Hacker News Reader

Comment by jackblemming | Hacker News Reader

This man had 8+ years at Facebook and they still made him do programming questions? What is wrong with our industry?

I have 38 years in hardware design, most of that doing ASIC design in Verilog.

I've been with my currently employer 19 years, but if I found myself in an interview I'd expect them to ask me technical questions. If they didn't ask them, it would be a red flag. What if they asked me an "offensively" basic question? Great, I can make quick work of it, no insult taken.

It has happened to me only once that I interviewed someone far more senior (and was a PhD) who got offended when asked about some simple technical issues. He deflected my questions, and so was flushed immediately.

'Asking technical questions' is quite a bit different than shoving a code editor in front of a candidate's face, and the interviewer all but saying "The computer will decide your fate."

Asking an ASIC designer to create a 2-input XOR gate out of 2-input NAND gates is like asking a programmer to write a bubble sort. If someone asked me either one, despite being 38 years out of college, I'd do it without being offended.

It depends on the type of questions and whether they were relevant. The thing with these little coding quizzes is they rarely have anything to do with what the person will do day-to-day. Design a problem that's relevant to the work and it's fine.

I mean, writing code is a big part of the job? I bet they asked behavioral and system design questions too, even though I'm sure he solved business problems and designed systems in 8+ years at FB. Why interview in the first place, why not just give him an offer up front?

Interviews aren't fun, but there's not something "wrong with the industry" if the questions are relevant to the work. He even complimented their choice of programming questions.

I've seen enough experienced people who are great at system design and expect to be tech leads, but who are absolutely bad at coding. Do you want to hire someone for their ability to program or for their ability to think about the big picture only?

tbf it usually comes in a package.

Interviews are designed to be roughly the same experience for everyone. There's plenty of good legal reasons why, but separate from that, jobs, roles and so on are not standardized across various companies. While I personally know someone with 8 years experience at Facebook probably isn't a clown, the point of an interview is also to get a sense of how you'd work together and to ask eachother questions. A good interviewer will tailor their interview to the candidate, too.

I seriously doubt companies who have been coding interview for years now are for legal reasons.

Not coding interviews specifically for legal reasons no, but consistency of interview. If you ask one person a coding question, you should probably do the same for everyone, otherwise you expose yourself to legal liability. This is especially true the larger the company you are interviewing at - and the more generic the role is internally.

You don’t need to adopt this style to avoid discrimination.

Not to avoid discrimination, of course, but to avoid folks suing you for not getting the job - or at least making it easy if/when they do. These are two separate things. Folks tend to get touchy about being told 'no' again especially the bigger your company is. Frankly, interviews will always be imperfect because few will respond in that situation the way they do at the office. This tends to hurt egos.

That this is a sufficient but not necessary solution does not discredit it in the way your tone implies.

>If you ask one person a coding question, you should probably do the same for everyone, otherwise you expose yourself to legal liability.

No! This does not mean you must interview Jr engineers and Sr engineers identically!

You can drop the leet coding requirements for experienced candidates and have no legal worries as long as all similarly experienced candidates are interviewed and judged similarly. It's actually extremely common for companies to have different interviews for different experience levels.

Sorry for the confusion, I was referring to everyone at the same level of seniority.

with respect, this is just lazy, following the herd because everybody else is doing it. Somewhere around 2010, a group of xooglers started selling CTCI (Cracking the Coding Interview)

They single-handedly fucked hiring for the entire industry.

Many of my peers have found success and homes with outstanding companies with wonderful culture that have abandoned this archaic interviewing process. cling to it if you must, but it is broken beyond repair and people are starting to trend away from it.

> Somewhere around 2010, a group of xooglers started selling CTCI (Cracking the Coding Interview)

> They single-handedly fucked hiring for the entire industry.

I'm not sure about single-handedly. I think you can blame the creators of LeetCode as well :-)

It definitely changed the game - or at least, made it something you can practice for easily in one place. But there's nothing particularly special about leetcode that you couldn't find in your college coursework. A lot of companies tend to optimize for college-level questions, but this isn't true across the industry. I used leetcode when interviewing for my most recent job too, by the way.

Apologies if this comes off short, I'm actively involved in hiring now, and have been at a lot of tech companies. I do my best to help keep the process at minimum consistent. Bringing in the right people is never easy, but is incredibly critical to the success of your business.

Happy to answer questions, though.

It's pretty easy to do almost no coding at larger companies as a more senior engineer and become quite rusty. It sounds like he was interviewing for a position which he's actually expected to ship things and code, so it's pretty reasonable to ask him to code in the interview.

Where have you worked where senior engineers do hardly any coding? What else would they do all day?! Are you sure you aren't thinking of project managers?

Everywhere I've worked (mostly large companies) the seniors write much more code than the juniors.

Some senior engineers will be “coding machines” whereas others will be much closer to “architects” or “tech leads” where shipping a lot of code is not the most important aspect.

To be fair, most senior engineers should be involved in code reviews regularly, so it’s very unlikely they are incompetent coders.

Anyone can put n+ years at Facebook on their resume regardless of whether they worked on Facebook or not. Maybe they’re banking on a background check not being run. And if I know anything about people, I’m sure there are people out there doing this. Frauds abound.

Check this out: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/yahoo-investor-ceo-lied-about-t...

I was once asked a to present a bit-manipulation algorithm, during an interview for an NLP role. :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com