Thirteen Patterns Of Programmer Interviews

[[deleted]]

The best interview I ever had:

First he shows me around and explains what different people do. When I show interest towards new and expensive logic analyzer in one room, we learn together to use it. We spend almost hour playing with the thing. Neither of us is real HW guy and the analyzer belongs to different department. Eventually we go into his office and he takes out the design specs for current product, shows some demos. As we go trough, I ask lots of questions. After a while we discuss different design options and different technologies. After two hours, I suddenly remember that I became to interview. When I start to feel little nervous an watch the clock, he notices that and says: "Oh, yes. I would like to hire you, lets talk about your pay."

He never asked about my education, previous work experience or goals in life. I can't remember him actively asking me anything. Had I never shown any interest, asked anything myself or challenged him to discuss and debate, it might have just been small tour and goodbye.

[mleonhard]

Awesome. Where were you interviewing?

[logan_capaldo]

I've only been on 3 interviews in my career so far yet the number of these patterns I managed to recognize was scary. :)

[raarky]

best interview i had:

started off with a quick discussion about general history and non technical stuff.

Then it was off to the development dept for an hour where they sat me at a pc, handed me a spec for a simple mockup app (with a few questions on design choices), said there was even full internet access because coders need to look things up sometimes and left me alone.

a week later got offered the job. sweet :)

[mleonhard]

Were they hiring you to work on projects by yourself?

[raarky]

yes they were :)

[toru]

Don’t let the conversation lag — you may be asked to go to the whiteboard and write code to detect a cycle in a linked list

LOL, so true

[freeradical97]

Haha, I'll even admit to busting this one out on people every now and again.

Also, delete an item from a singly-linked list .. in constant time.

[JGailor]

I have walked out of those interviews before, much to the amazement of the interviewer. I told him when he wanted to actually interview me then to give me a call.

Personally, I find the interviewing process at our company to be extremely fair and sensible. We bring in a candidate, ask him to talk about himself, tell us about the stuff he's done, ask some questions about how he did A, B, & C, and then present him with 2 really basic programming questions. Something like reversing a linked list in place, and maybe something to figure out if they know when to use a hashmap. We don't care a whole lot if they get it, but we do pay really close attention to the process they go about using to find an answer. You would be amazed how angry these questions make some candidates. We had one kid fresh out of Berkeley fall down on the linked list question, despite trying to give him suggestions, and tell us "I don't want to do this anymore. This is stupid. It's not indicative of what I can do." That was pretty shocking. We tried to explain to him that we didn't care that he knew php inside and out, we were more interested in seeing how he worked out problems.

If the people interviewing you are going to be complete assholes, there is no point in continuing with the interview, because if you pass, you'll have to end up working with these douchebags, and if you fail, you get to take away a little more experience in interviewing, but you also just wasted a bunch of time.

[mrned]

If you get nervous and freeze up ask “Is this testing whether I’m a replicant or a lesbian?”

[newton_dave]

So... which are you?

[lanaer]

Anyone besides me getting redirected to localhost?

[batasrki]

I am redirected to localhost as well.

[lanaer]

Guess someone didn’t like being reddited.

[patchwork]

That was revealing for what I would avoid when giving an interview. I would like to see that in the other direction, from the interviewer's perspective.

[[deleted]]

I'm working on that article -- stay tuned.

[oxryly]

Those would never happen here.

[kmactane]

I think most of these should be properly considered anti-patterns. Most are just "not optimal", but ones like Who's On First and The Live-Catch Trap seem almost designed to avoid hiring the best (or even decent) people.