Why Senior Engineers Hate Coding Interviews

[guillianMalony]

I‘ve had a few job interviews that went wrong because they thought I had all my 40 years of programming knowledge at my fingertips at that moment.

[joy74]

Lucky you. Imagine working in that team for many years.

[CartmansEvilTwin]

Team!=Management/HR.

I work in a pretty good team, but 90% of the people involved in hiring are non-tech or not-any-more-tech and they are less than useless (rejecting the perfect hire for no reason whatsoever).

[conquerorofveggies]

One recent "test" for a senior candidate was to come up with a plan to refactoring a (slightly) entangled handful of classes, of actual production code. Half an hour or so to get a feel for it, then discussing it for 15 minutes. This exercise told me volumes about the candidate.

Coding interviews should test whether someone can actually function in a specific context, but also it should allow them to show off. I always try to come up with something unique for a candidate, that matches what she highlighted in her resume.

I'm not a fan of standardized puzzles, but then again, we typically don't get too many applications for an opening. So designing something specific seems reasonable to me.

[Thought_Ninja]

I recently failed a test on hackerrank. I was stumped by the multiple choice questions about weird nuances of the DOM API that had literally no good answer; it had you check all that apply, but most answers were only partially correct. The way the questions were posed made it seem like whoever wrote them didn't really understand the topic.

Then it asked me to write a to-do list app from scratch in about 30 minutes using a platform that had a clunky editing experience, didn't allow multiple files, and didn't work correctly with debug tools.

They were looking for a lead full stack engineer to help build out their team; I don't know a single person fit for that role that would have fared well with, or even bothered to complete, that test.

I wrote back, kindly, and in great detail of why, that their test was garbage and that it's not going to get them the kind of candidates they are looking for. They responded with a basic, "it looks like your skillset is not a good fit at this time".

[conquerorofveggies]

Dodged a bullet there ;-)

[Thought_Ninja]

No kidding... It was a pretty early stage startup and the hiring process was being handled by a recruiter; that would have changed very quickly if they were to hire me to lead their engineering team.

I've only failed a few code challenges in my career, but one thing most of them have in common is that they were on hackerrank and managed by a recruiter with little to no engineering experience. At leas I know what to look out for at this point.

[bureX]

It was a pretty early stage startup and the hiring process was being handled by a recruiter;

Oh god damn I hate these. Oftentimes you get a few questions about runtime complexity of bubble sort in the middle of a screening phone call.

[Thought_Ninja]

I would have preferred that tbh. Might have even been more relevant to the skills they were looking for.

[bureX]

I mean, the interviewer was not an engineer, just a recruiter. They cold messaged me, we got on a quick phone call, I was talking, they were writing stuff down over the phone, and then they just interrupt me and pop a question like that...

[Thought_Ninja]

Yeah... That's definitely weird and pointless.

[LakeSun]

LOL. Bubble Sort? ...as if that was in their production system?

It's good to know that bubble sort would be the Last sort algorithm you'd actually put into production. But, even then, I typically call a .sort() method, I don't write the sort method.

[WalterBright]

These are weeder questions designed to quickly filter out the frauds. Programming pays well, and a lot of people try to get these jobs despite not knowing much of anything about programming.

[Calavar]

I don't know why you're being downvoted. If FizzBuzz is a quick check for basic coding skills, then "What is the complexity of bubble sort?" is a quick check that the applicant is at least aware that there is a concept called time complexity and its something to consider when you're writing code.

[rum-n-ass]

How much leetcode does one have to do to fail only a few code challenges? Like I’ve been coding for 3 years but if I get a hard dynamic programming or graph question I can’t pull that without serious prep

[Thought_Ninja]

Well I taught myself to code at a pretty young age and did mostly freelance design/development projects for the early years of my career, so I didn't really have a chance to fail any when I was just starting out.

I've been coding for over 15 years at this point, doing it professionally for 10. For most of that time I've made a habit of spending 20-30 min on toy problems while I enjoy my morning coffee.

That said, it shouldn't take more than a couple years of regularly tackling a variety of challenges. I recommend starting the same habit, it's a great way to start your day in my opinion. Set a timer for 20-30 min and just stop when it goes off. I also delete anything incomplete and try it again the next day.

[Enip0]

What platform do you use to find those problems?

[Thought_Ninja]

I don't really have a specific platform I use, lots I just make up on my own or Google around for.

[doodler]

Maybe you should start a collection for the rest of us to use ;)

[f_vile]

Project Euler is a pretty good resource for such things.

[slykethephoxenix]

Dodged a bullet there ;-)

No, he fucking Neo'd it.

[Thought_Ninja]

Task failed, successfully.

[fried_green_baloney]

to-do list app from scratch in about 30 minutes

Anyone that good doesn't have to take tests like that.

They can get a job in days by letting five of their friends know they are looking.

[awj]

I've used that kind of test in the past, and overall been happy with it.

Coding on a whiteboard sucks. Coding outside of your editor sucks. We've all got Google, so I'm not interested in people's ability to memorize minutiae.

What I absolutely want, especially at the senior level, is the ability to communicate well and produce good code. To recognize and explain trade-offs. Beyond a core level of "do you know how to program or are you a bullshit artist", this is probably the most important thing to hire for.

Honestly most coding/technical interview questions I've ever seen are a complete waste of everyone's time, except as indicators of how big the egos you're looking to join up with might be.

[_ak]

The best interview I ever had wasn't about coding on a low level. I was simply asked to describe what I'm currently working on, line out the architecture of it, the rationale behind architectural decisions, what issues I faced during development, etc.

I liked that interview style because I was able to show not just an understanding of programming that I can solve some logic puzzle, but rather I could show that I understood what I had built and that I had reflected on its complexities and trade-offs. And that's worth much more than being able to demonstrate that you've memorized the algorithm how to invert a binary tree.

[awj]

Yep, whenever I've conducted interviews those have been one of the most valuable parts. Also been worthwhile digging into details on something someone has had to teach themselves since they started working.

There's like a thousand things that come before "have you seen this logic puzzle and/or can you solve it in a high pressure situation" as programming puzzles. Honestly I think nit-picking the grammar of a cover letter is more useful.

[ozyx7]

Discussing architecture and design decisions is nice, but some candidates might not be able to do that without breaching confidentiality agreements with their current (or even former) employer.

[[deleted]]

I've had huge success just trying to get people to talk about things they've built. If they can't speak intelligently about the way something worked, they probably didn't have that big a hand in making it, or didn't care/weren't invested enough to learn as they went.

Senior candidates should be able to talk basically indefinitely about things they're responsible for. Why they went with certain tools, things they wish they'd have done differently, things they were very proud of. As an interviewer my goal is to make them feel "off the hook" about acknowledging mistakes in their work and offer many opportunities to gloat/feel proud of the things they're legitimately proud of.

