[geebee]

You should try interviewing as a software engineer with 10 years experience. They never ask you to double the value of each integer in an array. They ask you to find all matching subtrees in a binary tree, or to find all sub-matrices in an NxM matrix with a positive determinant in a matrix of arbitrary size, or find all words in a dictionary that can be constructed by concatenating other words in the dictionary.

The easiest questions I've been asked are unimaginative but straightforward things (build a binary tree, print inorder, find all permutations of a string, code a hash map).

There's also a particularly pernicious trend toward asking for on-line assessments or homework assignments, things that save the hiring company time but put an even greater time burden on the applicant.

I'd say "cracking the coding interview" is a good reflection of the kinds of questions you need to be prepared to answer in an interview, and they are miles away from doubling the value of each integer in an array.

I think this is why there's such a disconnect between us. You do see self-described software engineers with 10 years of experience who can't do fizzbuzz, I really do believe you. But we (the applicants) never see this, instead we see a vastly higher standard applied. Which would be fine if the companies acknowledged that they are having trouble hiring because they're extremely picky. But instead, we hear people claiming that there's a "shortage" and that they can't hire because all these supposedly senior people can't code fizz buzz.

[SovietDissident]

Which would be fine if the companies acknowledged that they are having trouble hiring because they're extremely picky.

Exactly this. I'm mid-level, trying to switch jobs. Several front-end javascript positions I interviewed for asked me anything from pretty tough algorithms to "how does Angular do namespacing" to object-oriented questions relating to Java to how to style a page and add event listeners to it without ability to reference the docs, etc.

The questions per se are not undoable, but the the sheer magnitude of the corpus they can ask questions from is what's so difficult. I accept this and try to cover as much as I can in self-study and outside courses, so I can better in future interviews. But it is a substantial burden timewise, and seems to be of diminishing marginal utility regarding actual, on-the-job performance, which is pretty annoying. Oh yeah, and then they reveal that they want to pay me $75k per year for a mid-senior position, in California. I know people who make that starting out of college as Account Managers for bigger CPG (consumer packaged goods) or pharma companies, with a company car and cell phone. (Granted, I think those jobs would be boring and also at-risk over the long-term, but the time spent/compensation difference seems out of whack.)

If there really were a shortage, companies would check for fundamentals but relax their standards and offer more on-the-job training for candidates. And wages would be significantly higher! Should get rid of H1Bs as a start, and see if that helps.

[dublin]

Amen on getting rid of the H1Bs! Not only would doing soclear out the deadwood, the improvements in skills, capabilities, communication ability, and critical thinking would dramatically slash the true cost of software development.

[taurath]

I've worked with amazing H1Bs. The problem is the great ones are always underpaid and by the time and the bad ones are encouraged to do anything to keep their jobs because their entire future is on the line.

[apazzolini]

I don't doubt that you've had poor interviewing experiences with companies that ask you to do things that are not representative of the job you're interviewing for. This is a well-known problem in our field, and as a fellow engineer with 10 years of experience, I've also encountered it.

It's also not my point at all.

The comment I was responding to was advocating that there is a myth surrounding the flood of people who don't know how to code. This is not a myth.

Doubling an array of integers is one of the easiest questions I can possibly think of, and use it to build interviewee confidence as a warm-up before diving into pragmatic questions related to the job.

Unfortunately, there is a not insignificant number of candidates who claim experience and yet are unable to write `.map(x => x * 2)` or use a for loop.

[geebee]

I'll agree, you were making a more narrow point that there are in fact a lot of candidates who can't do extremely simple coding exercises (I agree about that as well)

This assertion is often mis-used (a slight of hand to resolve the question of why companies reject so many candidates yet claim that anyone competent will find "100 companies that will hire you today".)

However, you were not making that second assertion, you were insisting that something that is real is not a myth, fair enough.

[tracker1]

I've seen both sides a number of times. Even when interviewing specifically those coming out of code-camp style organizations, there's probably 2/3 that never did anything in terms of discovery beyond what they were assigned. I'm not saying that anyone has to spend all their free time coding, but a bit of passion when starting out is the single best indicator of how a junior level developer will perform.

This other is title inflation where someone at junior-mid level has a senior title after 2-3 years of experience. It's all over the map. For every good developer, I've seen 2-3 bad developers. For every 10 good developers, you might get 1 great developer. For every 2 great developers, 1 has a personality that doesn't work well with others.

It's a challenge to build a team where you need to balance ability, room for growth with need. I also agree that the hiring practices outlined in "cracking the coding interview" are excessive for most environments. Most line of business applications will use tooling that abstracts some of the more difficult challenges. Cloud environments offer services that take care of many of the rest. In reality, there's more need for someone to have an understanding of when you might use a given SQL variant, Mongo or Cassandra (or any number of others), vs even thinking of creating your own systems.

In general, for "senior" javascript developers, I ask a single question. Something that's in every JS book from beginning to advanced that I've ever seen. And less than one in 10 give a complete answer, and less than half get it half right.

[monsieurbanana]

What's the question?

I like to ask them to explain either the concept of closures in javascript, or how `this` works.

I don't even need them to know the word closure, knowing why you can't reference a variable written inside another function, the difference between var and let, or what does bind/apply do.

[tracker1]

What are the values that equate to false in an if statement?

false, null, undefined, NaN, "" (empty string), 0

Bonus: An object with a toString() method that returns one of the above won't evaluate directly, but will roughly equal (foo == false).

sometimes I'll ask for a function that returns input as a whole number or null, if it's a string, attempt to parse base 10, return null if invalid, return null if the input isn't already a number or a string. 0 is usually what will trip people up.

[jtchang]

Doesn't an empty array also equal false?

[jtchang]

Isn't this basically atoi? Which has a lot of edge cases.

[tracker1]

pretty much... the main one I tend to ask is the 6 falsy values, clarified as needed. The responses tend to be a good overall indicator of how well the person knows JS.

[jtchang]

How does it indicate how well someone knows JS? That's the type of question you can easily Google.

Not to mention in general Javascript does some pretty not intuitive things with objects: https://archive.org/details/wat_destroyallsoftware

[danellis]

> You should try interviewing as a software engineer with 10 years experience. They never ask you to double the value of each integer in an array.

You shouldn't extrapolate your own experience into "never" or "always". I have twice your experience, and I've had insultingly simple questions like this. Amazon asked me to do fizzbuzz, for crying out loud.

[penguat]

we ask almost everyone the same thing, which can be resolved to one of the unimaginative but straightforward things above, but is not necessarily obvious at first glance. We fail the people who evidently can't code, not the people who fail to resolve it to the magic answer.