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Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

I’m confused - are you saying you find the programming interview process abusive? In what way is it abusive?

"We expect you to study for months, on your own time, unpaid, so that our interviewing process can throw questions at you that are unrelated to the actual job we're hiring you for. Because we can, and because we do it that way, and because we don't care about how it comes down on you." Yes, I find that abusive.

Frankly, I'd rather everyone not study, and just hire the people who don't need months of refresher studying to do figure out some short coding problems...

I have a dangerous thought sometimes that universities, collages and bootcamps should have a much higher failure rate. Some people, despite working incredibly hard, find programming impossibly difficult to learn. I’ve had plenty of students like this - where no matter how much effort they put in to studying, programming just never seems to click.

It breaks my heart a little to say this but the earlier they pick a different career path, the better their lives will be.

Hard to gel that with the "learn to code" wave of the past decade. Software engineering is one of the few remaining middle class white collar professions with significant demand and growth, people are going to be drawn to it as wages collapse in many other industries.

Yes. And yet, everyone glosses over how difficult it is to learn to program. Its a different way of thinking. Learning to program is like learning to write good fiction. Or learning to make art. Lots of folks - for no fault of their own - will never achieve mastery. But by never telling those stories, people end up blaming themselves for not being good enough. The reality is you can't dump a 60yo ex-miner into a coding bootcamp for 3 months and expect him to be employable. And if you try, and he (predictably) fails, failure isn't his burden to carry.

I suspect a lot of people who complain about technical interviews do so as cover for struggling to be good enough at programming to be hireable. I think we need to take the stigma away from that - its ok to find programming hard. Honestly, that makes you a more normal person. It doesn't say anything about your work ethic or your value as a human. And its not a failure to choose another career.

There’s a trope in kids cartoons, where everyday objects becoming scary looming nightmare things at night time. We can play that game with anything! Cars: “a 2 ton metal box we hurl through space in a life ending daily slalom”. Careers: “underhanded slavery - don’t work and you don’t eat. We make you choose your poison so you’re complicit in crafting the chains around your ankles”. Children: “Biologically enforced obligations which destroy the best years of your life...”. The fact that we can tell scary stories doesn’t make the stories true.

With interviews - my claim is this: A well designed interview has a high statistical correlation between passing the interview and being useful on the job. Eg when I was interviewing we gave candidates some buggy code (with failing tests) and asked them to find and fix the problems. The ability to debug unfamiliar code in a job interview is correlated with the ability to do the same thing at work.

If you can’t read code, I don’t want to employ you. Please practice and reapply, or find work elsewhere. This is a reasonable position - and probably the only reasonable position for an employer to hold.

There’s lots of skills other than debugging: coding, profiling, algorithmic analysis, CS fundamentals, architecture, communicating with coworkers, etc. A mediocre interview assesses 1 of these skills. A good interview assesses 5+.

Are there bad interviews out there? Yes, lots. But interviews themselves - even badly designed ones - aren’t abusive. (Unless you think a rejection is abuse).

I get that some people put themselves through leetcode practice hell to get a job because they’re unemployable otherwise. I have sympathy for this but I don’t think this is the fault of the interview process. I suspect any decent assessment process would have the same result - where some people need to improve before they can get hired.

> With interviews - my claim is this: A well designed interview has a high statistical correlation between passing the interview and being useful on the job. Eg when I was interviewing we gave candidates some buggy code (with failing tests) and asked them to find and fix the problems. The ability to debug unfamiliar code in a job interview is correlated with the ability to do the same thing at work.

> If you can’t read code, I don’t want to employ you. Please practice and reapply, or find work elsewhere. This is a reasonable position - and probably the only reasonable position for an employer to hold.

> There’s lots of skills other than debugging: coding, profiling, algorithmic analysis, CS fundamentals, architecture, communicating with coworkers, etc. A mediocre interview assesses 1 of these skills. A good interview assesses 5+.

I agree with every bit of that. I'd be happy to interview at your place, if I were looking. My objection isn't even just to interviews that ask you random stuff that doesn't correlate with being useful on the job. My objection is to interviews that ask you random stuff that doesn't correlate with being useful on the job and that requires months of your time to prepare for. I think that's abusive.

I don't prepare for interviews. I just don't. My preparation is the 35 years of my career. Either that made me into someone you want, or it didn't. Sure, I'll take on your buggy code and failing tests, in an unfamiliar code base. No problem. But if an interviewer throw a bunch of leetcode questions at me, I'll fail (by the interviewer's standards). And I don't care. I'll go work for someone else.

> I don’t prepare for interviews. ... I'll fail (by the interviewer's standards). And I don't care. I'll go work for someone else.

Great. The natural result of a poorly designed job interview should be missing out on good candidates. Thankyou for giving those companies an incentive to improve their processes - by missing out on you.

You study, you learn the algorithms, and in return you get a high-paying job and excellent benefits. It’s a good deal for many.

You complain about studying unpaid, but who gets paid to study? Many pay tens or hundreds of thousands to study law, medicine, business, etc., and it takes years. Spending a couple months studying algorithms may not be easy, the process certainly isn’t perfect, but calling it abusive is really a stretch.

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