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Comment by skyde | Hacker News Reader

did you really expect someone that have a bachelor or master degree in computer science to not know how to do this.

Or you just wanted to not hire someone if it took him more than 10 minute to do it on a whiteboard?

I wouldn’t tell people directly that they should write those classes/methods, only hinted towards them. I don’t think anyone came up with the idea of writing “filter” on their own, and people often struggled with the implementation. The interviews were and hour long and I gave lots of hints. Not a lot of successful candidates from it, and I was quite lenient.

I mean if you feel that all the people you interviewed are worse programmer than all the people you went to school with then it's likely the problem was not the candidate but the way the question was asked.

I don’t have a CS degree and not everyone we interview has one. But judging candidates against who you went to school with seems like an odd strategy. I don’t understand your thinking there.

I assumed you had a CS degree sorry. My point is at the university I graduated from "far from one of the top university", second year student all had to write a clone of "Mario Bros" from scratch in 6502 assembly. And wrote most part of an operating system "basic filesystem, task scheduler, virtual memory system ..".

Which mean even the student that had the worst grade did all that and could do it again without help.

So if I had to interview someone that went to the same university that I did, I don't see the point in asking them to write code to invert a linked list or to solve the n-queen problem because I already know they can do this and I am more interested to know if they have real world experience.

By real world experience I mean know the downside of using a database like Apache Cassandra and to not use it for storing money related data despite all the hype about nosql ...

But do you ask this question, because it‘s part of the job to write linked lists or because it‘s something they should know if they had proper education?

I don’t care if they know what a linked list is. I’d happily show them that part. Everyone I’ve interviewed knew what one was though. The thing I was looking for was how they were organizing their code and breaking down the problem. That’s critical for the job.

I would expect that if you don't tell people what you want they will fail to produce it.

I recall a mind reading interview I received once. He described a problem he faced, asked me how he solved it. ?! I explained how I would solve it, and while it's possible my answer missed something or was non-performant, I'm pretty sure it was a correct implementation. Nope. It wasn't what he did. I got a job offer, but turned it down, because holy crap.

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