its very | difficult to know if someone is an expert, or just trying to | fool you (and perhaps themselves) into thinking they know what | they are talking about. | SmellTheGlove wrote: | Nah it's still broken. Using lawyers as an example because | that was my past career, 3-4 years of law school also doesn't | teach many practical skills. In fact, most of us took what | amounts to a semester long course just to prep for the bar | exam. And even then, you still don't know anything! | | As I shifted into tech, the hiring process didn't surprise me | but for the wrong reason. All I learned was software | engineers put up with similar bullshit to lawyers! | | All that said I don't know how to fix any of it easily. Maybe | no one else does either, and so here we remain. | porcoda wrote: | I've noticed that people here paint the whole industry with a | broad brush that reflects what a handful of giant companies and | companies imitating them do. I've been on both sides of the | interviewing table at a few places and it's never been the | whiteboarding dystopia that everyone talks about here. The last | job I took had a long interview process, and at the end of the | day someone spoke up and said "oh yeah, we probably should ask | you some code question", which I blew since I was exhausted and | it was an obscure C++ thing. They laughed it off and I still | work there. | | HN is a poor barometer for the broader tech industry - | everything from hiring practices, tech choices, etc. HN has a | tendency to make it sound like all the world acts and smells | like a giant tech company or a startup. There are a TON of | companies that are not like those. | neonate wrote: | https://archive.is/njEHH | axpy906 wrote: | Thanks could not get main site to load. This should be at top. | BurningFrog wrote: | Idea: Professional CS interviewers! | | I'm a good programmer, but not a good interviewer. That makes me | pretty typical. | | I could spend a lot of time getting better at it, but I would | only marginally improve, and it would take time out of the work | I'm actually good at. | | This feels like a typical problem for division of labor to solve. | | Maybe it's already done in done form? | avl999 wrote: | You would not "marginally improve", you would dramatically | improve. That's the dirty secret of these interviews they are | not that hard to get good at. There are at most a little over | half a dozen data structures and about a dozen algorithmic | technique patterns that show up in these interviews, once you | do enough of those types of problem, you get better at it. | | I am willing to bet that spending an hour every day on leetcode | you can probably be good enough to pass interviews at most | companies in a month or two (assuming you had exposure to DS | and Algorithms in college, if not add more time but the general | idea applies). Maybe not Google but I would bet you'd be good | enough to see double digit increasing in your onsite -> offer | conversion percentage. Whether that would be worth it is a | different question, the answer for many people who already have | good jobs is no. | Apocryphon wrote: | Tech interview discussions always seem to run the same course and | hit the same points, so I'll repeat one of mine: | | What's wrong with the idea of turning the standard Leetcode | algorithms interview into a license that only needs to be | completed once, or maybe once every 5-8 years, similar to what | physicians must undergo? Much more efficient than having to | retake it with _every single company_ during an interview cycle. | barry-cotter wrote: | > What's wrong with the idea of turning the standard Leetcode | algorithms interview into a license that only needs to be | completed once, or maybe once every 5-8 years, similar to what | physicians must undergo? | | How far from this is the A level in Computer Science[1] which | should take at minimum 20 weeks full time study for the target | 16-18 age group? Or the EdX MicroMaster's in Data Structures | and Algorithms[2]? If any one of the FAANG companies said "Get | this qualification and we guarantee you an interview" that | would already be massive, never mind skipping one or two steps | of the interview process. | | [1] https://www.ocr.org.uk/Images/170844-specification- | accredite... | | The content of this A Level in Computer Science is divided into | three components: * Computer systems component (01) contains | the majority of the content of the specification and is | assessed in a written paper recalling knowledge and | understanding. * Algorithms and programming component (02) | relates principally to problem solving skills needed by | learners to apply the knowledge and understanding encountered | in Component 01. * Programming project component (03 or 04) is | a practical portfolio based assessment with a task that is | chosen by the teacher or learner and is produced in an | appropriate programming language of the learner's or teacher's | choice. | | [2] https://www.edx.org/micromasters/ucsandiegox-algorithms- | and-... | aiisjustanif wrote: | For the non-UK folk you might have to explain A-levels. But | your question it's valid. | | > How far from this is the A level in Computer Science[1]? Or | the EdX MicroMaster's in Data Structures and Algorithms[2]? | | Pretty far from being standardized and the key point of the | previous comment you replied to is re-licensing. | | > If any one of the FAANG companies said "Get this | qualification and we guarantee you an interview" that would | already be massive, never mind skipping one or two steps of | the interview process. | | Is it? Network engineers are required to keep up | certifications for jobs in the US (CCNP or rarely CCDE). So | do Security Engineers/Professionals, Auditors, Cloud | engineers/architects/consultants. Government employees or | contractors require them for assurance. It's not that massive | of a shift imo. | interview_anon wrote: | giantg2 wrote: | I'd say cert, not license. I don't think anyone should _have | to_ pass a LeetCode exam to professionally code. But otherwise | a good idea. | Apocryphon wrote: | Sure, I'm using them interchangeably to mean an "officially- | decided standard that allows you to not have to retake the | same interview at every company." Whether that standard is | created by some sort of industry consortium, the IEEE or ACM, | CS academia, or some combination thereof, is left as an | exercise to the discourse. | mherdeg wrote: | Is this the Triplebyte model? | Apocryphon wrote: | I thought Triplebyte just allows candidates to skip the tech | screen step, the on-site can and does still include algo/ds | questions depending on the interviewing company. | closeparen wrote: | That's more the way employers treat Triplebyte in practice, | and it is probably how they would treat any similar | attempt. | qiskit wrote: | One way to bypass these interview tests is networking. If you | are recommended by someone or get an interview through someone, | you generally won't be given these tests. After my first job | out of college, I've never had to do these types of interviews | as I got my next jobs via former co-workers who moved onto | other companies and personally recruited me to their new | company. | | I'm not sure if licensing will work. We already have | "licensing" via Microsoft/etc certificates. And my experience | is that we test these people with certificates even harder | because of the poor reputation of these certificates. | closeparen wrote: | "The standard" belies a lot of variation. Some interviewers | want perfect code the first time on a whiteboard, some let you | go back and forth with a compiler as much as you wish. Some | interviews stick to relatively shallow algorithms knowledge | like DFS, others will ask you two LC Hard questions in an hour. | Sometimes it's about whether you solved the problem, sometimes | it's about your thinking and collaboration during even a failed | attempt. There are too many opinions and too little hard | evidence to sort them out. It's a challenging coordination | problem. | Apocryphon wrote: | You're completely right, and this actually is another layer | to the whiteboarding technical interviews