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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.
Would be a trial (as in free trial). Throw a fairly standard problem at them, but not one with a simple, common place implementation. Drop them at a computer with internet access, give them a couple hours, and see what they have at the end of it. It's not perfect, but it's probably a better way to evaluate skills.
I have interviewed many people and I don't believe in trick questions. Programmers are not supposed to memorize every algorithm. They should understand how to attack and solve a problem. I was always more interested in their thought process rather than if they get the right answer. How they look at the problem is more important
in other words, it doesn't help diversify the field with women, older people, and people of color.
While there are some good reasons to dislike "code on a whiteboard" interviews, this is not one of them.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Hi, my name is Vince. I interviewed for Amazon, specifically for their PHP API for AWS development team. Despite an entire background of 10+ years of developing front-facing PHP APIs for other businesses, plus having a major part of my code available for public review on GitHub, I failed their interview process because they wanted me to write a specific type of searching and sorting algorithm, by hand, on white-board. This type of code would never have been used on the job, ever. Yet this is what they interview on. The job was to build a PHP API so PHP developers can call basic PHP functions, and the library would translate them over to HHTPS calls to AWS. All of the complex computing/searching/sorting is handled by the existing AWS services.
There's always that one guy on the interview team that would rather stroke his own ego by asking a "trick question". 100% of the time it will be either on an obscure function or feature of a language that may be used once in a career, or it will be so poorly worded as to be unrecognizable. I really don't believe that any other profession runs into this problem. With 40 years experience, an extensive resume, 100's of successful projects, I'm still treated like I graduated yesterday and am "tested" on what I know. It's insulting and companies need to stop. I'm at the point in my career that when the "trick question" person hits the white board, I ignore them and redirect the conversation back to the people asking real questions. If you are an interviewer you'll do yourself and the potential hire a much greater service by either presenting them with a challenge you've recently overcome or asking them to narrate one they've recently overcome.
IOW - trick question guy, knock the shit off, you're annoying the rest of us. It is much more important to determine the prospects problem solving methods and skills than their fluency in the programming flavor of the month.
"Show me an example of a program that you wrote and are proud of"
(and then go over the program with them to make sure they understand how it works and why they wrote it the way they did)
The proof is in the pudding.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Quick cheat sheets are important. Not everyone can memorize every single library function in every single language they use on a daily basis, even simple functions.
Is it:
strlen(string)
len(string)
length(string)
count(string)
string.len
string.len()
string.length
string.length()
or any number of other variations.
As a developer, I'm sure most everyone knows the task they're trying to do (get the length of a string), but there are so many variations of the same function between libraries and languages, that it is often quicker and easier just to search which one is appropriate for the given language, than to simply type each one out and test the code to see which one doesn't bail on execution.
and I don't know what "truth" means. I look up things like "democracy" and "separation of powers". I don't do riddles.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
These technical interview approaches aren't very good, in my opinion, because they basically assume that the beginning and end of all software development training happened in a second year algorithms class. Algorithms are very cool, I understand why people want to talk about them, but they represent a minority programming challenge in today's world.
Speaking only for myself, in a given month of coding I may only have to consider which algorithms I should use once or twice. The rest of my time is spent on GUI design, communicating with coworkers, working on documentation, and switching between projects. Putting aside the value of algorithms in an interview, how can the interviewer ascertain all of my other software development skills if we spend 2 hours mapping trees on a white board? I would argue that they can't, and by asking technical questions about algorithms or brainteasers, they really aren't properly evaluating the skills of a professional software developer.
This reminds me of one the anecdotes I picked up from one of my college engineering professors in regards to his philosophies on tests:
"Would you fly in an airplane forcibly designed in one hour with no notes?"
And before someone starts busting my balls, yes students should learn the underlying fundamental mechanics of the subject matter. It's more of a protest of the unnecessary aspect of memorizing the details that have no bearing on someone's understanding.
As a CS professor, I find the use of these kind of review processes kind of contradictory.
