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Because it has been observed [1] that a lot of people turning up to coding interviews don't know much about coding.

I'm sure in the ML sector right now, it's hell. Seven figure salaries are going to get some optimistic over-reachers desperate to try and get in the door and BS their way through the first few months.

My own experience: I had a CEO and board member of the startup I was CTO'ing push a dev my way. "Brilliant", they said, "just really great attitude, check them out see if we can get them hired, fast". I was excited, and keen to meet them. Turns out their way to code was to find a library (this was a Ruby shop, so technically a gem), that did the thing needed, bolt it in using example code and ship it. "OK", I said, "but we're a startup trying to solve an optimisation problem in the logistics space. There is no gem. We're going to have to be smart and solve this ourselves by reading papers and experimenting and trying things out. How would you do that?". And I kid you not, the exact response was "If there isn't a gem, I don't think it's doable, or maybe we should wait until it's done".

When I told my CEO and board member that this great, exciting prospect they found couldn't code, they refused to believe me until I spelled it out really carefully: if we hired them, we'd have to train them to solve problems in code. Like, give them CS50 or something. Is that right for a senior engineer as 4th or 5th hire in a startup?

So now I ask some trivia for engineer roles. I dress it up a bit so as not to be patronising, but I kind of want to have a conversation about how they code, what they do, what their method and see if it rings true. On a lot of phone screens, it still just doesn't tally up.

[1] This is 2007, but I see no evidence of it having really changed much, TBH: https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/



I once got asked FizzBuzz in a take-home interview, and the tool they were using flagged me for completing it very quickly and with an answer the tool had seen before.

Fortunately they gave me the opportunity to explain that it was a well-known interview question dating back to 2007 (with that blog post as evidence), and that I had previously asked this question in interviews, so I basically had the answer memorized. (I think the fact that I had correct, unique answers for the other questions helped me also.)


This post is absolutely perfect in summing up the state of Software Engineering hiring.


Don’t practice obscure arbitrary brain teasers? No job for you. Too good at the brain teasers? No job for you.


> "If there isn't a gem, I don't think it's doable, or maybe we should wait until it's done".

Yikes. But I have also known many people with this mindset (and it appears to be workable for a certain subset of the tech industry)


Who hired the engineer? It seems like they failed to make a successful hire, but that happens sometimes.

>but I kind of want to have a conversation about how they code, what they do, what their method and see if it rings true.

I think these are great ideas. What kinds of things were you asking in your interviews?


I can't remember where I got this from, but I like to ask them to talk to me about their favourite project. It can be school, hobby or work, just something they are excited about. Then we talk about what made them excited, what design tradeoffs they considered, the problems they ran into, how they overcame problems, what they would do differently knowing what they know now, and so on.

My favourite answer was a guy who replied "I've been working recently on some OpenGPL stuff in Common Lisp for the X window protocol". That was an interesting chat, and I was happy when he accepted the offer I made at the end of it.


> We're going to have to be smart and solve this ourselves by reading papers and experimenting and trying things out. How would you do that?

By reading papers and experimenting and trying things out? Throw in a few books for good measure?

Why are you answering the question you are asking yourself?


Because when I dig further into how to do that, I often get blanks. Saying you will do that and being able to do it are two different things.

You might not understand how low the bar is here. If I ask 100 applicants to write a working function to calculate E=mc^2 for different values of m, 30+ just won't know where to start.

So when I ask how we might solve a problem I am not asking for the abstract 10000 foot view. I'm checking they can write simple code. Filters out a huge number of people, unfortunately.




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