Hacker News Reader

Comment by pklausler | Hacker News Reader

I hated this article. A good technical interview reveals an aptitude for programming or a lack of same, and can distinguish a true aptitude from an ability to fake it. I've been interviewing programmers for a very long time and I'm pretty good at avoiding "false positive" results with a few straightforward questions.

If you have aptitude and talent, brush up on your algorithms and try to have fun with the interview. If you don't, then I'm sorry, but maybe you'd be happier doing something else.

View on HN

So, you may be right. Perhaps you're great at telling good programmers from bad. But almost no one does the analysis to really know if this is true (false negatives are the huge unknown). And most interviewers are not as good as you. The consistency between interviewers at the same company is low (we measure this). The consistency between different companies is low. We (interviewers) can do better than this!

I make no claims about false negative results. But I know that people that I've recommended hiring have basic analytical skills, can correctly code a Boolean predicate with a few connectives in it, and aren't confused by linked data structures. It's not a high bar that I set, and that's kind of my point: ask at least some low-bar questions! You can debate all day about how well candidates have done with the hard questions, but it's pretty easy to know what to do with those who can't cope with something like "do two (x,y,width,height) rectangles intersect or not?".

I misunderstood you. I think we actually agree about this!

Care to mention these questions? Most companies are suffering HARD from false positives. I'm sure a lot of people would love to know what's working for you.

Thanks!

Well, I'm not going to spill my current repertoire, but in short it's all about "programming in the small". Can you construct a precise Boolean predicate to test for a well-defined condition? Do you "get" pointers and recursion? Find sample problems in your own work.

If it is something that loses value if "spilled" it probably is not as valuable as you think.

>Most companies are suffering HARD from false positives

Are they really? I mean, maybe, just maybe, the expectations are too high for whatever basic CRUD app you're producing.

If "most" companies are overwhelmed with having hired bad programmers, how does any work get done? Where are all the good programmers?

>I'm pretty good at avoiding "false positive" results

And you know that...how exactly?

Because a false positive is very visible - you've got a terrible engineer bringing everyone down.

It's the false negatives that are harder to detect...

Not having any does not necessarily mean you are good at avoiding them. It may mean you are lucky, or the false positives weren't there to be had in the first place, or some other reason is keeping false positives out of your company.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com