Fixing the Coding Interview

Everybody talks about cracking the coding interview. Dozens of articles and heated discussions on how to prepare, what to ask, and even how to handle the infamous brainteasers.

But let’s face it: the way we interview engineers is broken, and there is a very good reason for that - we are engineers! We know how to write code, and fix problems, a whole other set of skills than assessing other peoples' technical competence. In this talk, we will share six mistakes we were doing while recruiting engineers and share the path to master the skill nobody talk about - being a better interviewer.

Transcript

1. CRACKING THE CODE INTERVIEW fixing
2. CRACKING THE CODE INTERVIEW Everybody talk about
4. and everything is awesome
5. Until you look a little bit closer
6. Input: arr[] = {{1, 6}, {2, 8}, {3, 10}, {5, 8}} Output: [5, 6] [5, 6] is the common interval that lies in all the given intervals. Given N intervals of the form of [l, r], the task is to find the intersection of all the intervals. An intersection is an interval that lies within all of the given intervals. If no such intersection exists then print -1.
8. Candidate is not impressed
9. And I am confused
10. CRACKING THE CODE INTERVIEW fixing
11. interviewing is hard
12. we are engineers
13. We really really really suck at interviewing
16. how do we fix it?
17. Yossi Shmueli architect Omri Fima architect
18. over 1000 interviews
19. You have couple of hours, And a lot to achieve What are their strengths? Do they fit the team/company? What skills do they have? Which training will be required? How will the next 6 month look like? What is their passion? weaknesses?
20. How can we maximize our learning?
21. What do you ask?
22. Data Structures?
23. Tech questions? What is the difference between Vue & React?
24. Riddles?
25. FIND THE BUG?
26. Why? Easy to conduct Easy to compare
27. Why not?
28. Bad predictor of skills
29. Can be trained for
30. once it’s on glassdoor game over!
31. What DO we ask? so….
32. Interview 1.0 we call it
33. Preparation Your home turf Our home turf Code interview Culture Fit Sell! Sell! Sell!
34. Preparation Your home turf Our home turf Code interview Culture Fit Sell! Sell! Sell!
35. What is the actual job definition
36. What are the Skills to perform it well
37. 3M JAVASCRIPT DATABASE MICROSERVICES DESIGN FRONTEND Added value Productive +6M
38. What my Team needs right now?
39. Disruptor? Executioner? Enabler?
40. Structure the interview based on the rubrics
41. Asses your candidate based on the rubrics
42. 3M JAVASCRIPT DATABASE MICROSERVICES ARCHITECTURE FRONTEND Added value Productive +6M
43. Do your Research
44. CV Github Blog App Meetup video
45. Preparation Your home turf Our home turf Code interview Culture Fit Sell! Sell! Sell!
46. Tell me about something you’ve built that shows your experience at Scale Event Sourcing CI\CD Microservices Recommendatio n Systems Scraping
47. Experience look for
48. Experience is not knowledge
49. Knowledge is just what you know
50. Experience is about how you make decisions based on what you know
51. optimize your questions Decisions
52. So, you've built a job scheduler? How the api looked like? How did you handle errors? And scale? Oh, how did you deploy? And what about tests?
53. Fractal Questions
54. Preparation Your home turf Our home turf Code interview Culture Fit Sell! Sell! Sell!
55. can you apply your experience to our set of problems?
56. #1 A problem relevant for your domain #2 Can be explained in 5 minutes #3 Fractal Problem
57. How would you implement autocomplete?
58. API DESIGN REST GRAPHQL ERRORS CLIENT SIDE PERFORMANCE DATA MODEL PERSONALIZATION COMPONENTS RESPONSIVE UX DISTRIBUTION PERF. TEST CACHING INVALIDATION STORAGE INDEXING ON-WRITE V. ON-READ BACKWARD COMPAT. EVENTUAL CONSISTENCY AUTO COMPLETE A\B TESTING DEV. USABILITY RANKING ML
59. The way you solved it is not the only way pitfall #1
60. 20 minutes of Poker Face pitfall #2
61. Software is built by teams, not individuals
62. Preparation Your home turf Our home turf Code interview Culture Fit Sell! Sell! Sell!
63. Take a subset of the question from last part, now code it.
64. moment of ס’לכת
65. Engineering practices Clean code Production ready Tests
66. Code Review Why did you choose this technique? What are the consequences? What if we sat down and refactored?
67. Setting expectations pitfall
68. 1:30 to build 0:30 to code review (make sure you can do in half the time) pitfall
69. Give them IDE & Compiler & google pitfall
70. Preparation Your home turf Our home turf Code interview Culture Fit Sell! Sell! Sell!
71. Similar tastes, or being fun to work with is NOT culture fit.
72. That’s Discrimination
73. culture fit is about shared values
74. you can’t get them all ‘
75. generalist vs. specialist pragmatic vs. purist tech vs. product
76. How do I learn about values? ‘
77. Opinions are… fluid.‘
78. Through decisions & skills
79. What do you focus on when you code review?
80. How do you know your feature is successful?
81. Preparation Your home turf Our home turf Code interview Culture Fit Sell! Sell! Sell!
82. Interview is a two way road
83. Did I just got dumped?
84. But I did the 20 minute intro!
85. and you’ve bored them to death
86. so how do i SELL,SELL,SELL without being too preachy?
87. show, don’t tell.
88. share how awesome is what you do, just by asking the right question.
89. show what is important to you
90. get them fall in love with the problem
91. SUMMARY
92. Do your research on the job and the candidate Look for experience Optimize for decisions Real world problems Fractal problems focus on engineering practices Learn values through decisions & skills Get them fall in love with the problem #1 #5 #2 #3 #4 #6 #7
93. This is what we found effective*
94. *don’t take it too literal.
95. Go train your interviewing muscle!
96. THANK YOU Join us and experience interview 1.0 Omri Fima medium.com/@thegreymatter Yossi Shmueli @YossiShmueli blog.house-of-code.com