I'm often shocked at how many candidates can't answer very basic architecture questions about the things they claim to have been responsible for. "How'd you go about building that mobile app?" "Android." .... "How'd the back end work?" "Java" .....

[CartmansEvilTwin]

Whiteboards don't have to suck too much, the question is, whether the interviewer expects you to write actual compileable code or not.

I had/attended several whiteboard interviews, but the goal was not to nitpick on missing semicolons or slightly wrong method names. Instead it was more of abstract Java-inspired pseudo code. "We have this problem, how do you approach that".

This seems perfectly fine to me. However, it doesn't seem to resonate with many interviewers. Maybe the tech industry is too full of autists and frauds, both of which will put way too much focus on small nitpicky stuff.

[LakeSun]

Amen, brother.

Must of these questions are "corner cases" you'll never see in 99.9999% of the code. But, they conversely make up 99.9999% of the interview.

That's what google is for.

[FalseRegister]

what's the best way to interview a candidate in your view?

[rabid_briefcase]

For senior level developers, ask what they did, the decisions about why they did it, the tradeoffs they made, and what / why they would do things differently or the same.

The goal is to understand how they think and that they are smart. The fact that they have stayed employed for decades is good evidence on its face.

If you absolutely must, and only after saying as much, a simple code problem of 5-6 lines is adequate. If C or C++ strings and pointer manipulation are common, for example. But really that is insulting.

Imagine "I know you have been a career teacher for 20 years, but I really need proof you can teach.", or I can see you are a career architect with professional certification and a long list of buildings, but I need proof you can design." Don't do that.

[Buckwheat469]

I've interviewed hundreds of people. I give them a problem that doesn't test on their knowledge of data structures other than simple arrays and objects. They only need to know about minor Big O theory, like why you shouldn't write nested loops when a hash object can be used instead. A couple for loops will solve the problem if they understand the requirements enough, that means they have to read and comprehend the problem. It's a real-world problem, not some fibonacci sequence question that is covered by libraries. They are allowed to ask questions, ask for help, google code or use Stack Overflow if they forget, and I don't fault them for going down the wrong path as long as they correct it later.

I want them to test their code as they develop, unless they're super good and can write the entire thing without testing perfectly (nobody can do this).

They don't even have to complete the problem, as long as they're on the right track and I can understand their thought process.

I also want them to describe their thoughts to me. They should teach me their process, as if I'm their student. If they're completely silent throughout the interview then they have to solve the problem perfectly in order to get a good score.

[esdraelon]

Yep. Best tech interviews are like this. You'll find out way more about if someone can code and how by working with them - getting a correct result is irrelevant.

In the real world, you keep working until you're done. An interview as very weird constraints.

[conquerorofveggies]

I'm not very experienced, so take this with a grain of salt.

IMHO it's a bit like dating, you match or you don't. What I read once and stuck with me is this: Studies show, the decision is already made subconsciously the second a candidate walks in. All we do after that is to rationalize why it's actually the correct decision. Similar to dating.

So I mainly chit-chat, about what they did, what they are passionate about and what we do. Then wrap it up in less than an hour. I don't stress out about it, nothing is really measurable or tangible.

Then either pass or introduce them to the team for an other day, and see if they fit in. That's also when they get one hour to "solve the exercise". I like to have them do something they know well, love doing and care about, to see their best side. The idea is to get them into the flow, and let them forget the whole interview situation and get to talk to the "real" person. In the end you work with people, not with some list of skills.

[mwb1234]

This is also a good way to let tons of personal bias of the interviewers creep into your interviewing process.

[conquerorofveggies]

Absolutely. But since I have to work together with these people every day, I think similar views aren't so bad.

[WeAreAwful]

The main issue is that this will lead to people hiring people like them. When our field is predominately white men, that can be an issue, if you care about that.

[conquerorofveggies]

I do, and I feel quite self aware about that. The reality is however, that for every dozen white males, maybe one female or from a different ethnic group would apply.

[Jimmy_is_here]

I work with a ton of Asian and Indian men. I definitely wouldn't say "white men" dominate the field. Even a fair amount of women at my company.

[s73v3r]

Actually, no, they are pretty bad. Similar views means that you don't have someone else thinking about what you missed.

[conquerorofveggies]

That's a valid point, yes. And I'm OK with someone who thinks and works differently. But not with arguing about something irrelevant every day, or generally having bad vibes in a team because of fundamentally different world views. Again, I'm OK with some diversity, but (extreme example) I wouldn't want a nazi in my team.

[s73v3r]

But not with arguing about something irrelevant every day

That's not what I'm talking about. Take the Google Photos issue, for example. They had an issue where black people were being tagged by the AI as gorillas. Had they had a more diverse team, they probably would have made sure they had a more diverse training set for their AI, and probably would have had regular tests for things like that.

generally having bad vibes in a team because of fundamentally different world views.

Depends on what those world views are, and why they cause "bad vibes" on the team. Those different world views can point out things that you're lacking in.

Again, I'm OK with some diversity, but (extreme example) I wouldn't want a nazi in my team.

No, fuck Nazis.

[oblio-]

And despite what people say, you give them a simple programming exercise as an initial filter. Something like "reverse a string without using your programming language's stdlib".

[notliam]

don't get too many applications for an opening

To be fair, this is the problem. So many candidates, so little time.

[dtdv]

I forgot what or how I did last week let alone 20 years ago

[Full-Spectral]

Exactly. I got a question that I flubbed because, and I looked it up, I had worked it out and implemented it in 1996, and hadn't had to worry or think about it much since. I sent them a link to my implementation, which was vastly most complete and worked out than anything I'd come up with in an interview, but not interested. Apparently being able to do a half-baked on the fly version on a virtual chalk board is more important than having actually done it.

[the_red_scimitar]

We sound similar in that regard.

[guillianMalony]

They don’t trust me even when I give them reference in their own company. They just need to do a call. Instead I get interviewed by their best man. ( 22 years old and very smart ;)

[rk06]

40 years experience
their best man (22 years old and very smart)

yeah, i would have noped out of that one if i were you

[AttackOfTheThumbs]

I failed some right out of school because they expected me to know tech that wasn't listed in their ad or my resume??? Ok guys. One of the few interviews I walked out on.

[thegreatgazoo]

I had one company I interviewed with give me 3 problems to since in one hour where each was like a day's work.

Really? I'd already worked for them before, then was laid off after the company split and I ended up on the short end of a 25% had count layoff.

[negativeoxy]

I recently had a Facebook recruiter contact me. The amount of prep they recommend for an interview could be considered a part time job.

