[ClumsyPilot]

"make them write code in the interview... Because now they can't program"

This comes across disrespectful and presumptious.

Firstly, do you believe that if you have not coded for 4-5 years you become useless just becauss you don't know the latest %fad% framework?

Secondly, the whole phrasing just conveys disrespect for cadidate, where the only responce to 'jump' is 'how high'.

If someone is interviewing for non-code postition they might tell you to take a hike.

The idea that a contrived 30 minute coding session tells you more about a candidate that studying code they've previously written or debugging together doesn't make awnce and is not supported by evidence

We don't ask surgeons: "since you can do heart surgery in 8 hours, surely you can reattach a toenail in 10 minutes during an interview"

[sokoloff]

I interviewed a very senior architect astronaut who literally couldn’t write code to compute the average of a list of numbers.

Wasn’t that they got hung up on the details of whether the average of ints should be an int, float, or double, or how to handle overflow, but just couldn’t get started at all.

After that, I stopped shying away from wanting to see code from even senior technical candidates.

(It was not a standard question for senior roles; I got a strong whiff of “this guy might be entirely full of it; let’s have a look-see”.)

[tguvot]

i am very senior architect astronaut. it will take me some effort to computer the average of a list of numbers in c/c++ as i didn't touch those languages in many years.

from the other side, while reviewing designs (not code) of various components I can spot locations where code handles sockets incorrectly or a couple of dozen of scenarios that system will fall apart under because engineers don't think that far.

value that I bring is not in averaging list of numbers. my value is 25 years of making mistakes, learning from them and knowing how to avoid them.

[Too]

Algorithm interviews should always let the candidate choose language to avoid these bad excuses, or in worse case even fall back to pseudo-code. If you can't calculate the average of a list of numbers in pseudo, then you are out regardless of how many years of mistakes you are bringing to the table.

[sokoloff]

Exactly. Maybe there are companies facing problems so unimaginably vast that architects who can’t write any code are critically needed. (Not who don’t which would be okay for a lot of companies, but who can’t.)

To me, this seems more like an executive chef who doesn’t know (or has forgotten) how a knife works rather than an Elon Musk or Henry Ford who doesn’t know how to weld a body panel.

[tguvot]

my current job is company with 1B in sales, with code base of one of the the main products started about 20 years ago, few additional acquired and semi integrated companies/products, high hiring rate of young and eager developers that know how to code very fast but don't know how to keep thing from blowing up in production environment.

what i do spans from feature set and scope negotiations with product (because devs don't have either patience or knowledge to do so), design reviews of any semi major changes or additions, helping with designs, revamping sre/devops practices and company infrastructure, figuring out what land mines we got in our systems in the past and how to remove them and more generally what changes in architecture are needed in order to carry company forward given it's rapid growth.

in overall I participate or oversee activities of few hundred developers across few continents and equal amount of sre and infra/tool people and use three spoken languages in order to do so (could use another one, but never got to learn it.)

hence, i am not musk or ford that don't know how to weld. i know welding, it's just not the best way to use me. my job is to make sure that rest of assembly process will be smooth and car won't explode when it hits the road (and it's not something that welder does).

[btilly]

Oh, I am sure that you do lots of work. And your company is organized in such a way that your role is critical path for lots of things.

But if a company the size of Google can get by without software architects, why does your company need to be organized in such a way that you require that role?

Back when I worked there, one of the universal shocks when people go to work for Google is that the overall architecture was light years ahead of anywhere else. The person usually given credit for that is https://research.google/people/jeff/. Based on results, he may well be the best software architect alive.

If you want to learn from his example, I recommend that you start with "a running prototype beats a whiteboard design".

hence, i am not musk or ford that don't know how to weld.

What sheer irony.

BOTH Musk and Ford knew how to weld, and considered that knowledge essential to being able to do their jobs. Sure, they didn't do a lot of welding day to day. But how could they make correct decisions about how to build new machines if they didn't know how those machines are put together?

[tguvot]

in pseudo i can. or in python. avg(list) :)

anything more complex, not sure. i touched last time linked lists in 2001. never learned algorithms and in fact didn't even graduated from school. and guess what - everybody is okay with all of it. because this is not the value that I am expected to deliver to the company.

edit: when people are interviewed for system architect positions, algo/coding interviews are not part of the process. because it's not skill set that company is looking for.

[sokoloff]

For the record, with that interview, even saying “in python, I’d use the standard library avg(list), because it would be ridiculous to re-implement provided and tested ecosystem functionality” would have served him well in terms of indicating he wasn’t an utter fraud. That alone wouldn’t land the job, but it would be a strong positive.