are broken | narrative: there are no objective standards, even if there is | huge overlap in the content being interviewed from company to | company (or even team to team). A very discouraging aspect | about these interviews is that the rubric is completely | hidden away from candidates and feedback is almost never | provided. At least a licensure or certification test would be | more transparent. | majormajor wrote: | There are no objective standards for the _output_ of the | software development process. It 's a unique mishmash of | building the blueprints and the final artifact at the same | time. Not because we _want_ to be a bunch of cowboys, but | because the unique ability of it _to be_ that flexible, and | to be patched over time, means speed is possible in a way | it just isn 't in other fields, and the market has rewarded | companies that move fast. | | So until that's changed, I find it hard to see how we could | standardize developer hiring. My coworkers and I all wear a | different amount of hats with varying competence. The | number and variation of certs required would be rough! "I'm | level 4 backend engineer with level 3 data design | [streaming level 1, traditional ETL level 7], level 1 hacky | frontend dev, and level 2 devops" - sheesh, now I'm | spending my whole time keeping those up to date. | Apocryphon wrote: | You are talking about the nitty-gritty aspects of actual | software engineering. I'm talking about doing away with | the redundancy of having to retake the industry-wide | Leetcode fizzbuzz portion instead of passing it once. | majormajor wrote: | I'm asking that since the job itself is wildly | unstandardized, how on earth are we supposed to | standardize a single "industry-wide" credential for | interviews? | | There's no "industry-wide Leetcode fizzbuzz portion" - | Leetcode and fizzbuzz are famously on complete opposite | sides of the whiteboard spectrum! I've only been asked | actual fizzbuzz once, and can't immediately think of any | other duplicate whiteboard problems I've seen either. | Many of them aren't ones I've seen on Leetcode, and would | probably be on the "easy" scale there if they were there. | | I couldn't pick out any single problem that would make | everyone at all my last few jobs happy, let alone the | whole rest of the industry. | 10000truths wrote: | Why would you _want_ a license? The whole allure of software | development is in its accessibility, that it 's easy to get | started with nothing more than a laptop and an Internet | connection. Putting up artificial barriers to entry is anathema | to that. What you'll end up with, in practice, is one of two | outcomes: | | 1. A race to the bottom where licenses become easier and easier | to get, until it becomes no more a demonstration of competence | than drivers' licenses are to one's driving skills. | | 2. Protectionist policies make licenses mandated and difficult | to obtain, then the talent pool and innovation moves to places | that don't require that license. | Apocryphon wrote: | By license I mean the current Leetcode interview process | except you do it once and are good for at least five years. | Obviously when candidates are interviewed there would still | be technical questions asked, but perhaps those would be more | domain-specific. The whole point is to avoid the redundancy | of the existing interview process. | ryandrake wrote: | Yea, think of it less as a "government issued license | allowing you to do software" and more of a certificate that | says "I recently passed a level $LEVEL leetcode grind, you | only need to test me for specialized skills or for a level | greater than $LEVEL." If it actually worked and couldn't be | gamed/cheated (good luck with that), it could reduce | interviews to a simple check of domain knowledge not | covered by the certificate. | naiwenwt wrote: | > By license I mean the current Leetcode interview process | except you do it once and are good for at least five years | | Some companies do seem to be offering something similar to | this, see CodeSignal's general coding assessment or back | when TripleByte was big a few years ago. I think the | problem is that even within the specialized topic of LC | style interviews, many companies don't agree on a similar | strategy when it comes to types of questions and | difficulty. There isn't one standard that every company | agrees on, so most have their own flavor of it. | singron wrote: | An equivalent idea is to hire anyone who has worked at any | well-known company with similarly rigorous interviews. | | But people from those places still perform really poorly in | interviews at about the same rate as everyone else. I wish I | knew if it was a fluke that they bombed this time or that they | passed the original. | ip26 wrote: | More likely is that any company big enough to have a | reputation is also big enough to have strong & weak | departments, and it can be hard to tell which the candidate | is from. | honksillet wrote: | As someone who is licensed in a different field, awful idea. | | Each state tends to have their own (often quite different) | license requirements. They tend to be expensive to get and need | to be renewed frequently (more $$$). There are usually other | hoops you have to jump through to get both license and | relicensed. I would never wish licensure on my own profession. | cutenewt wrote: | I agree on the downsides, but I believe licensing is a good | forcing function to get others to 1) gain knowledge and 2) | standardize training for a base level of competence. | gaoshan wrote: | I don't necessarily want someone with great algorithm test | taking skills... such a cert would be of relatively minor value | to me. A single data point out of many and not one with | especially great weight. I want someone that can build stuff on | time, using the tools our team uses, within budget and do all | of this while being a collaborative, reasonable, not unpleasant | person to work with. | Apocryphon wrote: | Sure, and perhaps that means you're currently already not | asking algorithm questions in your interviews. Meaning | candidates grousing about Leetcode wouldn't have similar | grievances interviewing with your company. | shahbaby wrote: | Reminder, our field isn't regulated. | | Anyone can go online and learn enough to be useful at a high | paying entry level job. | | At some point there has to be a filter and that's what these | interviews are for. | Apocryphon wrote: | The kind of license I'm suggesting doesn't change any of | that. It would literally be formalizing the existing Leetcode | process so it doesn't have to be retaken many times. | ip26 wrote: | The curse of a field which is both competitive yet difficult | to measure. A meritocracy where your true status is opaque. | bluedino wrote: | The trick is proving to an employer what you know. Hard to | get a resume past HR when you've worked in other industries | and learned all your coding online. | shagie wrote: | We tried that once. | | https://ncees.org/engineering/pe/software/ | | But nobody was interested. | | https://ncees.org/ncees-discontinuing-pe-software-engineerin... | | --- | | I've interviewed software developers who have on their resume | "Oracle Java 8 certified", but aren't able to name three | different spots where the static keyword appears in Java or the | situations where they'd be used. | | There are certainly many possible reasons why someone wouldn't | retain that knowledge, but I've encountered far too many | candidates claiming mid or senior level experience with | "enhanced" resumes and certifications from everywhere that are | not able to satisfactory do more than follow instructions (e.g. | not able to determine steps needed to complete tasks nor able | to solve the larger problems and break them down into tasks). | | So, with the resume and certifications not things that I have | confidence in, asking those questions to try to figure out if | the person is able to approach solving a novel problem is what | gets asked. If other companies do the same, then that candidate | will likely see similar lines of questions in each place. | Apocryphon wrote: | It's interesting how this mirrors the Computer