Not OP, but I'd like to chime in here. Getting good with computers is often best done by spending a large amount of time on computers. For many of "us" that involved teenage years playing MMORPGs, general programming, IRC, etc.
Despite a certain illusion of sociality involved in these activities, I am of the opinion that they are uniquely anti-social, and thus were in one way or another a deprivation of my childhood.
Sure I now have a much higher earnings potential. But was it worth it? I don't know. And thus I'm in no position to recommend it for anyone else.
Theirs probably a balance in it somewhere. And you can be damned sure if I'm ever a parent I'm going to tread lightly between "my child should learn to program, go to college, etc." and "my child needs to live a happy, normal, life".
That why it's a "for better or for worse" mentality in my opinion. We don't really know which is best do we?
I think about the same thing quite a lot. I remember having anti-social tendencies from a really young age. No idea why, I was just rarely interested in other kids. So I spent a lot of time dicking around with my computer. That paid off, but I got a little better with social skills later on after working at it. I always wonder how my life would be different if I didn't have all the computer escapism and worked on social skills earlier.
This is exactly my education path. The great thing was my MMO opened up both the client and server for development so I learned to program using GScript. God awful language in hindsight but addictive. I eventually spent more time developing for the game than I did playing it. That was god awful too since you had to pay to develop content for their game!
I remember when I first got started with git I committed at an absurd frequency. I don't think it's that unreasonable for someone straight out of college to be relatively new to git, and thus do the same thing.
I remember later on I wrote a script that listened to git hooks and rebuilt my project on a remote server. I was still testing manually at that time, as we all do in the beginning, which resulted in a large number of commits so that I could view the results on the server.
I think it's ok to ask "why do you have so many commits?" but not "why do you have so many commits?!?!?!". It's also not ok to ASSUME that a large number of commits is a bad thing automatically, unless you have reasons far better then any submitted in this thread.
Well I can't say too much without exposing the problem.
But there were about 16 files in total. All of the comparators that were written had multiple tests. (I shot for nearly 100% coverage..although I wasn't going to force stdin emulation, and mock out system.exits) All of the commits that were performed were done in small amounts. (Also, a few were just for transferring work space to other computers) The task in hand would have represented approximately 4 tickets at the bare minimum.
Besides, the number of commits: That problem is resolved by merging a branch back down.
The feedback was written in a way "How do you consider that reasonable in a professional environment?"
(Another thing... I wasn't required to submit via a git repo I was required to submit via a zip file, but I did because I hoped it'd give me a leg up.... Turns out: You're better off not trying)
66 commits sounds perfectly fine for complete unit test coverage, 16 files, etc. Sounds like this was not the sort of person anybody would want to work with if he phrased the question in that condescending way. He'd probably end up being an insane micromanager.
Not OP, but as someone who took a 6 hour test at full concentration, with no feedback other then a polite 'no', there are a few reasons I don't out them.
1) I didn't score well on the test. It's within reason they read this post and release my scores with a 'it was because he scored low'. Future employers then come across my scores and deny me.
2) Don't bite the hand that's like the hand that MIGHT feed you. You don't yell and storm out of investor meetings. Because then they tell other investors. Similar logic here.
3) This place is very optimistic. Pessimistic people aren't particularly desirable. Whistle blowers are included in the latter group especially by corporate entities. Who knows what it could cause.
It really boils down to the fact that it's not a safe environment to do so. Or at least it doesn't feel so.
Getting back to you with a no (and nothing else) is quite a stretch from literally nothing as OP.
I think you're playing the game of life with your scared setting turned up too high. You might get better results to turn the bold up a bit over time as you gain confidence.
Depends on how large the company is. For small startups, a glassdoor review might be specific enough to identify the candidate. Bigger companies, I suspect won't care and/or don't have take-home tests.
Out of curiosity, what are the demographics of the people who made these suggestions?
Were they employed? Were they very desirable to companies? Were they very undesirable to companies? Did they have financial hardships? College graduates? College dropouts?
