Code Interviews

I won&#x27;t bother with coding interviews. I consider them to be &quot;hazing rituals&quot;; not actual qualification assessment. I am very, very fortunate, in that I don&#x27;t have to deal with them. I am not looking for work, and plan to never look for work, ever again.<p>I have a <i>giant</i> portfolio[0]. It has links to 40 or so repos, with tens of thousands of lines of code, spanning decades. Just about every project can be cloned, built, and submitted to the App Store, or SPMed into your own work, in about thirty seconds.<p>I&#x27;ve written stuff that is now a worldwide standard infrastructure, and the links to that work is in my portfolio, as is a blog entry, where I discuss the strategic thinking that informed its genesis.<p>I&#x27;ve written dozens of articles, tutorials, and blog entries, that detail the way I think, work, document my code, evaluate and implement architectures, and work with others. Links to all that is...you guessed it...in my portfolio.<p>There are years of checkins, so things like development velocity can be measured. My GH ID is solid green.<p>If you aren&#x27;t willing to even look at it, then we probably won&#x27;t get along, and we&#x27;re both better off, avoiding each other.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;chrismarshall" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;chrismarshall</a>

&gt; All job interview processes are flawed. They&#x27;re just flawed in different ways, and some of those flaws work to your advantage and some don&#x27;t.<p>Ways in which the flaws of interview process have helped me:<p>* I&#x27;m very good at &quot;conversational&quot; interviews. I have battle scars from years in industry. Higher-ups at companies want to hear about that, and they make me strong offers. But technically, I could completely suck at my job and the discussion could sound exactly the same.<p>* Most of my money is stock growth from my initial packages. No way I would have this $$$ from bonuses.<p>* My title-bump came during hiring, not promotion.

It&#x27;s also frustrating for job mobility, as you need to move jobs (or at least have offers) to get employers to pay your market rate. But in order to get offers you need to basically start a part time job studying and interviewing. If you just interview with a company you want to work for with no competing offers you will get lowballed - you might also just get rejected because companies prefer high-false positive rates and most interviewers do not get any sort of continual training, feedback, calibration or standardization. It&#x27;s also unfortunately standard that your compensation doesn&#x27;t keep up with your market value as companies would rather hire-in than promote internally.

Max Howell&#x27;s tweet gets pasted on every article talking about code interviews as some kind of exemplification of the problem of whiteboard&#x2F;algorithmic interviews.<p>What some people might not know is that he reflected on that tweet two years later (3 years ago), in this Quora question: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quora.com&#x2F;Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejecting-Max-Howell-the-author-of-Homebrew-for-not-being-able-to-invert-a-binary-tree" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quora.com&#x2F;Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin...</a><p>He even explains how he actually did well in the software engineering interviews in the process.

&gt;My task is far more life-like,<p>That&#x27;s debatable. I&#x27;ve never had to implement a from YAML task execution system for work. I&#x27;ve used them a lot but that&#x27;s a very different task than writing one. In fact given how many exist writing one seems very much a bad case of NIH syndrome.

Agree that 99% of the leetcode interviews are divorced from everyday coding work.<p>However, this article goes in the wrong direction in trying to keep the LinkedList premise - how often do programmers see a raw linkedlist anyways?<p>Directly ask coding questions from your everyday work, and skip the linkedlist stuff as 3rd level detail questions; the signal that the candidate can do the job is much higher then. Ex: here’s an API and it’s json response: write some code to parse it. Add extensions like paging, network failures, etc. Let the candidate google everything, and if your question is good, it can’t be copypasta from StackOverflow.

<p><pre><code> &gt; It is increasingly common to use this kind of “pipeline-as-YAML” &gt; configuration to piece together a workflow of pre-built &gt; components 1. Some real examples of this are TFX components, &gt; scikit-learn Pipelines, or Airflow DAGs. </code></pre> Airflow DAGs are Python objects, defined in Python code.

&gt; There are a few questions that people like to use as punching bags. Invert a binary tree. Reverse a linked list. Perform breadth-first and&#x2F;or depth-first tree traversals. Anything to do with heaps.<p>None of these are hard. Should be pretty much covered by any good algorithm class.

The problem is that however distasteful or lacking the current situation is, it’s been adopted by most large companies and is seen as standard now so nobody has any incentive to improve it and it self perpetuates akin to hazing rituals at fraternities . Google got us into the current mess with their claim to have found the only difference between good performance and bad performance at Google was the ability to do algorithmic problems. If only they published that research! Before Google was Microsoft. The only thing that would incentivize employers to change now would be engineers refusing these interviews en masse or a small company becoming an influentially big one that has a different hiring scheme altogether.

As a data scientist, I regularly get asked at least a subset of questions that are more suited for real software engineers. Very few interviewers get around to asking relevant things (for me&#x2F;my job).<p>My day-to-day is messing around with pandas and matplotlib, mostly, but I never get interviewed on that. It&#x27;s usually brainteasers, time complexity of some algorithm, and an invariably-rigged machine learning thing I can never get right.

That may be because I&#x27;m young, but the idea of studying for a few months and get a salary that&#x27;s triple of what I currently make, or double of what starts to be the high barrier in my country (France) is extremely appealing to me. I understand that I may not feel the same way in 10, 20, 30 years but until then it&#x27;s a golden opportunity.

&gt; a decent evaluation of junior engineers without industry experience, but it’s a common complaint among senior engineers that they have to study material that they haven’t used in years to get a job where they won’t use it.<p>Counterpoint: some engineers with industry experience may have been working on very specific tech that doesn&#x27;t readily translate to a new position. Actually, I&#x27;m sure some companies wouldn&#x27;t even consider them for that reason.<p>Big companies need some standardized way of interviewing people if they want to maintain some level of fairness. At least, algorithms and data-structures provide a common denominator.