Science GRE | subject test being discontinued. | SeanLuke wrote: | This is a test on software engineering, not computer science. | shagie wrote: | I would contend that it makes it _more_ applicable to the | general "what do you do professionally" for most people | outside of academia. | someelephant wrote: | For a lot of space-cadet interviewers this would work well. | They just want the right answer and aren't thinking about how | easy it would be to work on a team with these people. | TLadd wrote: | Last time I interviewed, I thought about how it probably would | have benefitted me to take one less class a semester in college | and just drill leetcode-style questions in that time. Given how | almost all "prestigious" companies use these problems heavily for | interviewing, it's likely to increase earnings more than any | other course. | | I think what caltech is doing here makes a lot of sense and | demonstrates an awareness of the realities of interviewing at | companies a lot of their students will want to work at. College | is also a better time to build up this skill than later when | other responsibilities tend to pile up. | Veserv wrote: | For context, this is a CS11 class which is a catch-all small form | factor elective (3 units, average class is 9 units, units are | supposed to be that many hours per week) that is used to offer a | dozen or so small topics that are not extensive enough to warrant | a full class. In any given term they will usually offer various | CS11s for learning new programming languages and a few other | random topics with some being run by grad or undergrad students. | ozzythecat wrote: | Interviewing is broken. | | When I was at Amazon, it became impossible to hire candidates, | and generally the engineers we brought on board were non-US | citizens. Typically they're Indians without U.S. residency | status, often times U.S. college grads or often even transfers | from Amazon's Indian offices. Not only did we pay below other | FAANGs, but with these hires, we'd pay them at the low end of our | own scale. | | What are they going to do? Quit? Ha! If they quit, they have to | leave the country. So most of them just suck it up. Many of them | had spouses and children. Quitting Amazon meant they'd have to | uproot their entire family. | | A second order effect the entire industry on how to work around | Amazon (and other big tech's) styling of interviewing. What | amazes me are all the Youtube channels from Amazon engineers and | other big tech companies with this "influencer" persona. | | At the end of the day, many of these kids at Amazon are doing | shitty migration projects, shoveling legacy code around all day, | and dealing with on-call hell. | | But we have this entire cult of working in big tech and going | through all these gymnastics to get through pointless interviews. | | Perhaps Google, Netflix, etc. are much better places to work, but | it boggles my mind anyone would invest so much energy in getting | a job at Amazon. It's absolutely a shit place to work that | doesn't treat people like human beings. | almost_usual wrote: | I've never worked at Amazon but this seems to be a common theme | with interview candidates who work there. They talk about to | burnout and stressful on-calls shifts. I'm not sure how this | unfolds for Amazon in the long run. | johnnyo wrote: | Any way to access the assignments without a Caltech login? | relyks wrote: | I understand part of the point of posting this is to demonstrate | the problems with the educational system for CS majors and the | hiring practices of the industry, but what is the actual point of | sharing it here if the resources aren't open for all of us? | avl999 wrote: | This is absolutely embarrassing for the industry. | VirusNewbie wrote: | Why is it not embarrassing for Caltech's admission department | and algorithms courses? | someelephant wrote: | I'd argue it's pragmatic | avl999 wrote: | I agree it is embarrassing for Caltech as well. They are one | of the biggest engineering schools in North America not | Greendale Community College, this kind of class is beneath | them. No major research university should be offering a | course like this. | mkl95 wrote: | My career path in tech so far has been junior engineer -> mid | level -> senior -> tech lead. | | As I've progressed through that path, I have had literally no | opportunities of applying the stuff I've learnt on HackerRank, | save for a couple of interviews. | | At this point I'm convinced that the focus of those interviews | was entirely wrong. Once you pass those tests and get hired, you | will be dealing with tons of legacy code riddled with dumb | queries, questionable code quality, and very often the wrong | stack for the problem at hand. | | I'd be OK with modern interviews if they reflected the job you | will be doing to a reasonable degree. But knowing the state of | the industry I feel that they fall somewhere between gatekeeping | and a bait & switch scheme. | | If you haven't spent enough time practising those problems, you | will look like an idiot. If you have spent enough time practising | them, your expectations will be high, and you will feel scammed | when you read the steaming shit your new employer wants you to | improve. | giantg2 wrote: | I went to an internal job interview about 5 years into working | for the company. They were asking me all sorts of textbook | questions about defining stuff like polymorphism and explaining | some sort algorithms. I bombed. Many of these terms and | algorithms had never been used during my 5 years, and I forgot | many since they hadn't been used since college. | | I wanted to ask the interviewer if they actually use these | terms in meetings or used the algorithms, but I didn't. Since | it was internal, I already knew the answers would be that they | didn't, and I didn't want to appear confrontational. | | I was internal, a high performer on my team at the time, and | you're going to ask me this useless stuff? | dionidium wrote: | The reason this complaint never changes anything, despite being | very popular, is that these interviews serve two purposes that | it doesn't address: 1) they're an intelligence test; 2) they're | a perseverance/conscientiousness test. | | Will you take the time and put in the work to pass one of these | interviews? That measures perseverance and conscientiousness. | Having put in the time, can you recall and adapt what you | learned to perform complex tasks on a whiteboard in a stressful | environment? That's an intelligence test. | | In combination, these criteria measure the famed, "smart and | gets thing done" in a way that more practical lines of | questioning might not. Or at least that's the theory. | | For the record, I've only interviewed at one FAANG company, got | to the on-site interviews, did not get an offer (in case you | think I'm secretly patting myself on the back here). | syspec wrote: | I really think you nailed it, will have to borrow this point | in the future. | | A lot of it is about gauging the candidates aptitude, and of | course their willingness to put in the work. | | It's like those kids in math class that say, "I'm never going | to use this in real life." | monkeybutton wrote: | At least have empathy for your predecessors! How often have you | chosen an architecture and stack to solve a problem only have | the slow but constant shifting sands of managements' | requirements completely undermine the foundation of what you've | built, and been given no extra time to migrate and make it | right instead of adding on another layer of shortsighted hacks? | ramraj07 wrote: | What's your suggested alternative? Please remember that while | some of us would do well and prefer some live pair programming | or debugging sessions, it stresses the hell out of some folks | and penalizes them unfairly. Take home tests penalizes people | with families and other responsibilities and probably has a | racial bias as well in countries where different races have | different societal loads. | | In the end, even if these coding challenges might not reflect | the actual work you do, they might still be predictive of | success in the job, as much as any other