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Discussion on: Algorithms in interviews: Hazing ritual or valuable vetting technique?

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Valentin Radu • Edited

How about we explore a bit the other side: what do those pesky devs who "lecture their interviewer" think about the pointless tests you guys are promoting at Triplebyte?

It’s Not About Reinventing the Wheel

Well, then why are you checking if someone is able to reinvent the wheel in the first place?

They’re a Lingua Franca

Yeah, but you're hiring for a specific position. What you should really care about is if the candidate is able to do his/her daily tasks and how much value it brings to your customer's (or your own) company. This goes triple for seniors. More than that, writing competition-like algorithms and writing real life programs are two very different things. You can excel at one and be mediocre or worse at the other.

They Make You a Better Engineer

So does learning this by heart: Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment. Should we do that, too? 3rd edition is only 1000 pages long.
Thing is, in the unlikely event (s)he'll ever need to implement a state of the art algorithm, (s)he'll research it first. That's how all of this works in real life. Here's an idea for Triplebyte: how about you test the ability of reading and understanding documentation at different levels? That would actually be valuable.

They Even Reveal Character

I agree. If I'd interview someone and he/she wouldn't object being asked pointless questions, I'd be disappointed. I don't know about you guys, but I like to work with productive/proactive/ people not with zealots or robots. You know, people that actually bring value to my company.

Unfortunately, even large companies take this path sometimes. In 2015 Max Howell, the creator of Homebrew was rejected by Google because he was not able to revert a graph on a whiteboard.

This guy built a fully functional, highly efficient package manager. No, he built the package manager for macOS. Let that sink in.

This practice needs to stop and I advise prospective candidates to think twice before applying to any company that throws a low-effort quiz as the first step in their selection process. It just shows how much the interviewer prepared for the interview (yes, surprise, as an interviewer you need to prepare as well)

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Dave Parr

This comment is the best thing about this article.

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Gerardo Lima

You got a point on the cases that require a candidate to play with things that'll never be relevant on the job, but I also see many developers simply unaware of complexity (big-O), CPU and memory-wise, which can seriously harm a product after MVP phase and broad adoption.

These problems are addressed by classic algorithms and, in this sense, they are much useful skills.