Programmers Are Confessing Their Coding Sins To Protest a Broken Job Interview Process (theoutline.com)

A number of programmers have taken it to Twitter to bring it to everyone's, but particularly recruiter's, attention about the grueling interview process in their field that relies heavily on technical questions. David Heinemeier Hansson, a well-known programmer and the creator of the popular Ruby on Rails coding framework, started it when he tweeted, "Hello, my name is David. I would fail to write bubble sort on a whiteboard. I look code up on the internet all the time. I don't do riddles." Another coder added, "Hello, my name is Tim. I'm a lead at Google with over 30 years coding experience and I need to look up how to get length of a python string." Another coder chimed in, "Hello my name is Mike, I'm a GDE and lead at NY Times, I don't know what np complete means. Should I?" A feature story on The Outline adds: This interview style, widely used by major tech companies including Google and Amazon, typically pits candidates against a whiteboard without access to reference material -- a scenario working programmers say is demoralizing and an unrealistic test of actual ability. People spend weeks preparing for this process, afraid that the interviewer will quiz them on the one obscure algorithm they haven't studied. "A cottage industry has emerged that reminds us uncomfortably of SAT prep," Karla Monterroso, VP of programs for Code2040, an organization for black and Latino techies, wrote in a critique of the whiteboard interview. [...] This means companies tend to favor recent computer science grads from top-tier schools who have had time to cram; in other words, it doesn't help diversify the field with women, older people, and people of color.

Comments

I don't know if this is worth answering. Should I?

[Archtech]

"Hello my name is Mike, I'm a GDE and lead at NY Times, I don't know what np complete means. Should I?"

1. Since he works at the NYT, nothing he does matters. The newspaper's output is harmful or nonsensical, so in a way it is better if it isn't published.

2. Thanks to the wonder of Google, he could find out what "NP complete" means in about one minute. So the question is: does he think finding out would be worth one minute of his time? Further, if not, how good a programmer can be become?

3. If you think about it, he can't really judge whether he should know what "NP complete" means until he knows what it means.