Hiring Is Broken

Re:Hiring Is Broken by tptacek on Thursday January 17, 2019 @03:40PM (#18934413)

What drives me a little nuts is all the people on this thread saying BFS is simple, as simple as counting, as if that somehow strengthened their argument. It does the opposite: BFS is indeed simple, so simple that you can simply explain it to a candidate and ask them to implement it, just like you would do with an actual developer (or, more likely, that they'd just do for themselves based solely on the Wikipedia page).

I'll go a little further and say that if you've qualified a candidate as capable of busting out the routine Javascript required to wire up typical front-end code, if you can't teach that developer how to implement BFS within the confines of a single interview, you the interviewer share some of the incompetence. Certainly that would be the case for a manager or team lead!

The reality is that BFS is for most jobs (frontend AND backend) a trivia question, and a status-seeking mechanism for interviewers.

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Re:Hiring Is Broken by 0xFACEFEED on Thursday January 17, 2019 @04:24PM (#18934788)

THANK YOU. 16 years I've been writing code and I can count on one hand the people I've met who realize this. I get a little emotional about it because I've seen so many exceptional programmers crumble in interviews with trivia questions.

If an interviewer wants to test problem solving skills with a BFS, no problem:

- Draw a tree on the whiteboard (interviewers writing the whiteboard is highly undervalued; it calms the candidate)

- Explain what a BFS is. It's easy to draw out each step in a BFS algorithm.

- Ask the candidate to write some pseudo code that implements it.

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Re:Hiring Is Broken by theamk on Thursday January 17, 2019 @05:31PM (#18935295)

I do, every time! I even drew a little diagram a couple of times and traced the path!

And they still failed it! It is not about trivia or what BFS is, it is all about can you reason about algorithms.

(Disclaimer: our actual interview problem is slightly different, but it it still a very basic CS one)

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Re:Hiring Is Broken by Twirrim on Thursday January 17, 2019 @06:15PM (#18935580)

> And they still failed it! It is not about trivia or what BFS is, it is all about can you reason about algorithms.

Okay.. so now this is about you and a bad candidate rather than the person pointing out that interviewing is broken. Got it.

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Re:Hiring Is Broken by theamk on Thursday January 17, 2019 @09:13PM (#18936485)

Well, if at least one person reads the discussion, and then starts inventing the algorithms instead of giving up right away, I'd be happy :)

Because someone saying "How would I know? If, and when, I need to know how tree-shaking is implemented, I will go look it up." makes me sad. The tree-shaking algorithm was not given to us by ancient gods. As a programmer, you job it is to solve problems no one has solved before. Interviewing may be indeed broken, but the original article was not showing any evidence of this.

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