darrenkopp

I interview people regularly. These are easy to detect… not in a direct way but i can tell when you are being assisted by AI. 3 so far this month out of 12, for those who were going to ask how frequently.

i am the same except i use music (lyrics and all) to drown everything else out. i don’t. price the lyrics at all, but my brain is processing them because every now and then i suddenly break out of focus and am like “wait, what the hell did that song just say?” usually on comedy songs

> Interviewing should be more about avoiding bad candidates than finding the best candidate.

> This guy fails coding interviews. Then he gives coding interviews, but the people he selects based on these interviews are a mixed bag. Because he's failing the interview from both directions.

Good points, but I should say that the people that didn't work out weren't always because of technical abilities. The company that had the worst success rate was fully remote, but I don't know if there's any interview process that can help with that.

Actually there's another job before that, I just don't list my full employment history. Before that was VP of Engineering. That's just my final title, however. I started that as a normal engineer. And then as a senior engineer before CTO.

Small companies, so not the same as being VPE or CTO at Amazon. You see those as title downgrades, but I don't. I have a lot of talent, so people want to promote me and put me in charge. I don't want to be a manager/leader currently, I want to be a strong IC.

> Can we stop calling it "failing" when a company decides you're not a good fit? If you go on a date and don't get asked for a 2nd, did you fail the date? You're not just what they're looking for right now; not everything has to be a failure.

Fair point.

> I'm sorry, what? He thinks it takes one hour to teach someone data structures? We sure are wasting our time with those multiple college courses and hundreds of textbooks on the subject then. We should just get this guy to spend one hour imparting all necessary knowledge into everyone.

There's a difference between understanding how to implement one and just knowing how to use one that's already been written by someone and when to use it.

> Human biases are much more likely to work against you if the interviewers have not spent time trying to come up with a consistent test that they give everyone. Does the author think human bias is absent from non-technical interviews? The less standard your hiring methods are, the more bias you'll have.

Fair, but alas I don't know the rigors they have put their hiring process through. If I were a betting man, I'd still say that if we measured all processes using programming tests, the majority of successful candidates had working output by the end.

> I don't know who Darren Kopp is, so maybe I'm about to get an army of replies saying he's their coding role model

I've been told this by everyone who knows me

> but this is an article about whether code interviews work or not, and he's basically saying "if they don't hire me, who will definitely become one of the best employees they've ever had, then their coding interview process must suck". The other possibility is that Darren Kopp just isn't actually tremendously more stellar than everyone else and coding interviews are actually kinda working. For his argument to work, he has to be one of the best possible candidates for every job he's applying for. I just kinda doubt that.

Actually the only conclusion I have after writing the post is that I am not talented at interviewing. I do believe coding interviews have flaws for how they are used, but that doesn't necessarily make them wrong or right. I agree with your first statement, maybe I'm just not a good fit.

Perhaps both of us are correct as I consider coding interviews more of an audition than anything else. If Tom Cruise auditions for a part and doesn't get it, does that mean he's a bad actor? Likely not.

(I'm Tom Cruise here, btw).

Yep, that was my same approach as well.

I don't think it's wildly optimistic, but perhaps we are thinking about it in different ways. I don't think I could teach someone how to implement each data structure in an hour, but I could easily go over maps/queues/stacks/hashtables and tell you when to use each in an hour. I know this because I do that very thing in less than an hour in code reviews.

I do agree that the "stickiness" is iffy, but it usually sticks pretty well. You then have a second problem that can be described as "when you have a hammer, everything is a nail" as they use their new fancy hashtable everywhere.

This is pretty interesting, I hadn't heard of this approach before. I'll have to give it a try some time.

If I'm not cut out to work in your environment, that's fine. I do disagree with your other conclusions, however. I'm not bad at communication, I'm bad at verbal communication while simultaneously trying to solve a problem. I'm excellent at problem solving and simultaneously chatting in something like slack, however.

I, personally, cannot _think_ and _talk_ at the same time. It's just a stream of half-sentences, many of which my brain has already moved on from because what I originally thought won't work.

After writing this article it became very apparent to me that I'm complete garbage at interviews, but I'll outperform and exceed at the actual job function.

The data itself is ordered (which is why the task is to print them in order), but the order you receive the values is can happen in any order (ie the processing was split into multiple threads and each thread is posting back the results from the work).

Yeah interview before Joel was base -2 conversion. Joel's interview was mostly a chat and we mostly talked about my dog (and other things I'm sure but I only remember talking about dogs).

Sorry, I was paraphrasing the question and not giving every detail that I received. They also stated that there are no gaps, the values increment by one, and start at zero.

it's not impossible to solve, but there are situations like that which make any solution not work, which was a follow up question