It was Microsoft who started with the “golf balls in a plane” style questions.
Google iterated to the standard DSA questions that are common now.
And I don’t think they’re entirely without merit. However, people think you should be testing to find the ceiling. That’s impossible. Not only do you have the issue of whether or not the candidate just got lucky by getting a question they just happen to know, if you are hiring for a more junior position, it’s likely you don’t need them to know it in the first place.
Our goal should be to test the floor, not the ceiling. Find questions that can be answered by anyone with the skill set you desire. Sometimes that floor is: can you write runnable code.
We’ve just completed a hiring cycle where several candidates couldn’t transform a simple circuit diagram into a Boolean statement. One candidate who professed SQL knowledge who couldn’t write a simple query. And I mean “how many buckets do you have?” level of simple.
On paper, these candidates seemed good. Several even had GitHub repositories. But, end of the day, I’m going to ask you to do a task. I’m going to need it by a date. I’m going to need that completed without having to comb over it and possibly rewrite chunks of it.
I don’t need the next Linus Torvalds, but so many candidates come with greatly exaggerated resumes and we have to winnow somehow.
Google iterated to the standard DSA questions that are common now.
And I don’t think they’re entirely without merit. However, people think you should be testing to find the ceiling. That’s impossible. Not only do you have the issue of whether or not the candidate just got lucky by getting a question they just happen to know, if you are hiring for a more junior position, it’s likely you don’t need them to know it in the first place.
Our goal should be to test the floor, not the ceiling. Find questions that can be answered by anyone with the skill set you desire. Sometimes that floor is: can you write runnable code.
We’ve just completed a hiring cycle where several candidates couldn’t transform a simple circuit diagram into a Boolean statement. One candidate who professed SQL knowledge who couldn’t write a simple query. And I mean “how many buckets do you have?” level of simple.
On paper, these candidates seemed good. Several even had GitHub repositories. But, end of the day, I’m going to ask you to do a task. I’m going to need it by a date. I’m going to need that completed without having to comb over it and possibly rewrite chunks of it.
I don’t need the next Linus Torvalds, but so many candidates come with greatly exaggerated resumes and we have to winnow somehow.