Hacker News Reader

Comment by treeman79 | Hacker News Reader

I spent a couple years hiringly crazy at a fast growth startup.

After a while it got to the point where I’d walk in give an easy five minute coding exercise walk out and give a thumbs up or down. They could use any language editor or tool they wanted. We even provided a few alternatives they could pick from in case they just had a weird mental block on our preferred one.

Others would make sure that they weren’t too insane personality wise.

Other team members were constantly shocked by candidates that were verbally great but couldn’t do deal with hashes or arrays at all.

View on HN

> Other team members were constantly shocked by candidates that were verbally great but couldn’t do deal with hashes or arrays at all.

Quick questions like this always throw me. I don't think about programming in a way where free floating questions make much sense to me initially.

    A a b b c c c c d e

Give me a count of each letter.

Give me a function that given a number returns the letters that have that many in it. You have 60 minutes. Any language.

In my experience interviewing, about 25% of candidates would fail the first part and another 25% would fail the second part.

This is after the initial resume screen and sometimes even after they did an online leetcode style test.

Are they just blatantly lying on their resumes?

> Are they just blatantly lying on their resumes?

How would anyone know? Once a candidate fails the screen, the company rejects and never gives a second thought to the candidate again.

Does any company do follow-up to see what happened in the future to rejected candidates? I've never heard of that happening.

The coding screens are just assumed to be infallible, so the candidate must have been a fraud. It's unthinkable that the screening tests themselves are wrong, because then the whole hiring process is misguided.

I blame the trend of “software development” as a job role getting farther and farther away from the task of writing programs.

There are lots and lots of big company jobs where you can skate by writing ~100 lines of code a week (or less!) all inside the mandated Big Company In-House Framework. In fact your boss demands that you work this way.

I mean, that was totally me for years, so I’m not judging too harshly.

I’ve been at a senior level for a while with a bunch of projects in daily public use that I can point to and discuss at length.

I’ll still google “how 2 for loop” sometimes.

We ran about a 75% failure rate on the above quiz. This is after the reciter screened them and we had another developer phone screen.

Some took one look at it and walked out. Others would solve it in under a minute. Everyone in between.

I'll be looking for a new contract or job in June. Last time through the process, someone actually told me I was bad at interviews! They might be right; I spend a lot more time doing the job than looking for jobs. I'm not looking forward to the grind, and doubt I would be so fortunate to run into fun little problems like this one:

  letters = %w(A a b b c c c c d e)
  
  letter_map = Hash.new(0)
  
  letters.each do |letter|
    letter_map[letter] += 1
  end
  
  def print_count(map)
    map.each do |key, value|
      puts "\"#{key}\": #{value}"
    end
  end
  
  def match_count(map, count)
    map.select { |key, value| value == count }.keys
  end
  
  print_count(letter_map)
  match_count(letter_map, 4)

Oh my god. Tell me what problems you're experiencing and how you've tried to solve them. Talk to me about goals and knowledge gaps. What's your approach to "I don't know how to do this" and what do you think of mine? Why is the internet apparently disabled at your business? Talk to me about holes in your onboarding process and ask me how I'd fix them. Use me as a sanity check for your data structures vs business intent.

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/02/13/professor-layt...

Why are you always asking me to rediscover and reimplement the Fibonacci sequence when none of us give a fuck about it? This whole thing's insane, what have I become.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com