darrenkopp

I interview people regularly. These are easy to detect… not in a direct way but i can tell when you are being assisted by AI. 3 so far this month out of 12, for those who were going to ask how frequently.

i am the same except i use music (lyrics and all) to drown everything else out. i don’t. price the lyrics at all, but my brain is processing them because every now and then i suddenly break out of focus and am like “wait, what the hell did that song just say?” usually on comedy songs

> Interviewing should be more about avoiding bad candidates than finding the best candidate.

> This guy fails coding interviews. Then he gives coding interviews, but the people he selects based on these interviews are a mixed bag. Because he's failing the interview from both directions.

Good points, but I should say that the people that didn't work out weren't always because of technical abilities. The company that had the worst success rate was fully remote, but I don't know if there's any interview process that can help with that.

Actually there's another job before that, I just don't list my full employment history. Before that was VP of Engineering. That's just my final title, however. I started that as a normal engineer. And then as a senior engineer before CTO.

Small companies, so not the same as being VPE or CTO at Amazon. You see those as title downgrades, but I don't. I have a lot of talent, so people want to promote me and put me in charge. I don't want to be a manager/leader currently, I want to be a strong IC.

> Can we stop calling it "failing" when a company decides you're not a good fit? If you go on a date and don't get asked for a 2nd, did you fail the date? You're not just what they're looking for right now; not everything has to be a failure.

Fair point.

> I'm sorry, what? He thinks it takes one hour to teach someone data structures? We sure are wasting our time with those multiple college courses and hundreds of textbooks on the subject then. We should just get this guy to spend one hour imparting all necessary knowledge into everyone.

There's a difference between understanding how to implement one and just knowing how to use one that's already been written by someone and when to use it.

> Human biases are much more likely to work against you if the interviewers have not spent time trying to come up with a consistent test that they give everyone. Does the author think human bias is absent from non-technical interviews? The less standard your hiring methods are, the more bias you'll have.

Fair, but alas I don't know the rigors they have put their hiring process through. If I were a betting man, I'd still say that if we measured all processes using programming tests, the majority of successful candidates had working output by the end.

> I don't know who Darren Kopp is, so maybe I'm about to get an army of replies saying he's their coding role model

I've been told this by everyone who knows me

> but this is an article about whether code interviews work or not, and he's basically saying "if they don't hire me, who will definitely become one of the best employees they've ever had, then their coding interview process must suck". The other possibility is that Darren Kopp just isn't actually tremendously more stellar than everyone else and coding interviews are actually kinda working. For his argument to work, he has to be one of the best possible candidates for every job he's applying for. I just kinda doubt that.

Actually the only conclusion I have after writing the post is that I am not talented at interviewing. I do believe coding interviews have flaws for how they are used, but that doesn't necessarily make them wrong or right. I agree with your first statement, maybe I'm just not a good fit.

Perhaps both of us are correct as I consider coding interviews more of an audition than anything else. If Tom Cruise auditions for a part and doesn't get it, does that mean he's a bad actor? Likely not.

(I'm Tom Cruise here, btw).

Yep, that was my same approach as well.

I don't think it's wildly optimistic, but perhaps we are thinking about it in different ways. I don't think I could teach someone how to implement each data structure in an hour, but I could easily go over maps/queues/stacks/hashtables and tell you when to use each in an hour. I know this because I do that very thing in less than an hour in code reviews.

I do agree that the "stickiness" is iffy, but it usually sticks pretty well. You then have a second problem that can be described as "when you have a hammer, everything is a nail" as they use their new fancy hashtable everywhere.

This is pretty interesting, I hadn't heard of this approach before. I'll have to give it a try some time.

Adding another comment here, because this is part of the reason why I wrote this article.

> These kind of articles make me sad because I (and many other interviewers I've worked with) try to make it clear that this isn't a test - we don't care so much about being "right" or "wrong", and there shouldn't be any tricks of "a ha" moments. > We explain the goals and what we're looking for right up front. And I would hope most interviewers do the same, but I guess not. So there's this persistent myth among both interviewers and candidates that coding questions are about getting a right answer.

I understand all of those things. I've written the same before[1]. However, as clear as your instructions are and as well meaning you may be, it may not help. I can logically understand every word you say, but as soon as that question rolls out, I will now be dealing with stress hormones and 30 years of learned behaviors from thousands of experiences, whether I choose to or not.

So while I applaud your methodology and wholeheartedly agree, just telling people that doesn't guarantee that it's not still an issue because humans are complex organisms.

[1]: https://darrenkopp.com/posts/2016/02/25/always-learn-somethi...

If I'm not cut out to work in your environment, that's fine. I do disagree with your other conclusions, however. I'm not bad at communication, I'm bad at verbal communication while simultaneously trying to solve a problem. I'm excellent at problem solving and simultaneously chatting in something like slack, however.

I, personally, cannot _think_ and _talk_ at the same time. It's just a stream of half-sentences, many of which my brain has already moved on from because what I originally thought won't work.

After writing this article it became very apparent to me that I'm complete garbage at interviews, but I'll outperform and exceed at the actual job function.