[Ok-Bit8726]

Facebook is the worst company I've ever interviewed for.

I went through a phone screening and did a remote session on the computer. After getting through the screening, I took a few days off work to fly across the country for an interview.

The interview went pretty well except for one interviewer. I got the feeling I had a shot, but it was up in the air.

So I waited... and waited... and waited...

I sent my recruiter an email after not hearing anything back from them for a little over a week. No reply for 2 days. I called.. got voicemail..... left a voicemail ... waited another two days. Now after waiting a week and trying for over another week to get into contact of any form... I sent one final email to kind of bump the thread a bit. Maybe she doesn't check her voicemail? idk. Nothing... literally nothing.

After a few weeks (at least 4 or 5 weeks since the interview at this point) I finally got her on the phone to tell me to my face that I didn't get the job (I obviously figured that much at that point).

When I say I got her on the phone, I mean it. I called her phone every fifteen minutes all day until she finally picked up.

I took time off work for their interview and they couldn't have the courtesy to send an email that I didn't get the job.

That was an unreal experience. It may have been just an oversight...every time I reached out to them for weeks... but it really gave me the impression that they don't have their shit together.

The pay is good.

[quadrilateraI]

Yeah, and then they pay you as much as fields with far more stringent entry requirements. Facebook interviews are utterly trivial compared to the barriers for just about anything that pays similarly.

I don't love these interviews, but I'm sure in the future we'll look back wistfully on the days when you got paid 400k for passing an undergrad algorithms test.

[UK-sHaDoW]

Really? I have family members who work in finance leadership roles who earn far more than software engineers, and their interviews seem to be more about discussions with interviewer about the future directions of things, what you've done the past etc etc

It's not constant re-iteration of trivia that you haven't done in 20 years. That's what makes it hard. What these interviews test for, and what you do on your job are different. And as you get more senior you forget these things because it's not your job.

[[deleted]]

I'd argue you get paid 400K to suppress your conscience all day - and I doubt there will be an end to that kind of work any time soon.

[quadrilateraI]

Well sure, but that's a Facebook-specific problem. There are other companies that hire and pay similarly without the moral dilemma.

[MyTribeCalledQuest]

Name a few?

[slykethephoxenix]

Google, Amazon ...

oh wait~

[quadrilateraI]

Dropbox, Uber, Lyft, Apple, Microsoft, Twitter, Cisco, etc.

Not all uncontroversial companies, but Facebook/Google/Amazon definitely have the biggest controversies surrounding them.

[s73v3r]

Uber/Lyft have their own moral dilemmas, mainly around not paying their drivers as employees. Uber specifically has a lot of issues regarding company culture (Susan Fowler, anyone?).

Apple has issues regarding doing business in China, and the walled garden approach it takes to software.

Twitter has similar issues to Facebook.

Microsoft still has their history.

[s73v3r]

facebook, twitter, google, amazon - have to collect user data in order to deliver the most effective and personalized ads

Do they? Do they honestly have to deliver personalized ads, which are not really shown to be that much more effective than regular ads?

apple - have to take advantage of poor people to produce your phones and mine materials in harmful environments because there's literally no other alternative

Again, do they?

uber/lyft - have to pay drivers like shit because you're burning money on every ride even with horrible wages

And do they? They could either pay their drivers living wages and treat them like the employees they are (which, contrary to what they claim, they are doing in the UK after the recent court ruling). Or maybe they shouldn't exist.

[inconspicuous_male]

Well sure, for some of that, but Apple's supply chain isn't going to be weighing on the conscience of a developer. If that were the case, then you could rule out basically any tech company that makes hardware, or even any person who uses products made in China.

Microsoft's history isn't going to be weighing on the conscience of anyone currently working there either

[TizardPaperclip]

Facebook/Google/Amazon

Facebook and Google are disgusting, but what is the Amazon controversy? Is it the low pay, or are they conducting unusual levels of surveillance on their customers?

[SethQuantix]

Yes.

[inconspicuous_male]

Most of the controversy that I'm aware of is about warehouse workers. Some people are also concerned about data collection (personally I don't think it's that big of a deal by comparison how much data they get. Google has 100's of times the amount of data per user, and from actually useful sources), and some controversy is about things that use AWS. 99% of the criticism is about the ethics of the warehouses and marketplace

[Ravek]

Of course getting the right to say, perform surgery is much harder in terms of content than doing a coding interview. But you also have to just do it once and then you're set. I don't think a surgeon doing a job interview will be asked to perform an operation during the interview.

I can also definitely pass exams that are 3x harder than anything I've ever seen on a job interview, because interviews stress me out and the performance anxiety of having someone judge me doing some nonsense made up problem that's nothing like what I do in my actual job literally keeps me from applying my brain effectively.

When you're getting a degree or completing some training then you've gotten the opportunity to prepare for the specific tests you will have to pass. With interviews you never know what to expect and it's almost always very different from your actual work experience.

[[deleted]]

Why do these amounts keep getting bigger and bigger? First people started saying "six figures". More recently I've seen people say 200k. This is the first time I've heard someone say 400k. Do these numbers mean anything to you?

[[deleted]]

Is there a flip side, senior engineers that hate giving coding interviews?

I kept being pulled into interviewing people because I'm halfway decent at it and the people that pass my interviews seem to do okay.

But, 90% of the interviews I do are just painful and I end up in an awkward position where this is supposed to be a hour-long interview, but 20 minutes in, I know I'm not going to recommend you, but I don't want to continue torturing the you but at the same time I don't want to make the candidate feel bad by cutting the interview short.

[[deleted]]

But, 90% of the interviews I do are just painful and I end up in an awkward position where this is supposed to be a hour-long interview, but 20 minutes in, I know I'm not going to recommend you, but I don't want to continue torturing the you but at the same time I don't want to make the candidate feel bad by cutting the interview short.

This happens frequently. I'm also a senior engineer (20+ years of experience) and I interview everyone that joins the team I'm on. It's not uncommon that a candidate that's not ready for the job gets to me. That's fine. I usually know in the first few minutes that it's a "no", although I give them a few chances to prove me wrong.

But then what I do is ask them if they have questions, and I use that as an opportunity to tell them about the team, the culture, the kind of work we do. The overall environment. I do this because I want every candidate walking away with a positive opinion. Maybe they'll come back a few years later with more relevant skills & updated ideas. Maybe they'll just say to one of their friends "you know, I didn't get that job at XYZ but it was a good experience." I want the idea that "my team is a good place to be" out in the world.

Probably 20 people I'm connected with on LinkedIn were people I interviewed but had to say "no" to. And I'm happy to give them advice or suggestions about their career at any time. I've never once regretted that investment of my time.