I think it's important to remember how diverse the hiring pool is, and which voices tend to be the loudest. I would argue that the advice most companies get are from very successful companies. Similarly engineers likely seek advice from very successful engineers.
Both these groups are in the minority I think, and would thus not be in the best position to dictate for the majority (strictly in terms of fulfilling individual needs that they themselves have not encountered, personally or otherwise).
Example: 10x programmer wants a hiring process that caters to 10x programmers.
Problem: Vast majority of programmers do not fall into this category, and would not benefit from such a system. Yet companies want 10xers, so they go with it anyways. Then they complain about how hard it is to hire programmers.
Less experienced programmers are definitely over represented in engineers adversely affected by stress. This could be because people get better at interviewing at they gain experience, or because the people who can't perform under interview stress drop out of the profession
Just want to say, in conjecture to my sibling post on this thread, I had a identical experience. In fact, if you're in the Bay Area we likely applied to the same companies.
My take-homes made me fundamentally question my ability as a programmer. And I'm a damn good programmer. That is wrong on so many levels.
I can only pledge that if I'm ever in a position to hire developers (at any level) that I'll never force that kind of experience on a potential applicant.
I feel their is a major gap between junior and senior developers. And in this environment a junior developer has zero leverage with the companies he/she applies to. So they treat us like cattle.
It's like with every generation gap, their isn't much point blaming those who came before us. We can only do the best we can and make an effort not to replicate their mistakes. The next class(es) of software engineers have to improve and be better then the ones before them.
I can only say that if you're ever hiring, you probably will ask people to code for you. You won't at first, but after you've hired a few who could "talk the talk" but then can't actually write readable, maintainable, and in some cases working code, you'll reevaluate.
There's a gap between knowing concepts and knowing how to apply those concepts. There's actually a certain (limited) amount of artistry to writing code. Hiring a programmer without seeing code is like hiring an Architect without ever having seen a house he's designed.
>I can only say that if you're ever hiring, you probably will ask people to code for you. You won't at first, but after you've hired a few who could "talk the talk" but then can't actually write readable, maintainable, and in some cases working code, you'll reevaluate.
You don't need an 8-hour take-home coding exercise to determine whether or not someone is capable of writing working code.
Its good in theory, but it leaves a lot of ambiguity for the interviewee to parse through. For instance, if given a two week window would it look better for me to do it tonight? Would it show ambition? Or would it seem like I'm desperate, and lead to a lower amount of compensation being offered to me? Should I spend far longer then five hours on the assignment, and turn in superior work while making it seem like I only spent 5 hours? What is my competition doing?
As someone who's recently been through the ringer, including one six hour take-home, all I want is a clear demonstration of respect and rationality.
Bring me into your professional office. Let's talk like professionals. Allow me to demonstrate my professional skills. Call me back with a professional yes or a professional no, all within a professional time frame. That's it.
Remote or otherwise less traditional assignments / roles / jobs will deserve and benefit from their own process. But how we strayed from the straight forward formula is beyond me, my guess it was an initiative started by a handful of companies who had trouble hiring.
I don't think hiring devs is the systematic issue everyone makes it out to be. Assessing talent is always hard, be it an artist's, an athlete's or a programmers. I think rather then assume the cost of the investment in hiring, companies chose to blame the system and that's where this absurd roller coaster started.
> Bring me into your professional office. Let's talk like professionals. Allow me to demonstrate my professional skills. Call me back with a professional yes or a professional no, all within a professional time frame. That's it.
What if your professional skills are such that it's not possible to demonstrate them in an hour or two at someone else's office--either because of the nature of the skills, or because you're one of the many excellent programmers whose work suffers when there's someone actively staring at you, like the guy in the article?
Let's be honest. Programming as a discipline attracts a disproportionate number of people for whom social skills do not come easily. Granted, you don't want to hire a grumbling misanthrope who refuses to take direction, but you also don't want to turn away a perfectly good team player who lacks the largely irrelevant skill of gladhanding under pressure.
