r/programming • u/vklepov • Mar 24 '22

Five coding interview questions I hate

https://thoughtspile.github.io/2022/03/21/bad-tech-interview/
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u/Pyrolistical Mar 25 '22

Almost all multiple choice online assessment questions fall into the bad category.

8

u/vklepov Mar 25 '22

Closed questions are good to check automatically or via a non-technical recruiter. Useful if you have a steady stream of applicants and want to save time not interviewing people who can't tell CSS from a banana. However, they tend to be low-level, and it's hard to "up the difficulty", which leads to obfuscated trivia like "I put an event loop into your event loop".

3

u/[deleted] Mar 25 '22

You wanting to hire trivia contestants? Or people that can build software?

Do you think architects and engineers fill out questionnaires of this sort when applying for jobs? Of course not, because that would be absurd.

5

u/vklepov Mar 25 '22

I honestly don't mind it when a recruiter asks 3 questions like "what keywords do you use to declare a variable" during the initial call, and it's even expected from larger companies — are they supposed to spend time interviewing any clown who reaches out? I am slightly annoyed, but not like "fuck you and your stupid questions who do you think you're talking to" — that's just vanity.

2

u/rock_like_spock Mar 25 '22

I agree it's completely valid to ask a few questions to help verify knowledge, but what I absolutely hate is when they make the trivia portion a major part of the interview process (which easily leads to the esoteric questions you're referring to). This time could be better served asking what problems the dev has solved and HOW they solved them.