That most people have a hard time viewing the world from different lenses.
The article presents a picture of a guy “studying up” for a career and his adventures in interviewing. As someone who’s interviewed hundreds of candidates I noticed red flags right away. For instance, if someone asks you to design a micro service - you don’t say “I can’t”. No FAANGco interviewer wants you to fail. In fact, they want to help you. The best worst answer would have been “I’m not really familiar with micro services but I’ll give it a shot. Could you explain a bit more about them?” This shows the candidate doesn’t falter at a challenge, is willing to dive deep, and is committed to the task.
The lens shift comes into play when 50% of the candidates can’t complete fizz buzz, another 25% simply lied in there resume about any relating experience, and the other 24% don’t have any real understanding about algorithms.
There are software developers and then there are great software developers. It’s generally initiative and algorithms that separate the two.
And yet, virtually all boot camps allocate time to interview questions now. Hell, there are boot camps devoted entirely to whiteboarding interviews. Surely this cottage industry, similar to those for gaming standardized tests (SAT/GRE/LSATs/MCATs), is a red flag that the industry has fallen into a pit of Goodhart's law?
Hmm, perhaps. But interviewing has become big businesses for prep and passing. There are companies that will ghost interview for a candidate, even through actual onsite interviews. It’s a real problem.
Tangentially, candidates should read “Programming Interviews Exposed: Secrets to Landing Your Next Job” for prep. It was recommended to me a long time ago and it was enough.
There are N other separations I could think of besides the ones you pointed out:
- someone who gets anxious and blanks out given hardcore requirements these kind of interviews have, smart people can also go bad at tests
- someone who's having a tough day and would fare better taking the challenge home with quiet relaxing time like they would expect to have at work if they need to code complex algorithms
- no interest in past code written that could potentially show other traits of the candidate a quick coding quiz can't
- etc (no need to be extra creative here, just be humble and imagine what the candidate might be going through to get a dream job)
The simple fact an apparently smart young person joining the industry gets burned out like that due to stupidly arrogant hiring processes like these is a sign HR are failing miserably in the computer industry, and it's not something that started last month. Simplifying the burden of such process for actual people looking for a job to show how they are worth is dehumanizing.
False negatives waste far less time (dollars) than false positives. It’s unfair but worth it to not force a team to have to work with an unqualified candidate for a year or maybe more.
The problem with an unyielding, fairly uniform obsession with interview problems unrelated to actual day-to-day development is that you're institutionalizing Goodhart's Law. Eventually the interviews will encourage false positives as candidates grind on CTCI and LeetCode and pass interviews without actually being able to excel at actual work responsibilities.
I don’t think so. That’s why you’ll have candidates passing the questions but not the interview. We’re not looking got rote answers, we’re looking for comprehension, problem solving, and discussion.
It’s perfectly possible to drill and take preparatory courses to finesse communication skills specifically for answering and explaining whiteboarding algo/ds questions. These resources are perfectly aware that rote memorization is insufficient but being able to communicate is also required to game these interviews.
This right here, I don’t get. Why TF would a manager make you work with unqualified people for a year+? Between evaluation periods and at-will employment, there’s no reason this should happen.
The article presents a picture of a guy “studying up” for a career and his adventures in interviewing. As someone who’s interviewed hundreds of candidates I noticed red flags right away. For instance, if someone asks you to design a micro service - you don’t say “I can’t”. No FAANGco interviewer wants you to fail. In fact, they want to help you. The best worst answer would have been “I’m not really familiar with micro services but I’ll give it a shot. Could you explain a bit more about them?” This shows the candidate doesn’t falter at a challenge, is willing to dive deep, and is committed to the task.
The lens shift comes into play when 50% of the candidates can’t complete fizz buzz, another 25% simply lied in there resume about any relating experience, and the other 24% don’t have any real understanding about algorithms.
There are software developers and then there are great software developers. It’s generally initiative and algorithms that separate the two.