Coding Interviews Don’t Work. Here is How I Know
One of the myriad reasons I’m The Secret Developer is that it allows me to say the absolute truth. I don’t have to worry about annoying m colleagues or losing my position.
So, when it comes to interviews I can confidently say:
I’ve been one of the problems. I cracked the code as a junior. I’m not even ashamed.
I’m the reason we can’t trust interviews for our staff. I’m why you take a good-looking coder only to employ them and find out they can’t do the job.
I’m the problem.
To explain what I did (and what I’ll do again) we need to investigate what happens in tech interviews, and why.
Interviews Should Weed Out The Fakers
There are some absolute fakers around. They may even make it to senior.
I remember interviewing a senior architect for a coding role. They claimed that they wanted to go back to coding after several years out.
Unsurprisingly their code was dated and littered with errors.
I digress. Others fake their resume and attempt to draw a great salary ++ benefits and fake it ‘till you make it. In some companies, they might well not get caught and might actually be able to learn enough skills to survive in their job.
It’s unlikely you’ll weed out a real candidate because they aren’t a faker. You can ask them questions about their resume and keep asking further questions. Don’t take I don’t know for an answer.
Interviews Should Rate A Coder
Some coders are better than others. You might have worked in a position where coders go to die and actually do little coding in their position at all. They let their skills lapse and become a non-coding programmer.
On the same scale, there are junior programmers who struggle to complete Fizz Buzz. A good programmer should be able to complete simple tasks, and a few pointed interview questions (or coding questions) should be able to weed these out.
It is common for some coders to be unable to make it through these types of questions. However, this is usually seen as a reasonable price to pay to make sure only programmers who can cut the mustard make it to onboarding.
My Cheat Code
A number of years ago I needed to break into the industry. The Secret Developer being The Secret Developer there was only one way to get up to speed as a programmer. The first goto which also became a crutch and a cheat code.
hard work
Yes, I know that sounds mild. You might think that this isn’t a cheat or a poor way of behaving. On the face of it, this isn’t a problem.
It’s the way I went about it.
In my first few interviews, I noticed a pattern. A large number of trivia questions were asked about my target programming language to try to recognize competency.
At this time I couldn’t use GitHub professionally. I spent months memorizing interview answers.
Yes. I went in. Memorizing definitions, shortcut keys, and ways of doing things. Signed up for the good and the great on Twitter and focussed on the gotcha questions they posted.
Honestly, I would have been happier spending time creating projects and building up a profile.
Yet I knew that wouldn’t move me closer to getting a job. So, I continued, and nothing stopped me from spending the thousands of hours required to become a competent interviewee.
Inevitably I couldn’t hack my first professional gig. But the second one worked out, and now I keep getting bigger and bigger jobs.
A better way
I’m sure someone will come at me in the comments and say I can’t come up with a better process. I hope they’ve read https://medium.com/@tsecretdeveloper/the-ideal-software-developer-interview-process-6282b20de30d before they do so, and I genuinely hope that they don’t think data structures and algorithms are the solutions.
I memorized the answers to those, too.
Conclusion
The best way of interviewing, if I could choose one thing? Talk to people. Actually, take a look at their resume and LinkedIn before the interview. Ask specifics. “Humanize” your process and your interviewee. It’s the only way.
I’m wondering why we insist on automating interview questions. Wait, it’s just so we don’t have to talk to the candidates. I’m all for LeetCode in that case.