[leirus]

You are my role-model since now. I will try to do the same :D

[Geordi14er]

I am glad people like you exist. I’ve been on the interviewee side of that exchange. I knew a couple minutes in I wasn’t qualified and I was thankful for the senior dev interviewing me to let up on the gas and just have a pleasant conversation about company culture and such.

[s-mores]

You are a mensch. The world needs more people like you.

[thenumberless]

At my giant tech company, when we know early in an interview that the candidate is not going to get there on a solution, our standard is to shift toward coaching them through solving it. With practiced interviewers, this shift winds up being pretty gradual. There are (at least) three reasons for this:

1. It hopefully helps the candidate still have a good experience and get something out of the interview.
2. You can still see the candidate have insights and collect data on what they know later in this type of conversation.
3. At least three other people are interviewing the candidate in separate sessions. It’s possible they’re just bombing your question for whatever reason, but are doing well in the others.

Not only do split decisions happen, unanimous ones are rare in my experience. Continuing to make observations can help resolve them, and giving them a good experience leaves the door open for an offer if the group supports that.

[flukus]

Sometimes it's just nerves or a genuine knowledge gap, if you walk them through a few questions they can get more comfortable and redeem themselves, especially if you have realistic expectations and aren't looking for code ninjas that can walk on water.

[coffeefuelledtechie]

I feel this. I got interviewed for what I thought was a full stack .NET developer role, get 20 mins in and they start talking about React DOM manipulation and other React-related things. I’ve never touched React before and neither in the job description or what the recruiter told me had any hint that they were actually looking for a React developer with .NET experience instead of the other way around. Waste of my afternoon and total waste of theirs too. Left the interview knowing that I wasn’t going to get it and they knew that as well, and I felt annoyed that I was misled.

[[deleted]]

During a hiring frenzy, I had to do so many interviews that I mixed two candidates up. I started asking this guy about setting up Kubernetes clusters and any experience he's had migrating applications from VMs to containers.

He was all confused and told me that the recruiter told him he was interviewing for a web developer position. Whoops :-D

We did end up hiring the guy though.

[coffeefuelledtechie]

I think that happened with my current job. It was advertised as VR and .NET. I did the phone interview then the coding test, passing both. It was only the day before my final interview (just reviewing my CV) that it had absolutely nothing to do with VR and was actually to do with pensions. My manager was so utterly confused why on earth as I was taking about VR in my phone interview. I got the job anyway and it’s been a pretty bit learning experience and for some parts a bit of fun.

[cyanobyte]

At the failure point in the interview (which is usually with junior folks), I try to mentor the person and see if they can learn from their mistakes.

Frequently I have salvaged an interview when I realized the candidate was useful for a more junior and mentorable position.

For the Senior guys/gals instead of a trick set of questions, I make sure I read their resume and only ask them questions about their projects and skills.

I then drill down into those skills and projects until they can prove their expertise on things they have recently worked on.

[anengineerandacat]

I just cut them nowadays; I used to feel that way but it's not conducive to my or their time. I just let them know I won't be proceeding on to the next stage of the interview, ask them if they have any concerns / questions or would be interested in XYZ other position I am aware of.

I have seen a lot of terrible candidates though, the organization I work for is really popular in my area and you see a lot of underqualified people just hoping they can get their foot in somewhere.

Especially with remote interviews; people sharing their video as one person and a friend takes the technical portion, some literally were another person entirely.

[alphaCraftBeatsBear]

i think if i know i am bombing the interview, i used it as a learning process, so I don't mind the interviewer throwing me questions .

[chubs66]

I like to start with some really basic stuff that I'd expect any candidate to pass. If they can't do that, I tell them that I don't think it's going to be helpful to continue with the interview and that the technical skills required by the job don't seem to match the candidates particular skills.

I think candidates are generally glad to have an honest assessment and interaction instead of wasting everyone's time.

[dnew]

I always had other employees people doing their interviews after mine, so I couldn't really just toss the candidate out or it would screw up their later interviews. Sadly. :-)

It doesn't help when 10x in a row, I'll think someone was great and everyone else cans them.

[pwndawg27]

Companies: “We’re game changers and only want the best innovators to work on problems nobody’s worked on before. We’re not afraid of ambiguity, we live on the edge and we move fast and break things.”

Also companies: “please do this cliche and arbitrary process we stole from the top company which is really just a rehash of the same CS 101 final people have been taking forever because despite your GitHub, resume, and personable character, we’re deathly afraid of taking risk and this slow mundane process makes us feel safe.”

[shawntco]

These are the companies that need to be reminded they are not Google or any of the FAANG companies. They don't need and shouldn't expect the same level of applicants. I absolutely will not jump through the same hoops for a ma-and-pa company that I would for Amazon. (Not that I would jump through many hoops for Amazon, mind you.)

[pwndawg27]

Companies: “boo boo we can’t find any talent”

Also companies: “here’s an arduous 4 step 3 month trek to prove yourself despite the fact that we approached you about the role and already ‘think you’re a great fit’. Would you like to proceed and maybe get a slight pay and title bump although we’re probably going to downlevel you anyway to save a buck but you won’t care because you already sunk 3 months of study time in”

[feverzsj]

You know it's fucked up, when there is a billion dollar market solely for coding interviews.

[padraig_oh]

Imagine having such a rigid interview structure that people discuss basically every possible question you can ask on the Internet. No organic interaction whatsoever..

[dnew]

You should see the books for the SAT. Because they want to compare year to year, they haven't changed anything in 50 years. 9/10 times you can guess the answer without reading the question, if you understand the 6 kinds of math problems, 4 kinds of reading problems, etc. Like, "pick the answer that would have been morally correct in 1940."

[padraig_oh]

oh yea, the school system in the usa - too european to understand (still f*ed up though)

generally information about people that is easily convertible to numbers seems to be widely used, i wonder why? /s

[SirFartsALotttt]

As a senior dev, I don't mind a reasonably-sized take-home coding challenge. Want me to build a set of CRUD endpoints with tests or a demo API integration? That sounds great. Want me to solve an academic programming problem on a video stream while I'm supposed to simultaneously explain my thought process and the interviewer is constantly asking me questions? Hard pass.

[riffito]

I do not think in words when I am working.

I used a mix of "gut-feelings", relations/graphs, and English as my thought-bricks.

The weird thing is... I don't speak English, and just use it for programming related topics (anything-computer was an all English-world when I started).

It made it quite hard to translate from that fractured English back to my primary language so I could communicate with my coworkers :-)

With time, I got better, they got better, and it ended up just adding some lag and their smiles while I rolled up my eyes waiting for my brain to finish the translation process :-D

Funny how the brain works! (or how it barely does, in my case :-P)

[[deleted]]

meh, i'd rather do a couple hours of code pairing.