method can be when we | look for unbiased markers. | | This is similar to how the entrance exams to the IITs in india | are pretty much completely discordant to what you actually end | up having to know, the rigor and preparation you need to do | ends up reasonably selecting for well performing students | anyway. Not perfect though. Any system can be gamed but it | works alright. | gwbas1c wrote: | > What's your suggested alternative? | | I generally give (mostly) simple questions where I explain | how to solve them. Assuming you're a competent programmer in | the language we're dealing with, you should be able to figure | out how to solve the problem in your head in a minute or two. | The trick is that I'm gauging accumulated skill, not | memorized algorithms. | | For example, I'll explain how to use a data reader, explain | the constructor for a simple object, and provide a SQL | statement. Then you need to write the code that reads a few | values from the data reader and constructs and object. After | that we discuss edge cases and error handling, and if you | should throw an exception or return null. Easy-peasy! (And if | it's not easy-peasy, you really shouldn't be here.) | | Another example: I'll explain an older API for running a | lambda in a background thread, and then an API for running a | lambda in the main (UI) thread. (Mac, Windows, iOS, and | Android all have the same threading model for their UI.) | Easy-peasy if you understand basic scoping and threading. | (And if it's not easy-peasy, you shouldn't be working in any | job where you have to deal with threads.) | | In both cases, the candidate can ask any many questions as | they want, and I'll happily steer a candidate. | | The point is, I'm not relying on memorized algorithms, or | requiring prep. What I'm doing is relying on, and judging | accumulated skill. Only a novice will have trouble with my | questions; and I wouldn't use these questions when hiring | interns or entry-level engineers. If you've programmed with a | database before, you should understand the basic concept of a | data reader. If you've programmed for awhile, you should | understand scope. And, if you've programmed with threads, you | should understand running a lambda on another thread. (You | probably should understand lambdas, too.) | game_the0ry wrote: | > What's your suggested alternative? | | In my experience, any alternative to leetcode provides a | better signal-to-noise ratio. You are better off asking | trivia questions. | | Additionally, this is the common narrative among leetcode | advocates - "If no leetcode, then what?" As a hiring manager, | you think harder and do better, that's what. | | > Please remember that while some of us would do well and | prefer some live pair programming or debugging sessions, it | stresses the hell out of some folks and penalizes them | unfairly. | | So does leetcode. And a candidate that is truly a good fit | for the role would be more at ease with the interview than if | they saw a leetcode question they haven't seen before. | | > Take home tests penalizes people with families and other | responsibilities... | | So does studying for leetcode for hours. | | > ...and probably has a racial bias as well in countries | where different races have different societal loads. | | Share some sources before making a claim this ridiculous. | | > In the end, even if these coding challenges might not | reflect the actual work you do, they might still be | predictive of success in the job, as much as any other method | can be when we look for unbiased markers. | | In my 6-ish years of experience, this is false. I have | actually tested this theory in practice, and through my | anecdotal experience, leetcode is a poor signal for job | performance. | | I can usually usually accurately screen a candidate for | success in about 45 mins. And, unlike leetcode, you can't | pretend like you haven't seen the question before, bc I can | push the candidate to their limit, which is where you will | find hire / no-hire signals. I love talking about this stuff, | but I find that my peers engineering peers do not give a shit | and would prefer to stay in leetcode hell. | synthos wrote: | grinding leetcode is just as bad, if not worse, than a take- | home test | majormajor wrote: | Perhaps not everyone has to grind it so much. (I would | wager they're the same people who do regularly find | themselves thinking about computational and space | complexity, and about using different datastructures and | algorithms for problems, vs the ones who never see reason | to!) | | A take home test requires spending free time for everyone. | A whiteboard interview requires variable amounts of free | time. I would wager that, on average, the people _inside_ | companies using these processes require less time to | "grind leetcode" than the people _outside_ those companies | do. | | You gotta be able to convince the folks on the inside, not | the ones on the outside. To them, it being hard to "grind" | might even seem like a good thing! "It's hard to cram for | this compared to other sorts of tests!" | mkl95 wrote: | Take home OR coding challenges is a false dichotomy. | | > In the end, even if these coding challenges might not | reflect the actual work you do, they might still be | predictive of success in the job | | They are snake oil. You cannot predict success at some job by | asking candidates to prove their ability at something that is | only tangentially related to the actual job. | barry-cotter wrote: | General mental ability is general, that's the point. | | > The Validity and Utility of Selection Methods in | Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical | Implications of 100 Years of Research Findings | | > On the basis of meta-analytic findings, this paper | presents the validity of 31 procedures for predicting job | performance and the validity of paired combinations of | general mental ability (GMA) and the 29 other selection | procedures. Similar analyses are presented for 16 | predictors of performance in job training programs. | Overall, the two combinations with the highest multivariate | validity and utility for predicting job performance were | GMA plus an integrity test (mean validity of .78) and GMA | plus a structured interview (mean validity of .76). Similar | results were obtained for these two combinations in the | prediction of performance in job training programs. A | further advantage of these two combinations is that they | can be used for both entry level hiring and selection of | experienced job applicants. The practical utility | implications of these summary findings are substantial. The | implications of these research findings for the development | of theories of job performance are discussed. | cutenewt wrote: | Do you have any insights on what kind of "integrity test" | they used? | mkl95 wrote: | > General mental ability is general, that's the point | | I've seen PhDs melt under pressure at two different jobs. | Which tells me that an exceptional IQ or work ethic | doesn't necessarily equate with success in the industry. | Those two people had something in common, and it was | their poor communication skills, both input and output. | If your brain cannot process some coworkers feedback | efficiently and it cannot spit out feedback efficiently, | the logical / mathematical side of your brain is not | going to make up for it. | rmbyrro wrote: | > they might still be predictive of success in the job | | Basing an assumption out of thin air like this, we can throw | the opposite argument: 'they might be predictive of _failure_ | in the job '. | | Writers of bad code and choices mentioned by OP were likely | hired out of a fantastic hacker rank score, and yet failed to | produce good output. | samstave wrote: | The next big tech interview craze, I have long thought: | | Here is a fucked up environment. | | Here are logins for each role. | | Here is your team. | | Here is your role. | | Each of you has a chance at each role. There are three of you. | So three challenges. | | The environment is experiencing the following symptoms. | Diagnose, report, fix. | | --- | | Then throw them at some broken stack with