In education, we often based pass/fail on two hours long exams where the student has no access to outside information. Then companies say that's not how the real world works. CS evaluation sucks!
We change to continuous evaluation or project based learning, where student has longer time (well, certainly not 2 hours in a closed room) and can access external resources. You know, like the real world. And now it's companies the ones evaluating candidates the old fashioned way!
Let's go back further in time and go for corporal punishments...
What I've always found funny about this interview process is that the assumption is always that the interviewer knows the correct answer(s) to the question. It's painful when they don't.
Years ago I interviewed at Google and was asked a question about bit counting (some variation on "given a bit vector, wat's the fastest way to count the number of 1s?"). I quickly answered, "well, if your processor has a population count instruction, stream your vector through that and accumulate the result in a register". Having just evaluated bit counting methods as part of my Ph.D. dissertation, I knew this was the fastest way to do it, assuming the instruction was available (it's not on x86, but is on Power/VMX and most DSPs support it as well).
After I got a blank stare back from the interviewee, I said, "Oh, you were looking for the lookup table answer". We could have left it at that, but he went on to explain using some very convoluted logic how the lookup table would actually be faster than using a dedicated instruction and that my answer was clearly wrong. I mentioned a little bit about the number of cycles required for each approach, but he had none of it. In his mind, I had the wrong answer, even though my second answer was what he was looking for.
It was at that moment that I realized Google was not going to be a good place to work.
-Chris
Technical expertise is only one part of the whole picture. But it may be the part people thrust into the interviewer chair are most familiar with. Sometimes the interviews feel like a final exam and I wonder if they interviewer had final exams pretty recently.
I have been known to point out these annoying little things to my colleagues when we are hunting to fill positions:
Do the candidates' personalities mesh well with yours? Do you think you can stand being around them and working with them day after day?
Will they be reliable?
Do they seem easy to train? They will need to learn how this group does business and works together after all.
Do they express curiosity when they don't know the real answer?
Do they make things up to fake an answer? Or do they say "I don't know the answer, but based on my experience I would guess this..."?
Do they communicate well? Do they listen well?
Experts know that it is almost always better to use the sort from the language's library, and if they can't then they would look up the code for Quick sort and use that.
It's more like asking an expert pianist to tune a piano. Yes, some can, and that's great. But others can't, and it's usually not relevant--because you usually hire a piano tuner to tune the piano. Just like how you really should use an existing function for sorting.
I probably learned about the difference between NP-complete and NP-hard 25 years ago. It hasn't come up since. Much is the academic stuff can be fun to study, it's useless in most jobs. The only algorithmic question that ever comes up in practice is "is it better then O(n^2)". In-memory efficiency so rarely matters.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
By using a "name-brand algorithm" which I learned in 2nd year or whatever, umpteen years ago, you are testing for cramming ability, recency of test-cramming at school, and mental copy-paste of whatever was crammed.
You are definitely not testing for problem comprehension and creativity of solution or methodical approach to solution. All of those skills will be severely impaired by time-pressure panic, if you have a good programmer in front of you who has not crammed that particular cookie-cutter name-brand algorithm lately.
It would be one step better if you just said: write an algorithm to sort this array/list of values. But you still chose a problem for which comprehension, creativity, and methodical solution skills are not needed, if the person happens to pattern match your posed problem with the bubble-sort they just memorized for interview-readiness purposes.
So if anything, choose a simple-ish problem that is NOT one that has readily available mental copy-paste cheats available.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Hello, my name is Anonymous Coward. I am a software developer.
I was talking to you about a database kernel position which is a field I have spent much of my career in and in one case was a key member of the design/coding team developing the initial (and several subsequent) releases of a revolutionary enterprise class scalable DBMS which is still being sold over thirty years later and in production at many of the biggest companies. You, of course, must have known that because you contacted me and, unusually, I decided to stop by and chat with you because I have a soft spot for startup companies, database, and engineering managers who look around seeking talent themselves rather than relying solely on recruiters. You asserted that your startup was developing an enterprise class scalable DBMS system so it seemed like it might be interesting.
