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Comment by ganonm | Hacker News Reader

I think it's more about simply having an awareness of algorithmic complexity. I'm talking about writing a doubly nested 'for' loop and being able to realise that you've just written an O(N^2) algorithm if you're iterating over the original collection again. This sort of stuff is blindingly obvious to experienced programmers but for bootcamp grads who haven't built up that intuition, a short course on Big O notation exposes them to it.

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Or, since you're hiring Junior devs, someone could like, take 10 minutes to explain why what they did is wrong and point them towards some resource to help them get on the right track.

This whole thing is part of the circular logic problem with hiring: you have people making these hiring decisions that aren't trained in hiring, so they just go with "what makes sense to them" or hiring a younger version of someone who looks exactly like them for a junior role. It's fine, it works for the company, but it's why people will miss long term talent.

Do you have any resources would you recommend for becoming better at hiring? It's an area I think I definitely have room for improvement in

Damn straight. 100% of stupid whiteboard coding questions could easily be solved with taking 10 minutes to google / explain the solution. So why are these stupidities even asked? In other words, the author is incompetent and shouldn't be in charge of hiring. He won't hire someone because he won't take 10 fucking minutes to explain to them something beyond simple (although if you explain it in big O terms, it's not simple). That's a manager who is in the wrong job.

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