Fixing the coding part of interviews

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2022-01-27 18:30:09

This sucks. People panic. It’s hard to remember syntax or recall function names. It’s hard to map out a solution. The interviewer squirms because they KNOW the answer it’s so EASY why are you not getting it!? The interviewee feels like an idiot, or worse, wastes months memorizing the code for inverting a B-tree[2].

The worst part? It doesn’t actually assess how productive that person will be. It tells you nothing except how that person behaves in unreasonable situations.

That’s not how humans write code these days. Code is too complicated to write on a whiteboard. We have special-purpose software that enables us to write code faster, smarter, and more productively every day. I have four linters keeping me honest with every keystroke, and two machine-learning systems supplying me with code constructs, so I can focus on the part that needs actual human intervention.

It’s also not how teams produce code. If you go off and sit in a blank room and write a block of code and then pretend you’re done, you’re going to have a lot of trouble when you need to be a part of a team of more than one person. Software development includes division of labor, testing, usability input, data generation, version control, code and solution reviews, and a dozen other practices that ensure we ship quality products.

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