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by 1474295912 3554 days ago
I wonder if such a scheme would fly in other disciplines of Engineering? Would they hire a person at a Thermal power station, who can dazzle people with fancy Laplace transforms on a white-board?

I recently interviewed for a position at a small Amsterdam based company. They simply asked me to work with them and refactor a part of their code base. It was really interesting and frankly, we all had lots of fun during the 3-4 hour process.

Coming from the USA, it was eye opening to see the ingenuity of this simple way to determine candidates ability. It's such a shame that Stack ranking like HackerRank are being favoured instead of on-job evaluation.

2 comments

Cracking the coding interview trains you for one interview type. Many places do multiple interview types:

1. Coding challenge <- Your interview was mostly this.

- Make an object

- Make a mini-app

- Fix this code

- Refactor this thing

2. Design a program on a whiteboard

3. Algorithmic & Data Structures <- Cracking the coding interview helps here, and is the type many engineers struggle with.

4. Hiring manager interview <- the most subjective

People also will bring up if you're an asshole in any of the above interviews.

This is the Amsterdam startup scene, basically an extension of the US startup scene where you can smoke weed. Try France, Spain or Italy that truly have a different culture for tech things, I am not sure if you will like it.
Ignoring your snark, I had the similar experience at a Salzburg and Berlin based company. On the other hand there were many companies (Zalando, ProhectA etc) which were copying the shitty model of useless programming puzzles.
It's probably pretty easy to obtain pot in SF. Definitely easy in Seattle if you're over 21.