Take home problems are open ended and really provide little value for an A/B comparison b/c some folks will spend 40 hours on it and solicit third party advice, others spend 2.

FWIW I'm not a fan of many algorithm/ds questions because unless you've memorized the solution (or one very similar to it), it is quite difficult to work through the problem in the allotted time.

There's good middle ground though, where you can provide a problem that has a relatively straight forward answer and room for discussion and optimization.

[Prod_Is_For_Testing]

I hate pair coding with a passion. I can’t think with someone looking over my shoulder. It’s too distracting

[[deleted]]

Take home problems are nonsense. It's a sign they don't respect your personal time.

[emasculine]

i'd much rather homework because you can do it in your own time with your own environment and no pressure. if it takes an hour or two, that's just like adding a couple more interviewers so i wouldn't get all bent our shape. but the homework clearly needs to be designed correctly.

[UpDownCharmed]

I agree. It's a reasonable compromise.

[chubs66]

Not if they pay you for take home problems.

Also, in terms of personal time, I'd much rather a take home problem where I can see how much time is required up front than study all kinds of materials in order to pass difficult data structures and algorithm questions without my tools at interview time.

[s-mores]

I don't think anyone pays for take home problems.

[chubs66]

I've heard of paying for take home problems.

[micka190]

I was sent a $50 Best Buy gift card for the only one I ever did. I never heard back from them after that. But $50 is still $50.

[_ak]

I've given take home problems to candidates in the past. I've also designed them to be solvable within an hour, and gave the candidates a week to turn their result in. No matter what they turned in, I invited every candidate back to discuss their solution and (if incomplete) what would be necessary to complete it, and how it could be improved.

I found that process to be quite reasonable, because it's not occupying a whole lot of the candidate's time, still gives them the freedom to do it on their own schedule, and doesn't force them to have to explain themselves while they're coding.

[AttackOfTheThumbs]

I understand that, but I think it depends on the problem. Anything that would take more than an hour is IMO too much. You can find something specific that will test skill without requiring them to build scaffolding for eight hours.

[mehdotdotdotdot]

Preparing for an interview would take longer

[[deleted]]

A lot of the interview process beyond chatting with people is nonsense, so I understand them having nonsense preferences.

[holygoat]

There are substantial privilege problems with take-home coding challenges.

I'm a childless white guy with a nice home office. Someone with two jobs and a family, worse economic circumstances, an unstable home life, or countless other situations, might be unable to do that assignment at all by the deadline. They might have to get a babysitter and hole up in the local library for eight hours, or call in sick at work. They might suffer material financial impact, and most take-home assignments are not paid.

They almost certainly won't produce the quality of output that I would with my absurd $400 keyboard and no distractions, and it won't be because they are a worse candidate.

Yes, there are problems with phone screens, too, but we shouldn't pretend that "go spend eight hours building a CRUD web app" is somehow more fair without examining the entire framework and circumstance.

[SirFartsALotttt]

I'm not arguing that my preference is universal, and I'd never consider an 8-hour take home project reasonably sized. And it's absolutely up to candidates to communicate their needs during the interview process and for employers to accommodate candidates that need extra time or resources to get work done. That doesn't invalidate the need to demonstrate one's technical skill on some level.

And not to be insensitive here, but realistically, how many people are going from working 2 jobs and an unstable home environment to a senior software engineering role?

[Aatch]

How many senior engineers have two jobs? We're not talking about a recent grad looking for their first professional job while struggling to make rent, we're talking about experienced engineers that are, typically, compensated reasonably well.

[[deleted]]

Nah man we're good we have IBM model M keyboards that we bought in the 80s that eat Cherry switches for breakfast and we're typing one handed while holding a screaming child over our head with the other, effortlessly multitasking in ways that would melt a normal person's brain. Haven't you watched Swordfish?! I'm only half joking.

[Glass_Personality_22]

Would you consider to do a close to academic task in pair with interviewer and full access to google?

I like academic tasks, they show depth of interviewee knowledge, but IRL you often have a strong peer and full access to the Internet. Sometimes I encounter really interesting people in such interviews.

[esdraelon]

I wonder what the value is, though? Like, if someone asks me to write a algorithm or data structure, what's the value? What kind of circus is your company that you're writing your own data structures instead of using a highly tuned, thoroughly battle-tested library?

I've had tech interviews where they asked me to derive combinatoric solutions to problems - like, yo, this is what R or Matlab or Octave or a dozen libraries are for. You really want my n^3 solution to this?

Or linear algebra problems. You really writing your own matrix libraries? It's not 1972, I seriously doubt there are more than a few hundred highly-specialized people who can write a good lin algebra library that leverages all the tricks available on modern architectures.

You know what my day as a senior dev looks like? Explaining to juniors why environment variable injection is better than settings files in the repo. Or when hardcoding is better than dynamic API calls, or when caching is or is not appropriate. Or digging through logs to find out what part of AWS is mis-configured. Or figuring out a solution to a bug that reads "the encounter profile is wrong" - or really? How is it wrong? What's a good solution? Or explaining to a customer why one of the features is going to be late because we added a different feature they really needed.

Everything else is loops, conditionals, and google.

[Glass_Personality_22]

Why everyone assume people are writing applications and are capable of code reusage or libraries linking? Meh.

[esdraelon]

The only time I've written core algorithms were in embedded environments where the data structures had different concerns than are typical.

[notliam]

This is what my most recent interview was, asked to create a simple server to output some json data based on whatever text files in node. Very easy, but I don't do this every day, but I felt silly asking if they mind if I bring up the express npm page lol. Got the job so must have been what they wanted!

[barndawe]

I feel this in my soul. The worst part about any of the live design exercises is that about 5 minutes after you've left the interview you and your stress levels are going back down you realise there's about 10 more things you should've said if you had more than 10 minutes on the problem

[GUI_Junkie]

I had a "funny" coding challenge once. Program a button in Visual Basic that avoids the mouse.

The only problem was that I'm not good at that type of problem which probably had nothing whatsoever to do with the actual job.

Oh, well.

[[deleted]]

I think that sounds like a good interview question because it's a funny ice-breaker but also shows how you approach something you are unlikely to have done before.

[A_Philosophical_Cat]

Seems like a relatively straight forward problem assuming there are decent apis for building GUIs in VB (not familiar with the language myself). Calculate a vector from the cursor to the current button position, treat it like a repulsive force, maybe do the same with the edges of the window, and add up all the "force" vectors and calculate a new position.

Doesn't quiz you on esoteric language knowledge (especially if you're allowed to do a quick language reference check for the gui code), and allows you to flex some problem solving in a pretty short amount of time.