I think a lot of the comments in discussions like this come from programmers who do have solid social skills, and there's certainly nothing wrong with that, but an interview process that gives you personally a fair evaluation is not necessarily the most reliable one for programmers in general.
Good points. If you really care about being impartial, maybe have the 2 week period and a blind submission method in which the interviewer does not see when the assignment was completed.
But my rent is due the Friday after next and I need to know if I should send out another wave of resumes.
It isn't but it strikes me we are looking very hard to find a new way to do things, when the old way was pretty damn good.
Sit me down and talk about technology for ~thirty minutes. If I don't have the social skills to successfully do this (minority issue) I likely would not be able to communicate well with a team and thus should not be a candidate anyways. You will then know immediately whether you want to hire me (or progress me to another round) or not.
I then get a call two days later and can progress with my life.
People pretend like all this hiring strategy is for the good of the candidate. It's not. As with everything else its for the good of the company and its investors.
Here's a thought:
Invest in a competent hiring manager who can see through applicant bull shit and identify talent within a reasonable range. Includes basic negotiation skills. And assume the rightful risk that is employing another human being.
> Sit me down and talk about technology for ~thirty minutes.
This is an efficient way to hire a team of good bullshitters. I've interviewed people who did extremely well when we were "talking like professionals" but were unable to do even very simple coding problems.
My bar for coding is really not that high. I don't expect perfect syntax. I don't pick the language. I don't expect "the one answer". I expect people to write code that could work after syntax and small bugs are fixed, and most critically, I expect people to be able to discuss their code meaningfully.
Unfortunately, "ability to write basic code" and "ability to talk like professionals" are not tightly correlated. And I expect both of these things from dev candidates.
I disagree. I have yet to meet anyone who is faking it and cannot be cracked in 5-10 minutes of carefully-directed prodding. In fact, I don't see how it is possible to do extremely well on the "talk like a professional" part and not be able to write basic programs, unless you and I have very different concepts of what "talk like a professional" means.
> I have yet to meet anyone who is faking it and cannot be cracked in 5-10 minutes of carefully-directed prodding.
Coding is a skill largely separate from other critical dev skills, e.g. design. Someone can legitimately have deep knowledge of, e.g., how to build a 3-tier service architecture without actually being able to code. This isn't "faking it". It's a different skill. You can study database partitioning strategies and learn about the latest and greatest frameworks for writing web pages and APIs without ever writing a single line of code. And sure, you can try to probe deeply enough to expose where their knowledge stops, but you're still not probing for coding skill. There's actually a decent chance that you'll end up probing for trivia which is not a very useful filter. "Oh, you don't don't know the auto-generated C++ class members? You clearly haven't actually worked in C++!" Yeah, right. Anything known broadly-enough known that it's reasonable to assume all coders would know it is broadly-enough known that non-coders could learn it, too.
Even if you could probe deeply enough in conversation to expose that they can't code, you could do the same with a few minutes of actual coding. When someone can't code, it becomes clear pretty quickly when you ask them to code.
> Coding is a skill largely separate from other critical dev skills, e.g. design.
I do not believe coding is largely separate from engineering. There are, of course, other skills that are necessary or desirable.
> Someone can legitimately have deep knowledge of, e.g., how to build a 3-tier service architecture without actually being able to code. This isn't "faking it". It's a different skill.
Absolutely. It is also a level of skill I would only expect or look for in a position that was not going to be doing daily coding, such as a systems engineer.
> You can ... learn about the latest and greatest frameworks for writing web pages and APIs without ever writing a single line of code.
Here I disagree. If you have never used a framework or API, you don't know it. I don't care that you can regurgitate the Javadocs; I care that you know things like its pitfalls, quirks, and runtime oddities.
> There's actually a decent chance that you'll end up probing for trivia which is not a very useful filter.
To be clear, I abhor trivia-based interviewing. What I am talking about is practical engineering tradeoffs between one course of action versus another, preferably supported by direct personal experience in the past.
> Even if you could probe deeply enough in conversation to expose that they can't code, you could do the same with a few minutes of actual coding. When someone can't code, it becomes clear pretty quickly when you ask them to code.