admin rights and | figure why its broken and fix it. | | Create various stack models to throw at teams based on team | skill-set. | | Never hire individuals. Hire strong individuals who can work in | a team. | dmkirwan wrote: | I totally agree with you. Some of the content there seems | relevant to CS in general, but I hate the fact that you need to | study content that you won't use on the job in order to pass an | interview. It doesn't make sense to me. I've seen new grads | perform as well as senior engineers with these Leetcode-style | questions so I've stopped using them to assess engineers. | Further, I know we're specifically trying to assess technical | ability in an interview, but that's not the whole picture for | an engineer. They need to be able to take feedback well and | provide good mentorship also. I think we miss this. | | Inspired by some realistic interviews that I did recently, I've | been working on something[1] that aims to equip companies to | hire engineers using realistic assessment methods. It scales | like Hackerrank, but I think it's fairer. | | [1] https://devscreen.io/ | WalterBright wrote: | > I have had literally no opportunities of applying the stuff | I've learnt on HackerRank | | I have. Many times. | game_the0ry wrote: | Yes, the opportunities are possible, but exceptional. | | For the most part, you will be wiring crud APIs or trying to | figure out why your button is misaligned by 12 pixels. Those | problems also pay better too, bc those are business problems. | The hackerrank problems have mostly been solved. | | Think about that - you think Ed Dijkstra or Tony Hoare ever | made more than a facebook swe? | mkl95 wrote: | If you are THE Walter Bright, I have no doubt you have. | Respect | adam_arthur wrote: | The whole psychology around tech interviews tends not to be | focused on the right things. At least in the general sense, a | lot of it appears to be people copying others without | understanding the motivations. | | The theory of interviewing should be to ask questions that are | as predictive as possible e.g. success on the interview | correlates as closely as possible with success on the job. The | strengths needed will vary greatly by the role, company, and so | on. | | But what you tend to see is, everybody has a handful of "pet" | questions that they ask over and over, without applying strict | rationale for why its predictive to success. | | Personally, any good interview question must both be iterative | and highly correlated with actual work. Questions that have one | "trick" and judging on that basis is a poor interview. | Questions that focus on data structures or algorithms that | aren't going to be relatively common are also poor. Questions | which lack real world applications, also poor. | | At least for me, I have a handful of questions, but one of my | basic ones is to implement a certain data structure. And | honestly, I care more about seeing the naive solution than the | highly optimized one... because I care first and foremost that | the candidate can code proficiently. The naive solution is | super easy and requires little theoretical strength... but it | becomes very obvious how proficient of a coder they are by | seeing them write out the solution. How quickly can they write | it? Do they make syntax errors? How long to grasp the intention | of the question? | | Some write the solution in 5 minutes, some take 40 minutes. | That gap alone is probably the most strong predictor. | | There is a more theoretically optimal solution, but I just | followup at the end and we'll talk through what it could be. | But if somebody can hammer out a naive solution with good code | quality, quickly I weight that about 90%. | | But my company also needs strong coders over particularly | theoretical people. One of my best coworkers bombed on a tree | interview questions I asked... but I could tell from all the | supplemental details that he was very strong. | game_the0ry wrote: | Bingo. | | It should be telling that there are a number of, usually for- | profit, resources for prepping for just the interview process: | | * leetcode | | * Cracking the Coding Interview | | * Elements of Programing Interviews | | * Interview Kickstart, which costs like $5500, is a bootcamp | just for passing interviews | | * educative.io | | * algoexpert.io | | That being said, I might just play along with the DS / Algo | interview game. Having an interview process that is | artificially arduous and way outside the expectations of the | job duties means that the job market will stay artificially | inflated on the demand side. Hiring leetcode monkeys who can | barely deploy and manage k8s cluster on AWS means the demand | for my skills will be more valuable than if the interview | process actually worked. I can complain all day to my bosses | about how hard it is to hire (its not that hard) and meanwhile | rip their HR budget to shreds when I threaten to leave unless I | get paid more (I've done that before, I recently got a | promotion and 50% raise on base alone). | | So yeah, I'll gatekeep as long as others play too. I hate the | game, but I will play it to my advantage. | majormajor wrote: | What is that supposed to be telling? There are a quite a few | industries where there are profitable neighbor industries | around breaking in to it. Even ones with licensing and blah | blah blah instead of whiteboards. | | Hell, the cynics would call the entire current university | system one! And if not that, than it least the massive | industries around _getting into_ better schools... | mkl95 wrote: | > I can complain all day to my bosses about how hard it is to | hire (its not that hard) and meanwhile rip their HR budget to | shreds when I threaten to leave unless I get paid more (I've | done that before, I recently got a promotion and 50% raise on | base alone). | | Kudos for that. I may be making a similar move soon. | forum_ghost wrote: | fermentation wrote: | Sometime around my Junior year of college my goals shifted from | "I'm here because I want to learn" to "I'm here because I want a | job". I was surprised to find that doing well at learning | (getting As) not only wasn't good enough for an entry level job, | it wasn't even really correlated. The more time I spent on | coursework the less time I had to grind through interview | questions. I wonder if there are any other industries like this. | jmchuster wrote: | I was also CS undergrad. I see it more as a choice between | industry or academia. Junior year i also had to make that | decision. For industry, that then meant getting into | internships, which then translated into job offers. You needed | a minimum level of grades, say, 3.0, and needed to have classes | on your transcript that looked more like industry software | engineering, say, operating systems, databases, design. | Companies cared more about clubs, extracurriculars, side | projects, and of course you needed to be able to pass your | interview questions. | | While, if i was going for grad school instead, then i'd need a | 4.0, start taking grad school classes, start talking with | professors, try to get a job as a research assistant, try to | find a professor that i could latch onto and start working | with. And that was a path i had considered at some point, when | i really did enjoy taking hard classes, going in deep, and | pushing the edges of my learning. | analog31 wrote: | Symphonic musician. The first stage is nailing a blind | audition, perfectly. | fortran77 wrote: | Not anymore! Blind auditions are now a thing of the past: | | https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind- | audition... | | However, since you can't choose your parents or where you | were born, there's little you can do to prepare for the | Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity goals. (I could probably get | a lift by changing my religion. People with the exact same | ethnicity and appearance as me but of a different faith are | considered "people of color" by most DEI committees) | | I started out wanting a career in music but quickly switched | to a math major. While I still perform at amateur recitals, | I'm glad I didn't try to prusue