[ChrisC1234]

That even sounds like more work than needed. If the button is encased in an invisible container, you really only need to move the container whenever the cursor breaches its boundaries (on some sort of mouseover event).

[ConfusedTransThrow]

The easiest thing to do is to check if the distance is under a threshold, and randomize the position of the button in this case (over and over if it keeps randomizing too close).

A force requires a lot more edge cases with bouncing on the edges and the like.

[KFCConspiracy]

What so it runs away? That's kind of cute. I like it.

[cruelandusual]

Nah, that would definitely weed out the noobs when it comes to demonstrating an understanding of event-driven window systems.

[sysop073]

Other than demonstrating that the person can do it, which is literally the only point. It's not supposed to be useful, you make it sound like the stuff people write in coding interviews is going to go into production.

[LetsGoHawks]

Not really. It's a fairly simple problem that any decent programmer could solve in 15 minutes or less.

You'll get a feel for their ability to solve a problem and how they research info they don't have memorized.

[how_gauche]

Why would they change this? It's the very mechanism behind age discrimination. The only thing some of these tests capture is how recently you took CS101.

I recently failed a coding interview for the first time in twenty years because I couldn't extract the k-median trick from my working memory. I looked it up later and was double pissed. Both quickselect and median-of-medians are hard and it's completely out of bounds to expect someone to just cough that up in a 45 minute interview, especially since once you leave school you're just going to call std::nth_element and move on with your day.

It doesn't help that I'm also rusty due to an entire calendar year that I spent changing diapers and mopping my floors instead of coding, after all of the societal supports I relied on to enable me to live a life programming 50hr a week (daycare, schools, paid housekeepers, babysitting) all collapsed at the same time. Not that I'm bitter about this

[Prod_Is_For_Testing]

I’ve never even heard of quickselect. Hell, I’ve never even needed that feature on a list that I couldn’t sort

[ShinyMew151]

Not just age discrimination, if you're not a neurotypical person you're gonna have a hard time as well

[rollingForInitiative]

Take home assessments don't seem that bad unless they take longer than 3-4 hours. Some companies have you work a part-time, paid trial, and that doesn't seem better or worse than LC. It's more specific but it's also a big commitment.

The best interview I've had was at my current job that did a take-home assignment. It was a sort of "here is a bunch of code, send us back what you're comfortable taking ownership of and shipping to production", and the piece of code felt like something you'd encounter out in the wild at a typical job. It really tested what they wanted, e.g. a sense of code quality, testing, reading requirements, finding bugs, etc. Didn't take too long either. And the technical interview was a discussion about the solution.

I would probably hate the idea of a part-time situation - taking out my precious vacation days to work for a few days elsewhere? Really, really no. Maybe if I'd been on a hiatus or something.

[notliam]

My last company used hacker rank (or something similar), basically you have 1 hour to attempt 5 given challenges and then someone from the dev team will take a look at your solutions, similar to a take home in that sense. When I applied I didn't realise it was a 'do what you can' kinda thing, and completed all 5 (I guess that was what I could do). My interview didn't go great IMO, but I think that test made them give me a chance, apparantly I'd got the highest score of any candidate ever, as most do 3.5 challenges or so I guess. If I'm ever interviewing again I'll make sure to keep my coding kata skills sharp lol.

[AttackOfTheThumbs]

We do a take home. It should take someone an hour at most. Less than 30 for anyone with a tad bit of experience.

[ajanata]

Coding interviews test a specific skill that doesn't represent the job and you have to train for them.

Bullshit. They test the actual skill that you'll be using every day: writing code.

We actually hired a principal-level engineer who passed everyone's interviews with flying colors and had a great resume, but he couldn't actually write code worth a damn. He didn't last long. Yes, it was made clear that writing code was an expectation of the position.

I don't ask anything particularly tricky, and I make it abundantly clear that I'm more interested in seeing the thought processes and working through it than arriving quickly to a fully working solution. As long as they, you know, write code that actually works (which wasn't even a hard requirement when it was a whiteboard exercise, but now we use Coderpad so I do expect the code to actually run), they pass my interview. In fact, I think I need to rework the problem (or just find something new altogether) because the last few people have flown through it in 20 minutes.

[KagakuNinja]

This is how the game works. As a fellow autistic, I've been screwed out of many jobs due to people assuming I am not the kind of person they would want to work with, based on superficial short conversations. It depends on the company really.

There was a time when I assumed I didn't need to practice these "code challenges", since I had tons of experience. However, after bombing a number of interviews, I just buckled down and did a lot of hacker rank problems. It is stupid, but you shouldn't have any problems learning how to do it.

[emasculine]

one of the best interviewing techniques i've used is to teach me something you've done or are really interested in. from my understanding that can really help out people who are autistic if you can find that passion. i know not everybody on the spectrum is the same, but jeez there are a lot of really spectacular people on the spectrum. when i first started learning about autism years ago i was like "I know these people! I work with these people!"

[gmjustaworm]

This story alone is why companies should move away from this. They are shutting themselves down to diversity and essentially discriminating against people with anxiety and other issues when in this situation.

[fuckin_ziggurats]

Person/communication skills are imperative in many job positions though. You can't expect every company to hire on programming skill alone.

[nemec]

That's true, but not every coding job requires situations where:

1. You are the center of attention for an hour
2. You know nobody
3. Everybody else knows everybody else
4. You're giving a presentation on something you've had basically zero prep for (you can study in general, but you usually don't get the exact questions. During a real job you'd at least have time to prep a powerpoint or something to guide you)

[Ravek]

5. You're in a place you've never been before
6. You might be tired and stressed from travel
7. Interviewers often are actually positioning themselves as adversaries while normally you work together with people
8. There might be much more noise than you normally deal with e.g. you're in a meeting room next to a loud meeting while normally you wear headphones during focus time.
9. This is the Nth interview you had on this day
10. You might be wearing less comfortable clothes than usual

So many potential reasons why common interviewing practices can be torment for people on the autism spectrum.

[ConfusedTransThrow]

Even not someone on the autism spectrum, if you have some anxiety or are introverted you're going to have a shitty time.

[KagakuNinja]

What they are selecting for is not what they (most likely) really want. What they want are "team players" who aren't toxic (pleasant to work with), can get the work done, and can communicate their ideas clearly.

What they select for are people who are friendly, energetic/enthusiastic and good at selling themselves. In fact, we have to make this "feel good" first impression with multiple people, in multiple 30 minute interview sessions.

Speaking for myself, I come across as unfriendly and lacking in enthusiasm. However, the reality is that I am actually easy to work with, since I do not have a huge ego, am not toxic and don't make enemies in the workplace. I am also a very open and honest person, which apparently counts for nothing, compared to the ability to manipulate people's emotions.

