Re:Guido van Rossum joins Microsoft
by purpleidea on Friday November 13, 2020 @03:21AM
(#25080228)
> They can afford to be choosey. So they can try to find not only the person who can do the job but also do it BEST.
Selecting people based on how well they can code some linked-list traversal, in a web editor, while someone is timing them is not a good metric for overall "best". In fact you might reject candidates that think more about larger design problems, and overall your code might suffer.
>in a web editor
This is the part I dislike the most. They usually disable copy-pasting too because they know it's that easy to google so you can't just code in your IDE and paste.
Re:Guido van Rossum joins Microsoft
by therealdrag0 on Sunday November 15, 2020 @01:56AM
(#25098929)
Isn’t it usually both? My compy’s on-site has multiple coding sessions and multiple design sessions.
Re:Guido van Rossum joins Microsoft
by stormbeard on Friday November 13, 2020 @03:25AM
(#25080264)
I've done my fair share of algorithmic hoop-jumping and have worked at a few of these companies over the last 10 years. I'm not convinced that the people performing these interviews are able to tell how a candidate's brain works at all in 45 minutes.
At some point it's all just signaling and wild guesses.
The companies that popularized this were and still are EXTREMELY lucrative, and get a TON of competition.
They can afford to be choosey. So they can try to find not only the person who can do the job but also do it BEST.
And that's really hard to tell from just looking at their work experience. You want to see how their brain works under pressure, dealing with an ambiguous new problem they've never seen before.
A lot of people who rag on modern tech interviewing don't get this. Unfortunately, so do a lot of people DOING these modern tech interviews. "He said the algorithm was O(n log n) but the answer is actually O (k log n). Not inclined"
And so, we spiral.