Comment by jaggederest | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jaggederest | Hacker News Reader

By analogy, I'm reminded of a skit that we did in school:

A man, on his hands and knees, searching diligently for something on the ground.

Another man, walking by, stops to help search. After a few moments he asks "what are we searching for?"

The first man replies "My contact lens"

After a minute or two the second man, frustrated, asks "Where did you lose it?"

The first man replies "Way over there, but the light is better under this streetlamp."

Coding interviews kinda feel like that to me. We can't measure what's important, so we'd better measure what we can measure extremely rigorously.

I'm interviewing for Senior Staff roles and doing quality coding interviews and beyond the basics I'm not sure really what I'm supposed to ascertain from the format because it is so far removed from what is day to day important in the role.

I ask about time complexity, and all the basics, but it's just a bunch of malarkey. So I spend more time quizzing them about technologies I don't know on their resume and getting something out of it for myself. It's easy enough to tell when someone's full of shit, but asking them to describe the tradeoffs between the technologies they've worked with seems more valuable than watching someone sweat-ily cramming out some crap imperative code for a toy problem and telling me they got it down to nlogn. Oooo ee!

It might be helpful to look at this classic post by Joel Spolsky [0]. He discusses many of the points you brought up. I found it most helpful to pull out some of the principles he discusses and then ask "What would this look like when applied to [job in question]?"

[0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guid...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect

See also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law

> We can't measure what's important, so we'd better measure what we can measure extremely rigorously.

As much as we like to complain about interviews, the alternatives that more accurately reflect the work environment are much more strongly hated.

One of the most accurate interviewing methods is a work trial: Bring the candidate in for a week and have them work the job. Their peers and managers rate their performance.

It's great for revealing how a person works. But think about what's required: You would have to take a week off of your primary job every time you wanted to interview at another company. A company could only interview one candidate per week.

Some companies try this, but it over-selects for unemployed young people. They either give up or start bending the rules when qualified applicants refuse.

Did nobody ask why you would want to reuse contact lens fallen on some grimy ground in the night? Keys, coins, bills, even glasses ok, but putting back the contact lens into your eyes seems dangerous. I thought some kid might have spoken up :-).

Contact lenses used to be a lot more expensive and not disposable. They took a long time to get a new set. It was like loosing a pair of glasses.

It's keys, not contact lenses, and it's an old joke.

Over a century old! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect

Contact lens is the way I have always heard the joke.

In the oldest reliable references from the 1920s, it was a $2 bill, $1 bill, a watch, and a dime.

So keys and contacts are both modern revisions.

I thought I sensed the implicit presence of the Quote Investigator!

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/04/11/better-light/

I used the AI, the web, and even tried to verify with full page scans but then I realized I have a job.

Does the specific object matter in any way at all?

I just thought it was weird it was framed as "a skit we did in school" when it's a literally-ancient-old joke.

No. For example, in science most scientists just look where the streetlight is, but a small number of people build better, stronger lights to search larger areas, and there is a tiny number of people who can mysteriously just find things in the dark.

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