Exposing the level of competence a five-minute coding problem can is trivial to do in parallel with a deep engineering discussion. In fact, I think some sort of code should be part of that discussion. I just don't think it should be the "implement this" CLRS problem. It should be something two-way, more representative of what the job is like on a daily basis.
> I do not believe coding is largely separate from engineering.
I could pick up a cookbook and study how to cook a souffle. I could learn enough about this academically that I could answer basically any questions you might ask. Having this academic knowledge is a good thing, but it doesn't mean I've ever even separated an egg. If you really want to know if I can make a souffle, your best bet is to hand me the stuff and ask me to do it.
> Here I disagree. If you have never used a framework or API, you don't know it. I don't care that you can regurgitate the Javadocs; I care that you know things like its pitfalls, quirks, and runtime oddities.
And here I assert that you're either probing on trivia or probing on things that can be learned without using
the framework (actually, probably both). The pitfalls, quirks, and oddities are well documented in thousands of blogs.
> To be clear, I abhor trivia-based interviewing. What I am talking about is practical engineering tradeoffs between one course of action versus another, preferably supported by direct personal experience in the past.*
So this is an entirely different thing than pitfalls. Now you're talking about designing systems and dealing with tradeoffs. This isn't coding, and I don't believe you can always discover coding gaps by probing on this.
> Exposing the level of competence a five-minute coding problem can is trivial to do in parallel with a deep engineering discussion. In fact, I think some sort of code should be part of that discussion.
I guess I'm confused about what you're asking in an interview, then. Are your candidates coding or not?
> It should be something two-way, more representative of what the job is like on a daily basis.
I think it's unrealistic to try to get the candidate to solve real-world, day-to-day problems in an hour. This isn't what the job is like. "Design and implement this feature" is not a 45-minute task typically. It's typically days or weeks, so asking a "representative" problem in an interview is infeasible unless you're just doing high-level design, in which case it's not predictive for coding ability.
I think I'm not being clear and may be misunderstanding you.
When I was writing signal processing code, we had four levels of engineering.
- The first was an Algorithm Description Document. This document laid out, in mathematical terms, the algorithms used for various signal processing functions in the system. It was purely conceptual.
- The second was an Algorithm Implentation Document. This document mapped the algorithms to specific parts of the hardware and software system, laying out the logical module structure and data flow. It also specified how the algorithms would be realized in code, since parts of a particular algorithm might need to run in different parts of the system. The AID was still primarily mathematical.
- The third was a series of software design documents. These documents specified the details of module interfaces, code and file layouts, and specifics about what algorithms would be implemented in what functions.
- The fourth was the actual translation of the mathematical algorithms in the AID into actual C code. Most of the engineering at this level dealt with function-level optimization and some platform-specific stuff.
Of those four levels, only the last is what I would consider "coding". It is also the least important. Anyone who can really understand the first three levels and is willing to learn can handle the fourth. As I mentioned previously, there will be differences in efficiency, but not in capability. It would take willful ignorance for this not to be the case. I think this is also what you are considering "coding", but I'm not sure; I also think you might be merging #3 and #4.
Now, most commercial projects do not run this way and, as far as I know, few have dedicated systems engineers to manage the system architecture and APIs. Thus, the software engineers building the system generally perform the work in all four of these levels simultaneously as the system builds out. Despite this, I still only consider the work that fits level 4 to be "coding", and still consider it to be the least important.
What I look for when I interview are engineers who operate very well in levels 1 - 3. If I find that, level 4 is pretty much a given absent the rare pathological case or someone with a very "academic" attitude. The questions I personally ask deal with levels 2 and 3. Those questions cover some of what might be considered coding, like API design and class layout. I do not have candidates actually generate code, though. Some of the other interviewers have candidates write small functions in pseudocode or explain existing, uncommented Java code, though.
I also need to note that we have a take-home test that candidates need to pass before they get an on-site.We have also recently added an open coding challenge which may eventually replace the take-home test. This probably covers your requirement for candidates to code, even though it isn't done in front of one of us.
