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Comment by dilyevsky | Hacker News Reader

> But that will become quite clear during the interview regardless if you have them doing some leetcode challenge or not.

No, no it won’t. I’ve done 300 interviews when i stopped counting and I’ve had all sorts of people who talk a good game but absolutely can’t code

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I second this. I've been interviewing candidates for around 6 years and I feel like the number of applicants with very strong communication skills but that cannot perform the most simple programming problems (basic loop, swapping two variables) went up. For my team and most teams at my employer we employ a simple test with a basic programming problem, code review problem and rudimentary system design problem similar to our actual work. We expect the juniors and medior to not succeed at all of these but do want to see how candidates think and communicate if they get stuck, but a junior that can't sort strings in any language of choice is a hard pass. Half of our candidates past initial phone screen fail this test. I do wonder though if this has something to do with the local (NL) market.

Each company I’ve worked with has attracted a slightly different group of applicants, so I find it easy to believe NL would be different yet.

Whenever I start thinking the problem is the candidates I start asking myself “why?”. Why we came to the conclusion we did, why they applied, why we need more people on the team, etc.

It’s not your local market and this is not new. I interviewed folks at google head office in 2012 so we had people from all over the world and different experience levels and it was the same thing

What kinds of questions could you possibly ask that doesn't immediately surface this?

A person who "cannot write a loop" will not be able to earnestly hold a conversation about programming.

You are so wrong about that. I’ve had people recite gang of four design patterns and talk about template metaprogramming then absolutely fail at writing a doubly nested loop in their language of choice. Coding is a skill that you can only really master with practice not just reading books and blogposts (although that definitely helps)

I asked very basic coding questions that didn’t require “advanced” algorithmic knowledge like DP which are popular at some shops

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