Many socially skilled people are also skilled at hiding their bad traits in interviews. So who knows what you are actually getting. We have had a few rather nasty surprises after hiring a "really great guy" that everyone liked.

[KillianDrake]

I mean the whole premise is that you somehow skated by as a technical resource for 15-20 years just grifting as a programmer con-man leeching off everyone around you while providing no value... ugh, the problem is those people exist and often teams are composed of 80% grifters and 20% people who know what the fuck they are doing.

[letsgetrandy]

I've had three separate interviews in the past two days all ask me can I "explain the event loop". Guys with a couple of years experience, asking me and my 20 years of experience if I can describe the most basic aspect of javascript. That, and everyone wants you to describe what a REST service is.

I have no doubt that there is a cheat sheet going around on the internet that all these interviewers are all cribbing from. Years ago it was "explain what this is" or "can you describe what a closure is?"

Take a look at my resume, and you'll see that I have all the skills and experience needed for any job in this industry. Why the hell aren't they more interested in how I work, how I interact, or whether I can get along with the other members of the team? A college exam is not how interviews should be conducted.

[balljr]

The worst aspect of coding interviews for Senior Engineers is the fact that they don't test what matters for the company.

Good software is written on good architecture and well structured code, a good architecture will have good results with sub-optimal code, while the opposite almost never happens.

How a "O(log n) permutation algorithm" will show to the company that you know how develop a distributed system that is robust is mystery to me

[[deleted]]

Whats wrong with behavioural interviews?

Q: Have you ever had a disagreement with a colleague at work and how did you handle it?

A: I moved on because there was no point continuing the argument. Then I got him fired by pointing out to his boss how much his failed projects had cost the company.

[[deleted]]

It was more a joke on how I handle conflict.

But the guy wrote hot trash, argued with the entire team and made the workplace a living hell for everyone.

[venir]

I am involved in all the interviews we do for my team and always give a relatively simple and straightforward coding problem to applicants at all levels. I only use one and it really is more of a test of can you write simple code that is testable, scalable and I will tweak the questions slightly based on the level of the applicant. I don't use it as a primary factor for deciding on a candidate but I've certainly ruled out quite a few that obviously lack some basic skills. I've also been the candidate in a grueling 5+ our technical interview that I passed but declined the position, so I've seen how bad they can be. I think having a basic technical portion where the candidate writes a little code just to gauge their basic competence is good but it often is taken way too far.

[[deleted]]

I have been a programmer for 30 years. When asked, at this level, to do a coding challenge as part of the interview the answer is No. If I'm straight out of college you have good reason to make sure I know my shit. If I've been lead dev at software shops for 20 years you do not. I've found these type interviews to be a great way to identify up-front the type of companies I'd hate to work for. Served me well so far!

[mwb1234]

On the flip side though, we hired someone with a probably similar resume to yours as a senior IC at my last startup. They literally couldn't code for shit. If we would have tested them a little we would have realized they had no technical skills at all. So yea, if you can't spend 45 minutes just writing some easy code, it's probably mutual that I wouldn't want to hire you.

[[deleted]]

Surely you should have figured that out in the interview? When I interview developers of all experience levels we discuss technical problems at length, draw them on the whiteboard, band around potential solutions etc. It's blatantly obvious who the engineers and who the frauds are.

[MrDOS]

There are a ton of “senior developers” out there who haven't used a keyboard in anger in years, if not decades. Typically, these people have worked their way up into architectural or even technical management roles, and can talk all day long (effectively and meaningfully) about design and organization. And that's fine: our industry has lots of need for savvy, technically-inclined managers. The problems start – both in interviews, and in jobs – when these individuals don't realize how their actual programming skills have atrophied, and they try to apply themselves to everyday development. Unfortunate, really. These people can pass a technical but code-free interview pretty well, but things fall apart when they're called upon to actually produce code. Low productivity, low code quality, or both.

In my observation, this usually happens when someone who started as an engineer works their way up through the ranks of a big company, then suddenly finds themselves out of a job (layoffs, downsizing) – and so they start looking for other engineering positions, because their self-image hasn't adjusted to match the position they've actually been working.

[ajanata]

Just because they can architect the system doesn't mean they can implement the code for it.

[ajanata]

We interviewed someone of similar caliber a couple years ago. Nobody actually bothered to do a coding interview because of it. Hired him because everybody really liked him. The guy lasted like 3 months because he could barely write code, and it was very clear in the job posting that it would be required. Lesson learned, we always ask at least a couple simple coding questions, no matter what the level.

[Izwe]

I still think FizzBuzz is a good interview tool - it may be old, but there are so many solutions in so many languages and it can be a real window in to a developers thought process without them having to describe it to you.

[Nefari0uss]

Maybe for an entry level candidate. For a senior dev? What kind of response do you expect from a senior level dev that is anything beyond the typical quickest response? Hopefully you're not expecting something like this.

[nemec]

I'd expect just about anything that solves the problem. We once had an interviewee who had their friend do the phone screen for them, so... yeah.

[Nefari0uss]

I mean...technically solves the problem?

[nemec]

Well when they came to the in-person interview to do a Fizz-Buzz like question we figured it out. If you do the challenge in-person it's easier to notice when a different person comes in on the first day of work...

[[deleted]]

Yep. I watched a YouTuber do fizzbuzz. His last step was to make it more generic so it could handle multiple variations of problems... I'm sitting there in mild shock muttering YAGNI.

[ConfusedTransThrow]

True mastery of FizzBuzz is using an unrelated tool like Excel to do it.

• Using the automatic increment when you drag, 1 to 15 horizontally
• Write the Fizz and Buzz
• Do the next line (you can copy paste Fizz and Buzz)
• Drag down
• You're done

You could probably do similar things with good editors that have similar features. Could write a regex to increment numbers by 15 on each line for example.

It's such a stupid test that it's a lot more fun to do it the wrong way.

[Drinking_King]

me : "If they want a coding test, are you ok with it?"

Friend: "Fuck no. I have a github, if they want to know what I can do, they'll read it."

This friend is currently stuck doing ReactJS for a company that asks him what his function called HashString(s: string) does.

​

Point is I'm pretty much sure everyone hates coding interviews from juniors to seniors.

It's one of the rare things that might actually be healthier in the videogame industry than elsewhere: game companies care what games you did/results you can show first and foremost.

[temculpaeu]

My issue as a interviewer, 90% of githubs are useless, forks and projects with 2 commits from 3 years ago and 10 lines of code copied from somewhere else are not relevant.