Yes, I'm generally looking for someone who can do all of those things (though I don't work in DSP, so it's not an exact mapping). I would say that at least part of #3 is coding. If you're actually defining code layout etc., you are basically coding. If you dig deep enough here, you can probably rule out the vast majority of people who can't do #4. I still think it's a more efficient use of time to just ask them to do a bit of coding, though. Then I have certainty on the question rather than an implicit answer.
I worked with a team of these before. You can rule our certain types of people with tech questions (i.e. never coded before, only coded hacked, etc.). You cannot rule out
* People who read a lot of blogs so know the lingo, but never code
* People who get the theory but can't actually implement something that works without bugs
> People who read a lot of blogs so know the lingo, but never code
I think this is where my definition of "talk like a professional" may be more strict. I'm interested in understanding, in opinions, in the actual engineering.
> People who get the theory but can't actually implement something that works without bugs
Having spent most of my career working with PhDs trying to design and implement signal processing and NLP algorithms, I have experienced a lot of that. Given the proper attitude, it is fairly easy to correct coding deficiencies if someone really understands what they are supposed to be doing.
> People that over-engineer simple things
The greater offenders are fairly easy to detect in a directed technical discussion. The lesser offenders are fairly easy to correct in code review, again given the proper attitude, as they are unlikely to be doing things that require major refactoring.
In short, I think I place much more emphasis on engineering as opposed to coding. My experience has been that any coding issues people with good engineering skills and an attitude worth hiring have are quickly and easily corrected. You cannot really understand the engineering of a system without being able to code it. You might not be as efficient as someone else, but you are capable.
* People who have been on a team long enough to learn how things should work but lack the skills to really do the coding.
I phone screened a guy fairly recent who had a very long background (~20 years) in a pretty security-conscious field. He did very well in open-ended design discussions and was able to explain his prior work very well. He couldn't code trivial binary tree operations, though. I can only assume that someone else on his team is carrying most of the coding burden. This guy might be great at a PM-type job (or not, I don't interview for those jobs), but not as a dev.
I feel like there is some detail missing here. What constituted doing "very well" on the open-ended questions? How deep into the engineering did you get? Since you mentioned he "might be great at a PM-type job" it sounds like you didn't go very deep on int.
That one was a phone screen, so no it was not the deepest technical dive ever. But in fairness a 1-hour interview is rarely the deepest technical dive possible. I normally pose some big problem like "design a system that accomplishes X at high scale" and then drill into some area iteratively until we're discussing fairly specific details. At the high level I'm looking for the candidate to recognize tradeoffs between centralized/distributed designs, sanely choose the major components, deal with stateful and stateless components, recognize security tradeoffs, etc. As we drill in we might talk about data partitioning, georeplication, or high availability and implementation tradeoffs there. We might get down to the level of something like handling out-of-order change notifications. Rarely do I drill down to the level of file I/O or memory management strategies.
>Invest in a competent hiring manager who can see through applicant bull shit and identify talent within a reasonable range. Includes basic negotiation skills. And assume the rightful risk that is employing another human being.
Problem with that is it's hard to find one. It's gotta be someone with pretty good coding skills. This person would then have to share their time between either coding head-down or managing coders, either of which are time-consuming and intolerant of disruption.
One idea I had was you could have mutual feedback. A bunch of people would after a while have anonymous input on each other, giving you say 10 coder's impressions of a fellow coder. This wouldn't have to be quizzes, half hour coffees could do.
Despite a certain illusion of sociality involved in these activities, I am of the opinion that they are uniquely anti-social, and thus were in one way or another a deprivation of my childhood.
Sure I now have a much higher earnings potential. But was it worth it? I don't know. And thus I'm in no position to recommend it for anyone else.
Theirs probably a balance in it somewhere. And you can be damned sure if I'm ever a parent I'm going to tread lightly between "my child should learn to program, go to college, etc." and "my child needs to live a happy, normal, life".
That why it's a "for better or for worse" mentality in my opinion. We don't really know which is best do we?