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Comment by partisan | Hacker News Reader

Part of the problem, too, is that there are too many people making outrageous salaries.

I am currently hiring and as part of the interview process, I ask a very straightforward question. I expect it to take on the order of 5 minutes and 7 lines of code. It is programming 101. Out of the 10 or so people I've interviewed, exactly none of them has gotten past this question. Most of them take 45 minutes to work on it and few of them get it to work even then. These are people who have contracted at big name places, with 10+ years of experience, with CS degrees, H1-B and non-H1-B.

So if I am going to hire someone who is unable to write a simple algorithm, I would rather do it at offshore prices. And sadly, that is something I am seriously considering doing.

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You might consider whether this is really a valid test, or just something that you _think_ truly evaluates whether a candidate can do the job. In my experience hiring, it's not that valuable. I do think some kind of screening for basic skills is valuable at the low/inexperienced end, but writing code in front of an expectant audience may not be it.

I have written hundreds of thousands of lines of shipping code, and I've faced this kind of code-for-an-interview process repeatedly. The last time I had to do it, I found that I actually choked on a simple string reverse problem.

It was a really basic algorithm; there was absolutely no difficulty with my understanding of how the algorithm worked, or how to code it. I just choked. I was talking to three people on Skype with a shared whiteboard, and I had to give up. It was very frustrating. This had more to do with the fact that I had been out of work for several months and was facing a huge amount of stress about things like paying the mortgage than it did with my actual abilities on the job.

What should I be doing to find a candidate who can code and understands basic concepts without asking them to demonstrate that ability to me? I've been burned by people who talk a good game.

I don't have a great simple answer for this. I think it some combination of maybe looking at code samples, talking to previous employers, maybe doing some code in a timed exercise, either on or off-site, or maybe even contracting with a prospective employee to pay them to work on some small trial piece of code. I agree with you that there are definitely candidates out there who are all talk. I'm just not sure demanding code on a whiteboard during the interview itself is really a foolproof proxy for "smart and gets things done." I think it might weed out obvious duds but it might also weed out some people who might be having a bad day. It also is, I think, quite possible to game this kind of interview question, by studying some of the many books of coding interview questions coming out and just memorizing some of them.

Could you share the question with us?

Forgive my skepticism, but I have been battle-hardened by some pretty bad horror stories.

I work at a Big 4, we see a lot of fresh graduates coming in every weeks or so.

To give you an idea of how bad it can be: a group of technical recruiters took the decision to "tweak" one of the interview questions we are asking during on-sites. They thought the change was benign when in fact it made the problem NP-hard, which is you know... pretty "tough" to solve under 45 minutes (or without a lab, a research team and 20 years). Of course, all of them were baffled by the fact that none of the candidates were performing well on this "trivial" question.

It took us three engineers, and two interviewees to make them acknowledge, and understand their mistake.

A big waste of time for everyone.

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