this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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Honestly just changing the interview process would be enough to get more people into the business.
Literally yesterday I did a code challenge to track the distance, speed, maintenance schedules, and predict collisions of forklifts in a warehouse. The job I was applying for was a pretty average SRE roll.. System design, IaC, CI/CD pipelines, PromQL, etc.. How is the code challenge representative of the job in any way?
I feel like I need to learn leetcode algorithm patterns just for the interviews.. I never need them for the actual jobs I get hired for.
We have certifications and I will admit to really liking the linkedin ones for endorsements
But that is still the same problem. It just means someone can study for a test. It doesn't really tell you anything about their actual abilities when they are under pressure or don't have a textbook in front of them.
I do like coding exams/questions and use them quite a bit. But I've definitely been burned by having the wrong people administering them. Some people (self included) will use them as a way to have a conversation. If your answer is "I would look up if there is a function in the STL and, failing that, a non-GPL open source solution but I can still give it a go" then I want to have your children. But there are definitely people who will instantly fail someone because they can't write Bucket Sort off the top of their head without any need to run the compiler/a few test cases to debug it.
Which is why this mostly is the same issue facing diversity in STEM and the like. You need people who actually understand how to interview people involved. Not just the engineers who had an opening in their calendar.
I remember failing an interview once because they wanted me to know all sorts of obscure c++ tricks. The kind of stuff that most people skipped over when they read about it because it has almost no use case. Had travelled 200 miles for that interview too.
No idea who they wanted.. someone who had a photographic memory to memorise a textbook, maybe?
We tend to give practical tests when interviewing.. 'go away and write this thing'. We're not testing whether they write it, or how they found the solution.. google is there to be used.. but the questions they ask about the (deliberately) interpertable spec and what the code looks like.
People are generally looking to hire themselves. So if someone memorized the amazon coding question handbook, they expect that anyone applying to work at MidCo have done the same. Same with people who consider themselves "enthusiasts". At my old job, it reached the point that we had to schedule interviews around one of the major project leads going on travel because, otherwise, he would be insanely obnoxious as he insisted they should know everything about whatever C++ standard proposal he read last night.
And that obviously also has issues regarding diversity since a lot of the same "I am the best person so everyone should be like me" mentality folk tend to want to hire people with a similar background to them...
That's what happens when a company asks their "Rockstar" developer to write them a few interview questions. Whatever thing they just learned recently they would delve into in great depth. I just learned about binary packing! Guess what's going to be on the test.
A lot of good developers don't even pseudocode all that well on the whiteboard.
Of course you also end up with a lot of people that have hearsay knowledge. How would you optimize this communication stack? Oh I'd go web sockets and then switch over to UDP after the connection initializes. They have a conversation with you about how "they" did it at their last company and it solved all the problems. Then 3 months into the project you find out that they have no idea how to pull it off and they were just repeating what they heard in a scrum.