The data itself is ordered (which is why the task is to print them in order), but the order you receive the values is can happen in any order (ie the processing was split into multiple threads and each thread is posting back the results from the work).

Yeah interview before Joel was base -2 conversion. Joel's interview was mostly a chat and we mostly talked about my dog (and other things I'm sure but I only remember talking about dogs).

Sorry, I was paraphrasing the question and not giving every detail that I received. They also stated that there are no gaps, the values increment by one, and start at zero.

it's not impossible to solve, but there are situations like that which make any solution not work, which was a follow up question

They likely make it better. I rarely use my brakes unless I have to brake suddenly.

> The ChatGPT maker is developing tools with the US Defense Department on open-source cybersecurity software, and has had initial talks with the US government about methods to assist with preventing veteran suicide, Anna Makanju, the company’s vice president of global affairs, said in an interview at Bloomberg House at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Tuesday.

> But OpenAI maintained a ban on using its tech to develop weapons, destroy property or harm people, Makanju said.

At face value, seems like a good thing.

I believe that the title is expecting the reader to infer that the measurement is about plastic waste, not water quantity, which commonly is measured in distance.

Anecdotal, but I'm sure this is related to everyone adopting Tesla's charging standard, not just because the connector is superior. I have a L2 charger installed in my home, so my life is pretty easy, but even if I didn't the super charger network out here is pretty good. However, when I got a Tesla rental on my trip to Utah last year, I didn't realize how sparse charging is in some places.

While I could survive on Tesla's network where I grew up outside of SLC, it'd be pretty annoying... but there's no way I could handle a non-Tesla vehicle out there because there are so few charging options, and they are so slow in comparison, I'd never be able to do it

To me, that reads more like Figma is using OpenAI for functionality (which inevitably means they have to provide information for prompting) more than it reads they are letting OpenAI use Figma data to make their products better.

haha no problem

1. 18 years total, 3 jobs (9 years, 4 years, 5 years).

2. I did choose to relocate for my 3rd job. I was specifically looking for companies in new locations where I wanted to live. I will specify that my job's locations were as follows: in office (10 mile commute, suburb only), fully remote, in office (16 mile commute, suburb and city driving)

3. no

4. n/a

For more context, I should say that I'm no longer at job #3 because I quit to start a new company, but that company did end up doing layoffs, but not for a few months after I left and had I stayed I wouldn't have been affected. Every time I've gotten a new job it's because I've decided I wanted to pursue something else.

yes, it makes reference to this allegation.

Since everyone else is replying yes, I'll give the single non-useful response I guess.

1. No

2. N/A

3. N/A

#3 lessons with time I think. I can slip them on basically as fast unless my foot is damp after the shower. #1 and #2 were on my list of cons too, it's a universal problem. For laundry, I try to pull mine off toes first before I put them into the hamper to minimize flipping, but I still forget a lot.

Having worn toe socks for 5+ years now, it's one of the greatest decisions I've made. I mostly only wear Injinji now, but I have tried other brands in the past. Here's my pro's and cons list from my experience.

1. Pro: they are much more durable. normally socks start to get rough and developing those little hard fiber balls all over them after a while, haven't had those with injinji.

2. Con: they used to be a bit cheaper in the past, but they are pretty pricey now. I'd say I'm normally paying ~$12 - $15 for a pair, but thanks to #1 now that I have a good supply, I'm not having to buy them very often.

3. Con: if you lose one sock, you've lost two. Having dedicated right and left socks is a liability. I've attempted to address this in the past by just buying lots of the same style, but that is much worse, you suddenly find yourself with 6 plain white left socks and no right socks and realize you need to do laundry to have socks. Now I buy only one of a given style and it's much easier to match up pairs. Injinji is constantly putting out new styles, likely for this reason.

4. Con: Laundry is more difficult. It's become easier now that I've changed how I take off my socks, but there's still some effort.

Now there are a lot more cons in that list, but honestly they are all worth it.

post your public key to github, the rest takes care of itself.

I'm 100% in for this purely for the fact that it looks like it will actually tell you / provide a button to perform the action. I am a Windows fan and use it as my primary operating system, but I cannot tell you how irrationally angry I get when I end up in the new control panel and there are links like "find out how to do X" which just dump you into Bing search. Microsoft already knows the answer, that answer is potentially relevant to the specific version of windows I'm using, but they need to pump up Bing's numbers so they send me there and honestly the results aren't always that helpful.

I can confirm this as well. I started seeing 500 errors intermittently when trying to view pages, so I checked status page and saw everything was green. Status page started showing the incident within about 3 minutes of when I started seeing issues. Clearly that's all based on happenstance of when I was landing on GitHub's website, but I have found that of all the status page's by large companies, GitHub's is almost always showing an incident as soon as I start noticing issues myself.

have similar issue with 2011 nissan maxima w/ key fob. guess i have a new weekend project on my hands.

I only check during the morning while my adderall is kicking in and I don't go past the first page. This allows me to go as deep as I want and do some exploring still, but with limits. It's just taken practice over the years because I could easily burn through hundreds of pages on reddit / hn easily.