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When I did tech interviews, I used to think I could just jump right in with an intermediate level question and go from there. But the reality is that most of the candidates I interviewed couldn't even answer a trivial question that just required a basic for-loop with an if-statement inside it. These are not pressure-cooker interviews where they need to balance a binary tree while having Baby Shark blasted at them on full volume. These are chill interviews where I ask them to iterate through a string and tell me where the first "x" character is.

There are so many software engineering candidates who literally cannot write the simplest code. I even had someone actually say "I don't really write code at my current job, I'm more of a thought leader." Bzzzzzt.

I've always prepared what I called level 1, level 2, and level 3 questions ready for candidates. But, I almost never even got to level 2, and never in 20 years of interviewing got to my level 3 questions.

by jghn10 hours ago|

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I always wonder when people tell these stories exactly what the metric is.

I've been around the block for over 3 decades. I've had a number of high level positions across both IC and management tracks. These days I'm very hands on keyboard across a number of clients. If you asked me to write a basic for loop or if statement, there's a small chance I'd flub the exact syntax if writing on a whiteboard. Both because I bounce between languages all day and wires get crossed on the fly, but also the standard interview pressure type arguments. Whereas if the test is "does this person understand what a for loop is and how it works?", then yes, I can easily demonstrate I do.

In real life I'm not going to take an interview where there's not already that degree of trust so if that questions comes up something is already wrong. But I'm sure there are interviewers in the world who'd fail someone for that.

by nottorp9 hours ago|

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There's the old Joel theory that the good programmers don't apply for jobs because they just get invited...

by zeroCalories10 hours ago|

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TBH I'm like that, but how hard could writing a React component be? I'm not even a React programmer but I can probably write working code on a whiteboard.

by dolebirchwood10 hours ago|

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The best candidates would have that question wrapped up in 5 minutes. Like they're not even having to think about it, which is honestly all I cared about testing for -- do something really easy really fast so I know you're not BSing me, and then we can move on to just having a conversation about your past experience.

One of the worst guys took 20 minutes, with me having to coach him through it the entire time. It was a true exercise in patience, but I don't mind helping people learn new things. When he got his rejection email, he actually complained to the recruiter because he thought he did really well. Dude...

by sbrother9 hours ago|

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My version of fizzbuzz (I'm in backend/ML/NLP) is counting how many times each word appears in a string. Literally `return Counter(text.lower().split())` but it's totally fine if you want to do it in a for loop or whatever, as long as you can fluently write an incredibly simple function.

Half of the people I screen fail it. It's crazy.