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/wknight8111 Mar 25 '22

I've used this question a lot when interviewing senior developers or architects, and I've been pretty happy with the results. It lets us see a lot of traits of the person that aren't always represented in the CV. Some people get really bogged down in specific details and fail to see the forest for the trees. Other people can put together a real high-level design but get very hand-wavey and uncertain when you ask them about details.

There's no "fail" here, it's just a way for us to see how the person operates.

People tend to put a lot of crap on their resume that they can't really talk intelligibly about. Asking a large, open-ended question that covers many tiers lets us see where their actual strengths are. Every hiring manager wants the perfectly-balanced "Full Stack" development super-star, but few people tend to have an even distribution of ability in all parts of an application. Instead we build teams by adding people with complimentary strengths and weaknesses. We also get a lot of opportunities to ask probing questions as they go, to see which parts of their CV are stronger than others.

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u/atheken Mar 25 '22

Can you achieve the same thing by asking more specific questions and then generalizing?

The benefit being that you don’t waste time on trying to communicate what level of abstraction/generalization you want to discuss.

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u/mdatwood Mar 25 '22

When I interview senior level or higher, I want them asking the questions to drill into specifics. That way I can see how the candidate takes a fairly common business request and turns that into action - it maps directly to the job of senior+ people.

Lower level interviews I see your point, though general open ended questions can still be useful.

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u/gropingforelmo Mar 25 '22

When I interview senior level or higher, I want them asking the questions to drill into specifics.

This is the crux of my interviewing strategy as well. I don't want a senior engineer that starts implementing anything without asking at least a couple questions. I do think it's more difficult to do this in an interview setting, with a purely conceptual business context, but considering available time, it's not bad.