Re:Ask HN: What is the point of algorithm-heavy interviews?
by mgaw on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @06:32AM
(#21451409)
For me there are two reasons:
(1) We want to hire people who are able to solve programming-related problems. Now how do you find out if a candidate can do this? Looking at their CV doesn't tell you much. You can build up a long impressive CV without being able to program. So it would be nice to see them solve a problem right here and now.
Ideally, that would be a problem of the type you would often encounter in your actual work. But there are few programming-only problems in my work. And the hard ones are about designing a larger part of a system, or fitting something new into the context of something old, or trying to understand some old code to be able to adapt it.
My point is: All of these take a massive amount of context into account. Giving a candidate all that context would take weeks.
An algorithm challenge works because it has a good ratio of "time it takes to explain the problem" to "the problem is actually non-trivial to solve".
(2) We do these algorithm questions on a whiteboard, with one interviewer also standing and talking through the development of the solution with the candidate. I believe this gives me a sense of whether I can and want to work together with the candidate either on an actual whiteboard when sketching solutions to problems or when pairing.
(1) We want to hire people who are able to solve programming-related problems. Now how do you find out if a candidate can do this? Looking at their CV doesn't tell you much. You can build up a long impressive CV without being able to program. So it would be nice to see them solve a problem right here and now.
Ideally, that would be a problem of the type you would often encounter in your actual work. But there are few programming-only problems in my work. And the hard ones are about designing a larger part of a system, or fitting something new into the context of something old, or trying to understand some old code to be able to adapt it.
My point is: All of these take a massive amount of context into account. Giving a candidate all that context would take weeks.
An algorithm challenge works because it has a good ratio of "time it takes to explain the problem" to "the problem is actually non-trivial to solve".
(2) We do these algorithm questions on a whiteboard, with one interviewer also standing and talking through the development of the solution with the candidate. I believe this gives me a sense of whether I can and want to work together with the candidate either on an actual whiteboard when sketching solutions to problems or when pairing.