a professional career. | beepbeepnewnew wrote: | Even though blind auditions are less and less, I do want to | add to analog's point that orchestras don't care about | anything except for how well you can nail a huge group of | assorted excerpts and whether or not you suffer from | anxiety that may affect your performance. Plenty of great | musicians just never get a job because they get a lot of | anxiety or don't have the patience to practice the same 12 | measures of music for 12 years hoping that the audition | they takes asks them for that. | | Orchestra excerpts are just leetcode for musicians, and | just as lacking in testing the real qualities of good | workers, artists, and people. | madengr wrote: | gjm11 wrote: | That article is behind the NYT paywall but the bit of it I | could see appears to be saying _not_ that | | > blind auditions are now a thing of the past | | but that they _should become_ a thing of the past, so that | orchestras can ensure that their makeup (race, gender, | etc.) matches that of "the communities they serve". | | There's a big difference between "one person writing in the | New York Times thinks orchestras should stop doing blind | auditions" and "blind auditions are now a thing of the | past". | shagie wrote: | Unlocked - | https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind- | audition... | fortran77 wrote: | It is already happening. For example: | https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/buffalo- | philharmonic-... | turbinerneiter wrote: | No clue if this is even remotely true, but here is what I think: | the most successful companies can basically pick and chose from a | really large set of applicants. Given this luxury, the can, in | essence, filter by any kind of metric they want and still get | loads of suitable people. | | I short: if you have a million applications you can sort by GPA | and still have a hundred people to chose from. Sorting by GPA | means you will overlook lots of raw talent, but who cares, there | is still enough real talent in your funnel as well. | | For me, someone hiring for a way smaller and poorer company, this | is actually good. These processes overlook lots of great people, | which we can snag up. | | This observation is based on the behavior of big companies in | Germany (think carmakers and similar), not sure how well it | translates to the silicon valley situation, but seems similar. | xiii1408 wrote: | Yeah, I'd say this is exactly what's going on at big tech | companies. Add to that the need for an interview process that | is very standardized for (1) scalability in a large company and | (2) legal protection against discrimination (at least | nominally), and it makes a load of sense. | wombat-man wrote: | I feel that the interview format heavily already favors new grads | who just spent an entire year or more focused on algorithms | courses and learning a lot of the theory you might get pop | quizzed on. | [deleted] | amznbyebyebye wrote: | So wait you are smart enough to get into caltech, smart enough to | graduate with a degree in CS. And yet the curriculum on its own | does not do a good job enough on its own to prepare you for | getting a job? Very hard to graduate with a decent GPA in CS at | caltech and not be able to thrive as an entry level engineer. If | you got B's in caltech CS I'd make you an offer for 200k+ without | blinking or even asking you anything. | | I have a small friend circle, I would say they're all smarter | than I am on raw problem solving and intellect capability. They | came out with better degrees from better institutions. All have | PhDs and yet they're all facing delays when landing a job. There | is something definitely broken. I think the industry has created | this problem and the industry should fix it. | VirusNewbie wrote: | Its possible that this is another sign interviewing for | software jobs is broken, but it is equally possible that this | shows the skills required to excel in high school and be | accepted to college are easily gamed and Cal Tech isn't exactly | filled with the most intelligent problem solvers. | kolbe wrote: | This is probably because interview questions are more often | than not just brainteasers stacked on top of into-level | content. Much in the same way that juniors in high school | taking Calculus still need to study for SAT math: it's not | really consistent with measuring the content of advanced | courses at top places. | ZephyrBlu wrote: | > _If you got B's in caltech CS I'd make you an offer for 200k+ | without blinking or even asking you anything_ | | Why? This is not necessarily a good signal for competence on | the job and also doesn't cover people who have lied or cheated. | | Also, this wouldn't help create a less broken job market. You'd | just be breaking it in a different way. | NERD_ALERT wrote: | Computer Science is not Software Engineering. A PhD does not | translate to real world engineering skills. If you just go | through a bachelors CS curriculum, designed to give a survey of | all topics in academic computer science, that wouldn't make you | a competent engineer. This is especially true now that through | the internet, just about anyone with a laptop can get as good | as they want at software engineering without ever stepping foot | in an academic institution. Sites like Free Code Camp, Kaggle | etc. have torn down all of the barriers preventing anyone from | learning how to be an incredible engineer. Some of the most | important software in industry is open source and anyone can | take the time to learn how to contribute to it. | | If I had the choice between a Caltech grad who had all A's and | no experience or a student from some random state school who | had interned every summer and contributed to open source, I'd | pick the latter. Many people are locked out from ever attending | elite schools in the first place despite competence due to | coming from poor backgrounds and underfunded highschool | districts. | closeparen wrote: | That's a fair point but the kind of interview this course is | preparing you for is a CS test, not a practical software | engineering test. | SteveDR wrote: | Yes but the interviews are primarily used to screen | candidates for SWE roles | Firmwarrior wrote: | > If I had the choice between a Caltech grad who had all A's | and no experience or a student from some random state school | who had interned every summer and contributed to open source, | I'd pick the latter. | | I really wish someone had explained this to me while I was in | college.. I had ONE professor who'd actually worked in the | real world who explained it, but all the other professors | were lifetime academics who just parroted the same idiotic | stuff about how important it is to get good grades. | | Getting my first engineering job after I graduated was a | nightmare.. I ended up having to go with a crappy internship | that barely paid enough for me to live in a bedroom in a | shared house, with a terrible boss who constantly threatened | me and stressed me out. And that's with a 3.8 GPA.. When I | told prospective employers that, they were like "What is | that? Out of 4? 