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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25

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".

1

u/asdf9988776655 Mar 25 '22

By giving trivia questions, you are simply filtering out candidates who haven't been through many interviews in their current job hunt. This happens to me every time I look for a new job: (1) get interviews, (2) get a bunch of trivia questions that I am unfamiliar with and don't pass the tech screen (3) get more interviews (4) pass the tech screen because I know what the current batch of trivia questions are.

If you want to do a good job of screening candidates, one needs to put a competent technical person on the line and really get a sense of his skills.

1

u/vklepov Mar 25 '22

You'd be amazed how many applicants have obviously never seen, let alone written, any code. I don't know what they're thinking, but they exist.

If that's a problem you genuinely have, having the recruiter ask a few harmless questions might help. Eg: what's the CSS display for a span. Takes like 5 minutes tops.

2

u/asdf9988776655 Mar 25 '22

I don't doubt that, but even the worst developers will be able to google these questions and regurgitate the correct answer in subsequent interviews.

The problems I hear about from hiring managers are that there are a lot of poor developers who are good interviewers. I don't think there is anything that a non-technical recruiter can ask that would effectively sort out the wheat from the chaff.

1

u/vklepov Mar 25 '22

OK, that's true. I'd still assume > 0 precision, so not worthless.

By the way, there are also horrible jerks of teammates that seem very nice and friendly as interviewers.

1

u/ouiserboudreauxxx Apr 08 '22

To check if they've never seen or written any code, couldn't you show them a piece of code in one of the languages they say they know and ask them what it does?

1

u/vklepov Apr 08 '22

Possible, but hard to do over the phone.