[void_mint]

> Take note of the time and let them do their thing. Answer any questions they might have as they go. The moment the program outputs the correct answer, take note of the time again.

Gross.

> If you decide you want to hire the candidate, the interview must last at least six hours (with an hour break for lunch). Have your engineers interview the person, one by one, for about 45 minutes to an hour each.

Gross. The hardest pass.

> First, the candidate needs to feel they've earned the privilege to work at your company.

Gross. Equally hard pass.

> Second, your engineers need to feel they know the measure of whoever they're going to be working with.

Gross. Random engineers aren't qualified to assess talent or fit. Random engineers _may be_ qualified to pick candidates that match their gender/race biases though.

> and more importantly spend time having a little trepidation about how they did.

I would go so far as to say "Fuck you" to this author.

[tibbar]

Ha, I read your comment first and thought you were somehow overreacting, but then I read the piece and I agree with you. The author doesn’t seem to realize that the flavor of interview he’s running is deeply trainable, and that one can become very, very good at tic-tac-toe style questions after a year or two of intense study. But who would do that? Well, a whole lot of IOI/ICPC contestants did. So, he’s mostly just hiring for people who joined the same club as, I assume, himself.

[lostcolony]

It's funny. The older I've gotten, the more code I've written, and the slower I am to write code.

When I was fresh out of college the 'obvious' approach just appeared, and I was off to write it.

Now, any problem I am slow to peel apart in my mind, decide what the best way to approach it is, based on the language I'm using, what I'm feeling right now, readability, maintainability, etc.

Tic Tac Toe? Interesting; should I store board state as a 2d array, or a single array? The obvious approach would be to try and play every possible game with backtracking, but perhaps instead it would be simpler to just generate every possible permutation of 5 Xs and 4 Os? Would that work; on the one hand a badly playing O might lose after just 3 Xs, but we could still fill out the board if we 'kept playing', so it maps one to one, so maybe! Of course, then you risk situations where both X and O wins, so maybe not? Also, what about rotations; we could reduce our work by ensuring we didn't try to solve for cases that are just rotations of one another, but is the book keeping of that more work than just brute forcing it, given the constrained nature of the problem? Etc etc.

Writing working code matters, yes. But if you're looking for people who think just a few seconds before typing anything, and then seem frustrated they can't type fast enough, you're optimizing for juniors.

I hope it's all satire.

[b9a2cab5]

IOI contestants (and people that can memorize lots of difficult algorithms) tend to have high intelligence. If you're looking to hire really smart people and you don't care about false negatives, it's a good way to approach the problem.

The entire point is to hire people that 1) are interested in exploring algorithms on their own time (i.e. they're interested in more than just getting paid for a job, they're interested in interesting problems too) 2) are competitive and want to win 3) are hard working and intelligent (i.e. they had to study for these competitions and do well in them).

You might miss a lot of smart people but it's pretty likely if you ask really hard algorithm questions that you'll filter out any not smart people. If you're reacting badly to this style of interview, that's because you're not their target talent pool.

[pedrosorio]

> So, he’s mostly just hiring for people who joined the same club as, I assume, himself.

Not so. From the article:

> First, I cannot myself pass this interview. Last time I tried, I got the correct answer after about forty minutes or so. I could get it down with practice, but it doesn't matter-- I think slower than I type. That's a no hire. The point of the interview is to hire extremely talented engineers, not engineers as talented as me.

[qPM9l3XJrF]

"Gross... Fuck you"

Serious question... how did these kind of fifth grade playground insults become normalized on HN? It's a blatant violation of the guidelines https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and yet somehow comments like this get upvoted.

[void_mint]

You're welcome to flag my post if you think it's inappropriate.

The author of this post is either ignorant or malicious. Some of their behavior is so ignorant or malicious that it warrants direct adversarialism. This blog post is gross.

Curious, what about my post included a "playground insult"?

[happythen]

Doesn't read as fifth grade to me. Just has a little spiciness to it, I appreciate that. Think about it, the person could have linked and linked and linked to other articles to back up some point of disagreement. But instead, they shared their own opinion, relatable, easy to follow, and refreshing.

[dang]

Please don't post like this to HN. It's directly against the site guidelines, which ask you not to fulminate or call names. Maybe you don't feel you owe people who you consider wrong about engineering interviews better, but you definitely owe this community better if you're participating here.

I'm sure you can make your substantive points thoughtfully, so please do that instead.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[mikeymz]

I would also go that far

[lostcolony]

Qualifications != intelligence. Everyone has pre-existing biases.

[void_mint]

> What a nasty thing to say a random/typical engineer is too stupid to assess talent and is basically racist…

Quote me in my post where I said these things. Otherwise please don't misquote me. It's text after all, it's pretty easy to copy and paste.