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Programming Interview Questions Are Too Hard and Too Short (triplebyte.com)
Programming interview questions can feel unnecessarily difficult. Sometimes they actually are, a new study has found. And this isn't just because they make interviews excessively stressful. The study shows that harder programming questions actually do a worse job of predicting final outcomes than easier ones. From the study: Programming under time pressure is difficult. This is especially true during interviews. A coding exercise that would seem simple under normal circumstances somehow becomes a formidable challenge under the bright lights of an interview room. Stress hormones cloud your thinking during interviews (even though, sadly, neither fight nor flight is an effective response to a menacing programming problem). And it can almost feel like the questions are designed to be perversely difficult. I actually think this is more than just a feeling.
Interview questions are designed to be hard. Because the cost of hiring a bad engineer is so much higher than the cost of rejecting a good engineer, companies are incentivized to set a high bar. And for most companies that means asking hard questions. Intuitively this makes sense because harder questions seem like they should result in a more rigorous screening process. But intuition turns out to be a poor guide here. Our data shows that harder questions are actually less predictive than relatively easy ones. Further reading: Programmers Are Confessing Their Coding Sins To Protest a Broken Job Interview Process.
Interview questions are designed to be hard. Because the cost of hiring a bad engineer is so much higher than the cost of rejecting a good engineer, companies are incentivized to set a high bar. And for most companies that means asking hard questions. Intuitively this makes sense because harder questions seem like they should result in a more rigorous screening process. But intuition turns out to be a poor guide here. Our data shows that harder questions are actually less predictive than relatively easy ones. Further reading: Programmers Are Confessing Their Coding Sins To Protest a Broken Job Interview Process.
I shortlisted for an interview and got ambushed on my arrival. There were 19 other candidates, and we're all ushered into a small room with 20 desktop spots on a table that went around the entire room. We were handed one single sheet of paper with a coding problem we were to find a solution for. All 20 workstations were Mac Minis. None of us were told there was a programming exercise, none of us were told it was a Mac shop.
I walked out of the "interview" in disgust. Eleven others went with me. By the looks on the interviewers' face, this has happened before.
I don't mind being put to the test, but I don't like being ambushed.
-- Karma whore? You betcha. --