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Comment by tboyd47 | Hacker News Reader

Solving a problem within a fixed time period is the best real world scenario for programmers. No project has an unlimited budget, so no one gets unlimited time in the real world.

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"Solving a problem within a fixed time period is the best real world scenario for programmers"

The funny thing is an artificial examination style setup totally freezes me up. I'm a valued contributor and write original technically non-trivial code day in and day out.

The last time I did an interview a few years ago my brain completely locked up. The interviewer was very polite, and it could have not have been any less stressful situation. Yet, somehow my brain knew I was in an interview, and it was time to lock up all that valuable technical information ... somewhere where my conscious mind could not access it.

Which is really weird. Usually at work the occasional unexpected stress put's my brain on turbo-charge, and ... it's so beautiful to experience it, everything has perfect clarity, I know what needs to be done and I just do it so much faster than regularly.

My "on-interview" brain is complete opposite of my "million-euros-are-at-a-risk" brain at work. I have no idea why.

"Plan to throw one away." This was one of the major thesis statements of The Mythical Man Month, by Fred Brooks. It's one of the hallmark texts on software development. I don't disagree with what you are saying - that we need to be cognizant of time and money - but there is a scary shift happening in software where more emphasis is put on time-to-market above all else, where we are boiling the frog of consumer expectations. Millions of people lose their personal financial information in a hack, and the entire population just shrugs their shoulders. I'm left wondering if this would be the case if we put less emphasis on continuous production deployment, and more on the care and quality of our processes and systems.

> Solving a problem within a fixed time period is the best real world scenario for programmers.

Not if the fixed time period is 45 minutes with an interviewer looking over your shoulder.

Lots of real world problems are troubleshooted in less than that time, under more pressure, and have far more variables to consider/are far more difficult, like build failures. The scenario here sounds like it's as relaxed and simple as you can get without it being so easy it tests nothing. Are you assuming the interviewer always yells like he's Sam Kinison?

> Lots of real world problems are troubleshooted in less than that time, under more pressure, and have far more variables to consider/are far more difficult, like build failures.

Yes, and they're troubleshooted by people who are already intimately familiar with the systems they're troubleshooting. Nobody in the real world writes an app for a requirement they've never seen before from scratch in 45 minutes.

> Yes, and they're troubleshooted by people who are already intimately familiar with the systems they're troubleshooting.

So you're asserting interviewees shouldn't already be familiar with simple problems like reversing a list? Come on, give me a break.

> Nobody in the real world writes an app for a requirement they've never seen before from scratch in 45 minutes.

Being asked to reverse a list in 15 minutes isn't even close to "writing an app from scratch". It's not even theoretical - just look at all the people who make it past these interviews. I doubt they would call it "writing an app from scratch". Could you try any harder to misrepresent things here?

> So you're asserting interviewees shouldn't already be familiar with simple problems like reversing a list? Come on, give me a break.

Though it is clearly a simple problem, I've not had to reverse a list in any of the code I've written in the past 20 years. So I am not 'familiar' with the problem. I think I'd be able to solve it pretty quickly under normal work circumstances (even crises), but as many have said here already, working on something you've never done before with three strangers looking over your shoulder is a whole other dimension.

Many here and elsewhere have related the 'brain lockup' effect. Take me as another data point. It's real and it totally wrecks the interview for the interviewee and the interviewers, who lose out on a potentially good employee.

> Though it is clearly a simple problem, I've not had to reverse a list in any of the code I've written in the past 20 years. So I am not 'familiar' with the problem. I think I'd be able to solve it pretty quickly under normal work circumstances (even crises), but as many have said here already, working on something you've never done before with three strangers looking over your shoulder is a whole other dimension.

What's your point? You just want to repeat what everyone else has already said? And how low do you think the bar should be? What would be reasonable questions that actually still separate people who can code from people who can't, since reversing a list is too hard according to you?

> It's real and it totally wrecks the interview for the interviewee and the interviewers, who lose out on a potentially good employee.

Or they hire someone else who might actually be just as good or better. It's not like companies have an unlimited number of open positions.

I was responding to the words I quoted from your post. I was not aware that somebody had already made the point that even apparently simple problems may not be 'familiar' to all candidates.

It doesn't have to be 'familiar'. A fair bit of the point is to judge your problem solving skills, not your memorization skills.

For sure. I never said all interview questions have to be 'familiar'. I'm not the same guy you were talking to earlier.

> And how low do you think the bar should be? What would be reasonable questions that actually still separate people who can code from people who can't, since reversing a list is too hard according to you?

I'm not saying anybody should lower any bars. Just don't immediately fail somebody who struggles with a simple problem. Don't just automatically declare them incompetent. Help the candidate be the best version of themselves. It's in your best interest as an employer. Try to figure out ways to make your interview atmosphere as realistic as possible. Some of these people who choke on trivial problems may have aced the same test on a better day.

> Being asked to reverse a list in 15 minutes isn't even close to "writing an app from scratch".

It also isn't even close to "solving a real-world problem". Wow, look, I reversed this list and the conversion rate on our sign-up page went up 200%!

> Could you try any harder to misrepresent things here?

It looks to me like you are the one misrepresenting things.

> It also isn't even close to "solving a real-world problem".

It's not supposed to be the same thing. It's supposed to test your coding and problem solving abilities, in the limited time you have. What better alternative can you come up with? It's easy to just complain...

> It looks to me like you are the one misrepresenting things.

Hah, yeah right. If it makes you feel better, sure.

I worked with people who were hired with "can you do the job?" test and with people who were hired by "everything is wonderful, you are a special candidate that we just talk with" test.

The second group universally cannot perform under production pressure.

No projects are budgeted to 45 minutes. The real world scenario for such limited time is debugging in production issues. It is a completely different scenario. The people who jump in are mostly those who are familiar with the services or application that are showing issues, those who have a clear understand of the architecture of the company, those who have skills on their tech stacks and know where to look at and how to analyze, etc.

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