You then asked me to write, on the whiteboard, a 'debit/credit' function that took three arguments and returned, IIRC, the amount transferred (admittedly that was a little odd). The first two arguments were account objects (passed by reference if I recall) representing the source and destination accounts respectively and the third argument was an amount (presumably in the same currency as both accounts were maintained in) to transfer (a float if I recall -- that, of course, is likely stupid in itself when dealing with currency).
I, understandably, was perplexed -- you must want something more than this simple function (I'm not fresh out of high school looking for a summer job) and I tried to get more requirements out of you and got none except when I asked if this function was to provide its own concurrency control or if a higher level would have insured both accounts were sufficiently locked you said something like "Okay, you need to provide the locking" and agreed that I could assume existence of "Acquire/ReleaseWriteLockAccount(AccountObject)" functions.
Okay -- so I'm thinking this is a concurrency problem, no problem (still lame, but okay...). Obviously I need to deal with deadlock potential so I ask if I there is some unique attribute of each account (you didn't give me a description of the account object's public members) that had a well defined order that I (and other developers) agreed to use to order locks when locking multiple accounts to eliminate or at least reduce deadlocks. You weren't prepared for the question so I asked if I could assume (I think) that the account number was a public field, unique among all accounts, and supported the LessThan operator with traditional semantics. You said, sure.
I wrote the code making sure to lock the accounts in order of account number, transfer the funds, unlock correctly and return the required value.
You were not happy -- what you really wanted me to check, it turns out, was that the source account would not end up with a negative balance and fail to do the transfer and return 0 as the result.
What you didn't seem to realize is that in the real world cash balances on individual accounts go negative sometimes. In fact, at that instant, I had one (of multiple) accounts at one brokerage firm which had had a small negative cash balance due to an inter-account transfer out for over six months and no one cared because I had multiple accounts at that firm with a net value of well over a million dollars and cash balances (well, "cash equivalents"), overall, of a few hundred thousand dollars.
Both of us made a decision in that discussion. You decided you didn't want to hire me. I decided I would never work for you or your company as I didn't want to risk working on/at a team/company which was so poor at evaluating people and would pass on good developers who know how the real world works and would likely hire unqualified people who answered your kindergarten questions the particular way you wanted.
Of course, I was glad that we both made those decisions because your company seems to have never got past a very modest A round and seems to have disappeared off the face of the Earth quietly.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
The point is, the FOSS project(s) are your portfolio, similar to how a graphic artist, photographer, architect demonstrates their ability with a portfolio.
The difference is, the artist's portfolio is built up with their paid work. Every project they work on gets added to it. A programmer can't simply take company code with them when they go interviewing, so the project has to be a hobby project.
Can't be bothered to do at least one hobby/self-training/benevolent programming project? You don't love programming enough to be that good at it
That logic doesn't follow. Not everyone who's great at programming works on hobby projects, and not every such project will be published on Github. I work with 2 people who don't program after work, and they are just as productive as everyone else. As for myself, I also don't publish my non-work projects, because I can't be bothered to write documentation for them and I've coded them to serve my use case specifically.
Confession: I run technical tests when recruiting IT persons. But it is on a computer, with Internet access, and looking up documentation or forums is fine.
In fact, using Internet or documentation to find something is a very good indicator that the candidate has skills and experience.
Way back in the 1980s, one of my physics professors told the following joke:
The trustees of the university want to find out if the professors really knew their stuff so they came up with a question: What's 2+2?
They go to the math department and the professors there said, "Oh, that's easy. It's 4."
Then the go to the physics department and the professors there said, "Oh, it's 4.000000000 with an uncertainty of another decimal place."
Then the go to the engineering department and the professors there said, "Just a minute while I get my handbook."
Finally, they go to the accounting department and the professors there look around to see if anyone can hear them and then the whisper, "What do you want to be?"