5? Is that good?" | mettamage wrote: | A lot of talent is wasted by young people doing their | utmost best at uni only to find out that no one cared. I | applied to FAANG after graduating CS and no one got back to | me. | | A friend of mine in the HFT world told me "I know how hard | some of your courses were. But you can't highlight them on | your cv because no one will believe you that they were that | hard. And even if they did, they wouldn't believe that | those skills are transferable." | | Going to yet another job interview, I spoke to my | interviewer who had a similar CS specalization but from | another uni. He told me "my master was of baaad quality." I | responded with: "mine wasn't, and my classmates all feel | the same because we've learned practical skills and our | teachers prided themselves in giving difficult yet | practical courses." He looked at me with disbelief. | gcheong wrote: | The industry recreates the problem every so often with | different variants. Previously it was the Microsoft/Google | "thought problems" such as "Why are manhole covers round?" and | "How would you estimate the number of gas stations in a city?". | onion2k wrote: | Thet change when they realise the current method doesn't | actually work. They're not recreating the problem; they're | looking for a solution. | ivanamies wrote: | >If you got B's in caltech CS I'd make you an offer for 200k+ | without blinking or even asking you anything. | | thanks, it means a lot you trust my ability so much :) | | >All have PhDs and yet they're all facing delays when landing a | job. There is something definitely broken. | | Everyone agrees it's the leetcode interview format. I agree to | some extent, but I wouldn't throw it out completely. For me, I | give four problems, and the candidate must solve two of the | four with full internet access in an hour. It seriously reduces | interview day variation for good candidates. If they can't do | graphs but can do text formatting, they get a pass. I'm sure | there's still some better way of doing this. | majormajor wrote: | Here we see what the alternative to whiteboard interviews: | credentialism. Get into the right school and muddle through and | get a guaranteed 200k! | | Is there more to you than your high school performance? Push | back against this if so! | | (Calling the interview Leetcode is misleading IME, since I've | rarely been asked something that would be near the upper tiers | of that site's difficulty). | | Top-tier tech companies face a LOT more competitive pressure | than top-tier universities; why should I trust the university | selection process more than those corporate hiring ones? | | Ask yourself why the rest of the industry isn't happy to simply | hire every B student from CalTech/Stanford/MIT/Ivies without an | interview? | yodsanklai wrote: | > why should I trust the university selection process more | than those corporate hiring ones? | | I don't know the US education system enough, but there are | some schools out there which are _much more_ selective than | any SWE interview process. You can be guaranteed that the | worst student from these top schools could nail any algorithm | interview with minimal preparation. | | But these big companies hire many more people than these few | schools can provide, and they do so globally, from countries | that may not have such elite schools. | SteveDR wrote: | > You can be guaranteed that the worst student from these | top schools could nail any algorithm interview with minimal | preparation. | | Considering that CalTech offers this course, they must be | realllyyyy misguided, or you're talking about schools that | are far more selective than CalTech (7% acceptance rate). | majormajor wrote: | Needing to hire more than just the top schools graduate is | certainly a reason companies can't limit themselves to | university selection processes. | | But that's not all that's going on here! CalTech is pretty | selective as far as US schools go (6% acceptance rate). | Slightly more than MIT, slightly less than Stanford. SAT | score stats all in the same 1500+ range. | | But they're offering this course, and that makes me think | that no, the worst student from these schools _in the US, | at least_ cannot nail any algorithm interview with minimal | prep! | | And that makes sense, from a US perspective! Getting into | CalTech or Stanford or MIT is about doing well at _high | school /early-college level material_ in high school, and | about extracurricular activities, with a dash of being able | to afford it and being told it's something you should try | for. Most of that high school curriculum - even most | college-level CS material - isn't super applicable to a | software engineering job. It's heavier on memorization (we | have google for that!) and it's heavier on theory than on | creative application of things. | | I might argue that any test or course where the answers to | the exams come straight out of the textbook isn't worth as | much as it used to be, since we've got Google and SO and | all the books too! | | That's a big part of why a lot of these whiteboard | interviews aren't simply "write out Dijkstra's algorithm" | (boring, textbook!) but are about seeing if you can figure | out how to use apply CS in a situation where the way the | problem maps to the algorithm isn't immediately obvious. | | Creative work has a long history of not aligning well with | traditional US university admissions criteria and | evaluations. | [deleted] | giantg2 wrote: | "So wait you are smart enough to get into caltech, smart enough | to graduate with a degree in CS. And yet the curriculum on its | own does not do a good job enough on its own to prepare you for | getting a job?" | | This was my first thought too. A course just for passing | interviews seems odd. We had two small activities that were | part of a business course (business administration minor), but | after hours. One was a mock interview to give you feedback | about professional appearance, not fidgeting, etc. The second | was a mock business dinner to provide feedback about etiquette, | customs, etc. These were valuable, but they focused on soft | skills that aren't covered in the regular course content. | dvt wrote: | If you don't think modern interviewing practices are a problem, | this should be proof enough. Not only do we have an entire | programming book sub-genre dedicated to this nonsense, but now | we're also wasting class time on memorizing sorting algorithms. | Fantastic. | | Of course, we're going to see the inevitable arguments that "40% | of the people I interview lie on resumes" or "I interviewed this | guy once, and he couldn't even write one line of code"--let me | pre-empt that by saying if you ever get to that stage, your | screening process must absolutely suck and it's still your fault. | I've interviewed dozens of people and never had that experience, | because I check OSS contributions, professional history, | published material, and ask for code samples before I even engage | with a candidate in a technical discussion. It's not rocket | science. | | I've told at least 5 or 6 companies that wanted to white-board me | to suck it. It's honestly insulting that I'm forced to white- | board when I have two books with my name on them (published by | Apress), contributions to Golang (small commits, but they still | got me in the AUTHORS file), and OSS projects with hundreds of | stars on GitHub. | ignoramous wrote: | > _Not only do we have an entire programming book sub-genre | dedicated to this nonsense..._ | | Mate, wake up: ~billion dollar "interview prep" start-ups are a | thing. | giantg2 wrote: | Sell shovels to the miners instead of mining for gold | yourself. | interview_anon wrote: | santiagobasulto wrote: | I agree with you; the whole interview process is broken. | | But looking at the bright sight, teaching young people how to | "work the system" is not a bad thing. Again, we should fix | interview. But in the meantime, a class specializes on "how to | beat the man", looks like a fun class where you can learn more | than just CS. | barry-cotter wrote: | > I've interviewed dozens of people and never had that | experience, because I check OSS contributions, professional | history, and ask for code samples before I even engage with a | candidate in a technical discussion. | | How are you supposed to hire 50,000 people a year with a | process like that? It seems unlikely there are much more than | 100,000 people with significant OSS contributions in total. | Published material isn't going to be much more than that if it | b even gets that high. And most people who are good at | programming will have nothing for either. If you're not going | to spend at least ten, more likely 20 hours calling up | references your going to be fishing from a pretty narrow pool | there. | dvt wrote: | > How are you supposed to hire 50,000 people a year with a | process like that? | | This is a straw-man. What company has to hire 50,000 | engineers a year? Facebook has (in total) ~10,000 engineers | (hired over a decade+). Someone has nothing published and no | OSS? Great, ask for code samples and the candidate to walk | you through the code. It's completely trivial to fix the | busted