Coding interviews are stupid (ish)
I have, once again, failed an interview (probably). I don’t actually know yet but if I were the interviewer I probably wouldn’t recommend moving the candidate forward. Based on the hyperbolic title, you are probably guessing that I’m pretty salty about failing, but I’m not. I write one of these reflection blog posts each time I fail an interview I care about (fun fact: both were about the same company, enjoy the bonus round at the end). Now I’m writing one after experiencing a few years at a company that didn’t have any coding interviews (fun fact: I almost didn’t pass their interview process either).
Now, I’m just as guilty about being on the coding interview bandwagon as everyone else. I’ve given probably about a hundred of the same formulaic1 interview that I just took. I’ve passed on most of those candidates and I would have passed on me. I’ve also spent hours fixing code that had issues directly stemming from not using the correct data structure/algorithm that I may not have had to if we had been better at screening the employees during the interview process.
So which one works better? From my small sample size and general mediocre statistics abilities, I’d say they are about the same. What I do know, however, is that for every 1-hour interview where I evaluated if someone knew their data structures, I could have just taught them. Maybe they did know them already and just forgot because they haven’t used them recently. Math was one of my strongest subjects in school but if you asked me right now to take a derivative of something I wouldn’t be able to.