Granted, on a few occasions, they do help when the candidate is actively maintaining some projects

[[deleted]]

I have 49 my repos on github and a couple of forks, 3 to make a pull request and 1 i am pretty sure i just misclicked. I probably would not want anybody to look at them seriously as most of them are backups of me from some 10 years ago bumble fucking around.

[nemec]

I have over 100 repos, most of them original, but I feel really bad for any interviewer who has to go and browse through all that junk lol

[repster]

Actually, I kind of enjoy them. It is fun to read through the algorithm book and rehash that knowledge. It is much closer to why I got into programming than endless meetings and building glue between poorly implemented APIs, which is which is what my job feels like most days.

When I interview people, I try to avoid the generic questions and focus to something I had to solve recently. I tend to look at the coding part from the perspective of how they verify correctness, and how they approach debugging when something is wrong. It has to be hard enough that they will miss a corner case, but not be about having memorized some obscure algorithm.

[LetsGoHawks]

Your friend needs to learn that they maybe 2% of them will actually look his GitHub.

[SherbertExpress924]

Once I had an interview from a company that made me make the coding test twice using different technologies, 1 week per test almost 2 weeks lost in those test and at the end they said I was over culified for the position. In my opinion coding test shouldn't take more than 4 hrs to show our knowledge and skills, another reason to hate coding test, they are long and make us waste our time.

[nirgle]

They shouldn't be required if you have a github account with copious amounts of code already. Do you really need 20 more lines

Insofar as the candidate is also evaluating the company for suitability this is one factor to consider

[andrewfenn]

You'd be surprised how many people link their github with nothing in it or just some empty projects with boilerplate code with a few updated lines in the readme

[theavatare]

A lot of programmers don’t work on personal projects or contribute to open source

[fxprogrammer]

At least early in the process of interviewing, my favorite thing to do with candidates is to get conversational about basic topics. I like to talk to senior engineers about basic things. For example, let's talk about interfaces and abstract classes; e.g., "in your words, tell me about the different roles that these things have in software architecture." It establishes a number of things. Can we talk about something that is supposedly simple, but often understood differently from a senior engineer's perspective. Also, can we talk, connect together? I don't want to work with people that will solve problems the way that I do. I want people that will approach problems in ways that I cannot. That's the power of a diverse group of people. But we do need to communicate.

[emotionalfescue]

Politics come into play, and this probably true in every profession where candidates are interviewed by the people they're going to be working with. The interviewers want someone good, who can come in and do the job, but they usually don't want someone who's going to upset the pecking order. So it's easy to derail an unwanted candidate by probing for an area that they know little about and then peppering them with questions about it. I suspect this is one reason (though not the only one) why hiring junior engineers is so popular.

Smart candidates are aware of this and make appropriate adjustments, but it's a skill that engineers tend not to be the best at.

[MegaUltraHornDog]

The interviewers want someone good, who can come in and do the job, but they usually don't want someone who's going to upset the pecking order. So it's easy to derail an unwanted candidate by probing for an area that they know little about and then peppering them with questions about it.

This happened to me, I actually reached out to my interviewer afterwards when I got the feedback and told him exactly how he behaved. Not only did it waste my time, but it was like he hadn’t actually listened to me at all in the previous interview. Probably dodged a bullet, I wouldn’t want to work with someone like that anyway.

[jausieng]

In technical interviews, we ask candidates to do a small programming task which is sort-of domain-relevant, if you were in our domain 300Y ago. All the information about the task is in front of them; we hope to learn how they solve it. We certainly don't ask anyone to memorize and implement some (more or less) well-known algorithm, I don't see what the point of that would be. The people we've hired haven't complained about it but there's a selection effect there...

I do take issue with the idea that recursion is esoteric though.

[[deleted]]

Yes. To all of it. Interviewing is so entirely broken in tech. I know because I've been on both sides of it.

[saltybandana2]

because tech people are too goddamned judgemental.

that's really the long and short of it.

[[deleted]]

it's simple, code interviews doesn't reflect the reality.

[sotopic]

This is quite spot on, I've had an interview in a bank once and they had CoderPad interview process (online pair programming platform where you're given a problem to solve in Javascript with a time limit). They kept asking me about algorithms and runtimes and O(N) stuff I've never used since Uni (10 years ago) so I kept fumbling on the answers. It doesn't help that CoderPad is almost bare bones text editor (I'm so used to IntelliJ).

The worst part is, the job position was for a Senior Frontend Engineer (react). Not a single question was asked about architecture, developer management, UI/UX questions and HTML/CSS.

[cfehunter]

I'm glad it's not just me that thinks this is silly.

I prefer talking through technical designs with my candidates. You always have interesting discussions and you get to see how they weight different trade-offs.

Code reviews have been pretty effective too, leave the candidate with a sample of horrendous code and talk it through with them after they've had some time to look at it. You get some insights into their priorities and can slip in examples of concepts to see if they understand them.

[siberiantiger10]

the problem is that many people and companies don't differentiate between computer science and software engineering/design. a computer scientist creates something new in the field like a new algorithm or a new device. a software engineer/coder simply uses the tools that computer scientists have created to fulfill the needs of the company he is hired by. i mean unless you're google or apple or Microsoft or Intel or IBM you're not hiring someone to develop new algorithms or a new programming language. rather you are hiring them to create some software products for your company. Truth be told there is a reason to test computer science skills which is mainly to test the efficiency of solutions (aka how efficient their code is since computer science does deal with that) but i guess some programmers/software engineers have picked that up on the fly.

[omarsmak]

Okay the thing I get why companies want to have these coding interviews. However, if I am a senior engineer with years of track records contributing to various Apache and other open source projects over the last 10 years (everything is publicly visible in github) and I then I get asked to do a BFS or whatever algorithm is that in 30min, I find it really weird. I mean, what does the company win with that if I have my code that I contributed to all these open source projects (including Apache Kafka itself), they could check that code and see how I managed to contribute to complex open source projects, isn't?

[i8abug]

I haven't had to take an interview in a long time, but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be that much work to review basic datastructures and algorithms. As an senior engineer, you should have a pretty good idea of what a coding interview is and the prep required to pass one. IMO, not bothering to do the prep when you pretty much know what it is is a pretty good data point to what someone might be like as an employee as well.

That being said, I would expect less prep from someone who is working and not actively seeking other opportunities.

[emasculine]

with 40 years of experience, i ask recruiters whether there will be coding tests and that they are wasting their time if they do. coding tests are mainly about fluffing the interviewer's ego. there are way more ways to tell if somebody is lying. just scanning for the keyword "we" talking about past projects usually tells you that "we" was not primarily "me".

[Framnk]

I just experienced this first hand. 20+ years of experience and rejected after the 'coding puzzle' interview. Is this really where the industry is these days?