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I do simple questions similar to the quoted LinkedIn post. (So less leetcode and more "do you know how to code anything".) While I can agree it is harder under stress, what is the alternative to knowing if someone can code at all? (My pass rate is similar to the quoted LinkedIn post.)

I have done the entry interview as well. For example have had very good conversations with managers who were applying for senior IC roles. They then go and fail the tech interview basic "can you do write and execute a python hello world script from the command line".

3 comments

Yeah, I'm confused by the article. Following this logic, any interview sucks because of the stress it puts on the candidate. So what am I supposed to do? Hire based on a home assignment? then the "unpaid labour" crowd will call me out, and I personally believe they would be right to do so... So I'm supposed to hire based on résumé only? It's a lose-lose situation.

It reminds me a professor who recently told me, regarding ChatGPT use in university: "we're receiving every week applications from foreign students written in perfect German, then when we schedule a call for an interview with the potential scholar, they're incapable to speak either German or English."

Not specific to you possibly, but how about interviewing based on what you do in this role, and what the person has experience in?

I'm personally done with frontend/UI development roles where the interviews expect you to "brush up on CS fundamentals" or "prep", and then they ask nothing about "here, make this UI", as if it's some side thing. And if you didn't "prepare" for their leetcode crap, they act like you are some huge liar/faker who's somehow been coasting for 15 years.

Lot of people are pretty decent at bullshit. And they can talk the shop well enough to coast for a while.

On other hand I wouldn't say it would be unreasonable for UI people to setup some basic UI or like that could be done fast. And then do some edits there. Even if it is just copying some toy project. Then again I am not sure what is the current state of fronte-end and how much crap you need to do basic UI.

Yeah I think there is a: "does this person get UIs at all, and like this type of work" filter that gets missed by some of these leetcode processes. Personally tired hearing "this guy ACED the interview, a++++" then they fumble around with the actual work we have to do.

i agree. the stress is an unavoidable in any context where people are being judged or evaluated. i also find take-homes stressful, with in-person coding at least the stress is constrained to a narrow time window.

but i also think that that's why live coding can work really well with simple problems like fizzbizz, create a list of fibonaccis, etc. these are simple-ass problems that any coder can churn out in their sleep. if the stress of an interview prevents you from solving something like this... you probably need some more practice coding until something like this becomes easy enough to do under stress.

I agree. The quoted question is "filter odd numbers from a list", but the author then references a paper which tested this significantly harder problem:

https://leetcode.com/problems/longest-substring-without-repe...

Totally different IMO.

Would this be like entering the python terminal and typing print('hello world') or python hello_world.py that has the print instruction? Or something else. I'd just be unsure if a python installation like the python.exe would be available in a terminal.

I'm more curious than anything else for my own sake to know things people might ask. But its interesting how extremely simple things can be complicated if you haven't done them before. Like if someone asks about a relatively simple regex example in python it'd be easy to get if you just were working on a regex but you could get tripped up if it had been a while since working on one. You could say the same thing about working with datetimes. At least this is the type of thing that throws me off in an interview, maybe I'm not a great candidate though.

I expect `python hello_world.py`, but if people are confused I just nudge them to what I expect. It is not meant to be a trick question.

If people do not have local setup, I just have them write out in text editor and walk through the steps. Maybe not 75% fail rate, but more like 50% of people fail this step in the tech round.

Isn't your experience highlighting what the article is suggesting though? That needing to do this during an interview is what causes these failures rather than an inability to actually perform the requested task.

It seems like the suggestion is to put them somewhere private to perform the task rather than asking them to do it in a public setting.

The rub is the take home assignments are not good either.

I do personally let people pass the tech if they have good open source work (a good tech blog, legit python repo's, not just trivial homework stuff they did in school). So few of people have that though.

But the thing in the study cited in the post was putting people alone in a room for the same task with the same time limit -- _not_ take home assignments.

What if this is just a (labor-saving) tweak to on-site live coding interviews. You've already reserved the room. The status quo is that a member of technical staff is in the room with the candidate for the duration of their interview. The low-cost alteration is, after you explain the task and make sure it's clear, you leave them alone in there for the remainder of the period. Perhaps the interviewer gets a few small work tasks done while waiting outside.

I think the only unfortunate thing is that when you're in the room trying to talk to them about their solution as they write it, sometimes you can have a helpful discussion, which may involve probing or leading questions, which sometimes give you some signal -- but these also make it much more difficult to compare across candidates, so perhaps we should be ok letting go of that opportunity.

Just to clarify, do these 50% regularly develop using python, and did they understand the question?

It seems unavoidable to know how to run a script if you've done it within say a month. Now not remembering the if __name__ == __main__ thing is more forgivable.

These are 100% people who claim to be senior ICs with years of developer experience in python. The resume thing that list being expert in dozens of libraries, etc.

It is even less tricky than you are thinking. I literally just want them to know you need to put in a `hw.py` file `print("hello world")`, and then run from the command line `python hw.py`.

The reasons for failure are myriad (I suppose you could say it is they do not understand, but I legit try, regularly spend 10-20 minutes on just this for the ones who have problems, I am not being tricky). A few are people who do not know file systems (save their `.py` file in a wrong location), a few I think just do work in environments like served jupyter notebooks so don't have any relevant software dev experience (don't know how to execute python directly or write code in a .py file), some I am pretty sure are just liars on their expertise (have a few that just leave interview when asked this question).

Not aimed at your comment per se, but I'm having trouble reconciling these stories where a vast majority of applicants fail a simple test (or other Fizzbuzz type tests) with stories of how difficult interviews are these days with Leetcode hards, etc. Maybe the populations are not mixing.