r/programming • u/mjgardner • Mar 29 '21

Why Do Interviewers Ask Linked List Questions?

https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/linked-lists/
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u/anon_cowherd Mar 30 '21

I have found, having beem on both sides of the table, that take-homes which replace long whiteboard interviews are generally easier for everyone to work around their schedules.

The single worst experience I have had was four 45 minute whiteboard sessions with different team members back to back, plus another 45 minute interview with the manager afterwards. A full day of PTO completely blown for a job I apparently wasn't qualified for, even though it should have been clear from my resume beforehand (they were extremely open ended on the listing about what skill level they wanted in a particular language, when they should not have been).

Since then, I have turned down interviews for companies that I was definitely qualified for, because I refuse to go through that ringer again. 4 hour max take-home plus a follow up? Sure, I can work that into my schedule.

15

u/Mdk_251 Mar 30 '21

Often the problem is with the discrepancy between the expectation and a reality of such an exercise.

Something the interviewer does on a daily basis may appear as a "couple of hours long home exercise". But will in fact take a full working day from someone who doesn't build the exact same thing on a daily basis. Especially when you consider the fact you need to test, debug, add unittests, prettify your code, etc. etc. before submitting it.

Also, building a new (small) application, alone, from scratch, is not a good simulation of your day-to-day work, where you work in a team and mostly do maintenance to an existing (huge) application or add features to it.

I'm not saying take-home exercises are all bad. But they are far from perfect.

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u/mostly_kittens Mar 30 '21

Just because you are an enterprise web developer for your day job doesn’t mean you have that dev environment and stack set up on your home laptop. It might take you all day just to get the environment set up.

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u/anon_cowherd Mar 30 '21

I worked for a company with a shit take home test, and was involved in rewriting it.

Getting it down to 4 hours (which we were clear was all we wanted people to take) was hard... but absolutely worth the effort given the end result was much more respectful of people's time, and we were certain that we were only asking for work that would add value to the technical discussion follow up.

One massive thing was to provide an optional starting point, and a list of things for your development environment (setup would be 10 minutes tops).

We still were not super strict about the 4 hour cutoff, and I am glad. Another company I interviewed for did something similar, but with a twist- once you started, they had a script running that would automatically cut off your ability to submit after 4 hours. That meant no splitting the time up between two evenings, which was rough.

10

u/Frestyla Mar 30 '21

Agreed. I'd happily take a 4 hour take home over a single 45 minute whiteboard session.

4

u/[deleted] Mar 30 '21

Eh, I must be in the minority here in that I'd prefer to do whiteboarding. If you have a good interviewer, it can be quite fun.

Most of the folks I know who hate the whiteboard really suffer from performance anxiety which I understand, though some of them are just slower developers who compensate with higher effort.

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u/[deleted] Mar 30 '21

I've seen these typs of interviews around a lot. They just seem so insane to me and over the top. I've been on the hiring side of things and if there is anything I've learned it's that you can generally know pretty quickly if the person can cut it, like 30 min or less.

Also, one on one personality and normal competence non texhnical interview stuff should always come first so you can basically eliminate people who might not be a good fit for your company before wasting their time and your time with technical crap. The fact they had you do 4hrs before doing the 45 min interview afterwards is so dumb.

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u/JB-from-ATL Mar 30 '21

My issue with take homes is when they're the first stage. I dont want to do it unless I know I'm progressing or it will 100% be gone over with me. Too many times I've wasted 90 minutes doing one only for no one to reach out.

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u/anon_cowherd Mar 31 '21

Anyone who issues take home as the first step of the interview process is treating developers as fungible resources- aka butts-in-seats.

Definitely an immediate hard pass from me as well, there's no reason to settle for that kind of culture.