[tguvot]

depends on the company. i once (15 years ago) was interviewing with a company and they essentially asked me to whiteboard some regex like pattern matching flow. i did it, and after completing it to their satisfaction i said that in real world i wouldn't do it, as it's waste of time and will use lib* whatever. I didn't get this job :) a few years later, i discovered that few guys on one of the teams were from this very company. what was standing out about them, it's that they always had to reinvent any standard functionality/library with peak of it been their own xml-rpc protocol that they came up with, because xml-rpc wasn't good enough. I guess ethos of this company and all people that they hired, was to reinvent wheels, bicycles, etc and I didn't fit that ethos well .

this was also the only whiteboard coding interview in my life

[zingar]

The engineers you work with have to write code that does the equivalent of averaging a list of numbers, many times per day. If you can't (in any language) handle this then I question your ability to understand whether your choices make it easy or hard for the engineers to do their jobs.

[tguvot]

in some languages i will write the code. more complex algos not, because i don't know them. and never cared to know them. in reality engineers that i work with, write code that does whatever_library.avg(list_of_numbers). if i will see engineer that many times a day implements code that averages list of numbers I'll have a serious conversation with him about more efficient development practices

and maybe you are questioning my ability, but engineering teams that I work with - not. They come to me so i'll help them with problems that they have.

[blub]

This "average of a list" is a red herring, because in practice one gets some variation of dynamic programming, trees, graphs, etc.

And for these kinds of more complex algorithms problems I would not expect most architects to be able to solve them, since they're utterly irrelevant for their jobs. Heck, a huge amount of software developers can't solve them and bitterly (and at least partly legitimately) complain about them to whoever will listen.

[btilly]

"make them write code in the interview... Because now they can't program" This comes across disrespectful and presumptious.

It is the interviewer's job to check the possible reasons to not hire someone and validate that the they aren't going to be problems. One of the possible reasons to not hire someone whose last job was "architect" is that they have lost contact with coding. If they have, then from experience I can tell you that they won't want to go back to coding, and their architectures are losing contact with reality. They are a liability.

This observation is not original to me. The first time that I saw it made explicit was when I took interviewing training while I was at Google. Google's experience is that a certain fraction of architects avoid coding. That fraction makes really bad hires. So they explicitly told people to look for that in the interview so that don't wind up accidentally hiring them.

But if someone's title is "architect" and they can code, then that isn't a concern. Companies do tend to promote good programmers to architect, and you don't want to miss out on those programmers.

Firstly, do you believe that if you have not coded for 4-5 years you become useless just becauss you don't know the latest %fad% framework?

This is a straw man argument. I said nothing about "latest fad framework". The exercise is to write some code, not write code in any particular framework or language. Go ahead and be offended at something that I didn't say, but please remember that I didn't say it.

Secondly, the whole phrasing just conveys disrespect for cadidate, where the only responce to 'jump' is 'how high'.

If an interviewee objects to writing code in the interview, how are they going to respond when they're asked to write code on the job? Seriously, if they get offended in the way that you just did, that's a good reason not to hire.

If someone is interviewing for non-code postition they might tell you to take a hike.

I do not want to work in an organization where "architect" is a non-coding position. Seen that, left in horror. So if I'm interviewing you, you are almost certainly being hired for a coding position.

The idea that a contrived 30 minute coding session tells you more about a candidate that studying code they've previously written or debugging together is idiotic.

It doesn't tell you more, but it tells you something different. In particular it tells the difference between someone who shows their own code versus shows someone else's code and lies about the source. (Yes, I have seen that.)

[ClumsyPilot]

"Companies do tend to promote good programmers to architect, and you don't want to miss out on those programmers."

Everything in your responce sounds to me like in your view, architect is 'extra senior' developer, whereas I understand it to be a different job. Isn't what you are describing a principal engineer?

"In particular it tells the difference between someone who shows their own code versus shows someone else's code and lies about the source. (Yes, I have seen that.)"

To eliminate that possibility, you can ask questions about the code, how it was designed, etc. Presumably if they stole the code, they are not going to know it inside-out, like the author would.

[btilly]

Tip, the word is "response", not "responce".

In my view, software architecture should be part of the job of a principal engineer, and the role "software architect" should not exist as a separate thing.

Separately, you would be amazed at how many developers will happily give you code that they wrote a year or more ago, and then not remember their design decisions. So not knowing it inside and out doesn't imply that they are not the author.