status quo, but people are invested in this nonsense-- | there are entire companies that serve at the white-board | interviewing altar (Triplebyte, Coderbyte, Hackerrank, | Leetcode, Turing, Toptal). | barry-cotter wrote: | If it is completely trivial to fix the busted status quo | you should be able to make a great deal of money doing so. | Those companies you named exist to get people hired. If you | have an alternative system that works you will be fishing | from a different pool of candidates. That didn't work for | starfighter.io. If you can make it work for you you'll get | very rich. | Apocryphon wrote: | Did any company even take Starfighter seriously? The | companies the previous comment mentioned are at least | used in industry. Even Google or ex-Google employees have | gotten into this with Byteboard: | | https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/26/byteboard-nabs-5m-seed- | to-... | jmchuster wrote: | It's pretty simple to get a rough estimate of how many | people you need to hire a year. You take your engineering | count, say ~10,000, how long engineers stay at each | company, say 4 years, and you come out to 2,500 engineers | you need to hire every year, assuming you don't need to | grow, to maintain the status quo. So then you take a larger | company like google, with ~100,000 engineers, and they'll | need to hire at least 25,000 engineers a year. | lhorie wrote: | I think the more important overarching point is that most | candidates aren't prolific github people like you, and | likewise most companies are not going to cater their | interviewing practices to woo your preferred flavor of | interview style. | | Most candidates don't have code samples laying around (e.g. | they only write proprietary code for work), so asking for | some is a non-starter in a lot of cases. | | Another point worth of reflecting, your accomplishments in | OSS say nothing of interviewing expertise, they are | completely different skillsets. Companies may not hire in | the order of 50k people a year, but interviewer calibration | in a large org is absolutely a problem that isn't easily | solved by just following the opinion of some random 6-digit | salary SWE. | | As someone who's interviewed in the order of a few hundred | senior SWEs, I think there are good and bad ways to go | about any interview format, including leetcode-style. | | Complaining about how companies don't just throw away their | interview practices in favor of [insert pet format here] | doesn't really help, since it isn't really actionable. | | We talk about the perils of full software rewrites, I think | similar concerns exist for hiring as well. | pthread_t wrote: | > OSS projects with hundreds of stars on GitHub | | I'm in the same boat, yet most companies don't seem to care | about OSS contributions, despite their rhetoric. | | They want us to solve a few leetcode medium/hard questions | within the span of an interview. | tuckerman wrote: | The class is being taught in the Computer Science department, | not the software engineering or programming department. I think | the bigger issue is the conflation of CS and SWE. | | To your point about how you interview, unless there is an | alternative I would never be able to apply to your company. I | have no open source contributions or code samples to share and | no interest in writing a book. I also have no interest in | applying to places with take home exams where the company gets | me to spend time interviewing without a commensurate investment | of time on their part. | | Where does that leave us? I guess it's not ideal but, at least | for me, the current process seems like it's at least a local | maximum. | pthread_t wrote: | > without a commensurate investment of time on their part | | Doesn't grinding LeetCode apply here as well? | paradygm wrote: | > I've told at least 5 or 6 companies that wanted to white- | board me to suck it. It's honestly insulting that I'm forced to | white-board when I have two books with my name on them | (published by Apress), contributions to Golang (small commits, | but they still got me in the AUTHORS file), and OSS projects | with hundreds of stars on GitHub | | That is all commendable but none of that tells me if I can work | with you. When I interview candidates I use whiteboarding as a | collaborative opportunity to see how the interviewee thinks. I | treat it as a similar experience when I am the one being | interviewed, which is why I have never understood the hostility | toward whiteboarding. How else in the limited window of time | that is the interview can I learn as much about the people I | would be working with? | literallyWTF wrote: | This is the dumbest excuse for white boarding/l33t code that | isn't even applied in real life. | | You can be the most pleasant person who's articulating their | thoughts in simple and easy to understand ways and if you | don't solve the bullshit problem in o(-1) time you'll get | rejected. | pthread_t wrote: | > a collaborative opportunity to see how the interviewee | thinks. | | In principle, this sounds great. In reality, if the | interviewee fails to come up with the correct/optimal | solution for the duration of the interview, they are going to | be rejected. | gedy wrote: | > I have never understood the hostility toward whiteboarding | | Maybe you haven't been blown off and treated like an idiot by | some interviewer when you couldn't answer their pet question? | Even when you're more experienced and skilled than they were? | carabiner wrote: | Do you think companies would make more money if they altered | their interview practices? Or is this way of interviewing | somehow morally wrong ("insulting")? | Swizec wrote: | The problem with looking at OSS and publications is that this | penalizes a lot of people with real lives outside of work. | Especially problematic if you're into equitable hiring | processes aiming to hire people who aren't in their 20's | anymore. | | Looking at past work penalizes people who primarily have | experience in large systems where their work is NDA'd, | impossible to understand without a loooot of background, or | simply unshareable for any number of reasons. Also really bad | for new entrants into the industry. They don't have past work. | | The take-home exam penalizes people who have lives. | | The "do smol thing together so we can talk about it" interview | penalizes people with performance anxiety. | | There is no silver bullet. But if I'd have to choose, I'd pick | the least bad typical interview approach that judges everyone | based on their performance on a small job-relevant task. At | least you avoid a lot of bias. | | source: I've interviewed over 100 engineers over the past 18 | months as we scaled the engineering org roughly 3x. I honestly | don't even look at candidates' resumes anymore (this is after | initial screens have been made) because it always leads to | bias. | pthread_t wrote: | > The "do smol thing together so we can talk about it" | interview penalizes people with performance anxiety. | | Does this apply to the Leetcode style interviews? | Swizec wrote: | If they're any good. | | But really, it depends what people think of when they say | "Leetcode style interview". There's a lot of coding | interviews that superficially look like stupid leetcode, | but the job really does benefit from that. | | A basic example: I ask you to model some toy problem as a | state machine. Is that a stupid leetcode challenge? Maybe. | But many if not most complex UI interactions really are | state machines and if you're the kind of person who | intuitively thinks in state machines, you're going to write | more maintainable code. | | My personal blind spot is that thinking in graphs is | difficult for me. I just fail to see _"Oh, this is a graph | problem!"_. A lot of times the code I write would be much | easier to maintain and write had I realized I'm solving a | graph problem. Better performance too. | | edit: if you mean the performance anxiety party, yes. | Several research papers have shown that anxiety induced by | the interview context impacts people's performance. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-02-27 23:00 UTC)