This is on the easier end of the scale to be sure, but as someone who’s interviewed candidates with similar questions, it eliminates a surprising number of people…
My theory is that modern coding bootcamps stuff their students full of buzzwords instead of letting them learn the basics
Which shouldn’t be surprising. The company I was interviewing at only feed me the top ~1% of CVs to interview… Of course half of them were stuffed with bullshit
Yeah, this is the problem. Someone who has legitimately built a basic application or website from scratch may know everything you need, but HR will filter it out.
They don’t really understand what they are looking for, so someone who says they are an AI Researcher with 8 years of experience in the language “Zendaya” and work experience at five moon rocket startups will be at the top of the pile.
Companies need to beef up their training programs so they can literally take in whoever and teach them what they need to know. Forget trying to get the top people. Just take the first 20 who can make it through an interview without drooling on the floor. You will probably get at least 9 ok developers and 1 good one.
When I interview people, I don’t care how they get an answer, I want to see that they can get to the answer, ideally the correct one, but it doesn’t matter if it’s wrong. I want them to show me their problem solving skills and that they understand their own solution.
If you can read existing code and understand complexities you are already better than 80% of these hires.
You might get something harder after that. But there’s a reason one of the most common code interview questions is FizzBuzz. There’s a shocking number of applicants that can’t do it.
We eliminate half our candidates when they can’t even answer what is static in Java. Or what is object oriented programming. Ours is less coding tests and more explaining Java concepts.
Correct. It’s mainly used for quick helper methods where you don’t need an object context like the Math class. It’s also used for class variables like out stream in the System class.
So. Many. People think it means it’s a constant variable.
To be fair, the static keyword is overused in various languages and has various other purposes.
IIRC: C has both static functions and variables. Static variables keep their value for the next time a function is called, no idea what static meant for function declaration.
Rust has static variables, which are similar to constants but can be abused as global variables.
That’s true, but these are also the same people who say they are a 9/10 in Java at career fairs. I’ve been working in Java for 10+ years and I’d still only consider myself an 8/10 maybe.
I always feel bad when I try out a new coding problem for interviews because I feel I’m going to offend candidates with such an easy problem (I interview mostly for senior positions). And I’m always shocked by how few are able to solve them. The current problem I use requires splitting a text into words as a first step. I show them the text, it’s the entire text of a book, not just some simple sentence. I don’t think I’ve had a single candidate do that correctly yet (most just split by a single space character even though they’ve seen it’s a whole book with newlines, punctuation, quotes, parentheses, etc).
I am curious how you’d deal with the ambiguity of contractions vs. ending single quotes. I guess that character between letters can be assumed to be part of the word, but not if it’s between a letter and a space, for example. If you ignore contractions, hyphenated words, and accented characters, you could just match on /[a-zA-Z]+/.
Still in university, never did an interview. Is that seriously the avarage difficulty of interview questions?
This is on the easier end of the scale to be sure, but as someone who’s interviewed candidates with similar questions, it eliminates a surprising number of people…
My theory is that modern coding bootcamps stuff their students full of buzzwords instead of letting them learn the basics
I find the experience of the applicants to be hilarious lies.
Which shouldn’t be surprising. The company I was interviewing at only feed me the top ~1% of CVs to interview… Of course half of them were stuffed with bullshit
Yeah, this is the problem. Someone who has legitimately built a basic application or website from scratch may know everything you need, but HR will filter it out.
They don’t really understand what they are looking for, so someone who says they are an AI Researcher with 8 years of experience in the language “Zendaya” and work experience at five moon rocket startups will be at the top of the pile.
Companies need to beef up their training programs so they can literally take in whoever and teach them what they need to know. Forget trying to get the top people. Just take the first 20 who can make it through an interview without drooling on the floor. You will probably get at least 9 ok developers and 1 good one.
When I interview people, I don’t care how they get an answer, I want to see that they can get to the answer, ideally the correct one, but it doesn’t matter if it’s wrong. I want them to show me their problem solving skills and that they understand their own solution.
If you can read existing code and understand complexities you are already better than 80% of these hires.
This is our approach when we ask what is system, out, and println in System.out.println(). Just talk it out. Look at capitalization.
You might get something harder after that. But there’s a reason one of the most common code interview questions is FizzBuzz. There’s a shocking number of applicants that can’t do it.
We eliminate half our candidates when they can’t even answer what is static in Java. Or what is object oriented programming. Ours is less coding tests and more explaining Java concepts.
Just to be sure (I haven’t done a lot of java and don’t exactly like it):
static in OOP means that we don’t need an Object of a class to call a static Method or access a static value, right?
Correct. It’s mainly used for quick helper methods where you don’t need an object context like the Math class. It’s also used for class variables like out stream in the System class.
So. Many. People think it means it’s a constant variable.
To be fair, the static keyword is overused in various languages and has various other purposes.
IIRC: C has both static functions and variables. Static variables keep their value for the next time a function is called, no idea what static meant for function declaration.
Rust has static variables, which are similar to constants but can be abused as global variables.
That’s true, but these are also the same people who say they are a 9/10 in Java at career fairs. I’ve been working in Java for 10+ years and I’d still only consider myself an 8/10 maybe.
I always feel bad when I try out a new coding problem for interviews because I feel I’m going to offend candidates with such an easy problem (I interview mostly for senior positions). And I’m always shocked by how few are able to solve them. The current problem I use requires splitting a text into words as a first step. I show them the text, it’s the entire text of a book, not just some simple sentence. I don’t think I’ve had a single candidate do that correctly yet (most just split by a single space character even though they’ve seen it’s a whole book with newlines, punctuation, quotes, parentheses, etc).
I am curious how you’d deal with the ambiguity of contractions vs. ending single quotes. I guess that character between letters can be assumed to be part of the word, but not if it’s between a letter and a space, for example. If you ignore contractions, hyphenated words, and accented characters, you could just match on
/[a-zA-Z]+/.That’s the thing, nobody even asks this question.
That would already put you in the top 10% of solutions I’ve seen so far on this problem.
My confidence in my job security and general programming abilities has skyrocketed after visiting this thread
Depends if you’re working for a good company or one trying to hire people in a third world country for a dollar a day.