[mfcl]

I once started an interview process as a senior developer at Goto, the company behind LastPass.

The contact was a first phone call where someone simply asked the number of experience I had in software development, Java programming, etc. I thought it was weird that basically all they got from the phone call was a bunch of numbers. The weirdest part tho what that they asked how many years of experience I had in... open source? "How many years of experience do you have in open source?"

(Probably because the recruiter had a list of tech and skills required and simply went through it.)

Anyway, I went with it and eventually got a coding assessment. The docx document told me to implement a little deck of cards in Java using classes and inheritance. This was for a senior position.

I did not do that and withdrew my application.

[matthewwolfe]

You laugh at that coding assignment for a senior position but you'd be surprised how many "senior" people interview that would struggle with that and be unable to complete it.

[wildzzz]

It's a great way to weed out the junior devs that cheated their way through school (or are too dumb to figure it out via stackoverflow) and the senior devs that haven't actually done any real programming in a long time.

An engineer at our competitor got laid off and my PM found out and hired the guy to do FPGA work. My PM knew the guy through some contracts we had with the competitor and assumed he was an expert in the field. Turns out the guy was more of middleman between program management and the engineers so while he could talk about the work, he hadn't really done it in like 10 years. My PM got the hiring expedited and since we don't really do interview tests in our industry, the guy was now on our team before anyone could ask any pertinent questions.

Long story short, the FPGA team starts assigning him work but it's taking way too long and he's asking for more documentation and for help on things that he definitely would have worked on in his supposed previous job. Eventually we all figure out that he kinda overstated how fresh his skills are and we transition him to a sort of documentation role so he wasn't burning hours on things he just couldn't handle. While he was perfectly capable of doing that kind of work, it involved a lot of insight to our design so it took him a while to get onboarded to the system and able to properly describe the design. Eventually he was doing good work and got the project to the point where he wasn't needed but he left a bad taste in everyone's mouth. We could have hired two junior engineers to do the work he was doing for the same price and probably gotten it done much faster. After the guy transfered over to another project, we reamed out our PM about his hiring decision and begged him to give us some input next time. Of course, due to the waste of money from the last guy, the functional managers stopped taking hiring inputs from our project and would just assign whoever the fuck they thought we needed despite the kind of roles we actually needed.

[genewitch]

I am one of those people who just won't exaggerate or lie on my CV or during an interview. I say "i'm not sure, i'd google it the first couple times it came up". I'm not a programmer though. I have a weird skillset that doesn't mesh or gel with what recruiters are looking for, so on the rare occasion i get a recruiter on the phone, i tend to get a job offer at the end of the sequence.

I've had a few startup jobs, a couple megacorp jobs (not Apple), and a handful of mom and pop and defunct business jobs as well.

My least favorite interview questions involve regex or deep internals of BSD or Linux, my favorite interview questions are off the cuff solutions to problems presented, and then backtracking the explanation.

I've also been asked to perform job interviews for positions that i probably ought know enough about to interview a candidate for, but I went off my gut feeling about how the person acted in what i consider a stressful situation (a slew of interviewers asking asinine questions). I don't like interviewing, i am not very good at finding candidates that are "in for the long haul" but every time we were tasked with finding someone who can do X before end of Q3, my hired candidate recommendations always nailed it in that time frame. All this is to say, i find the whole process ridiculous. My CV apparently looks like a train wreck. I refuse to wear a tie or get a haircut. I'm eerily relaxed in interview situations.

My trick? one time i hung out with a CEO of an IT company from the PNW, and they basically told me everything i thought i knew was trash, my resume was trash, my attitude was trash, and the only thing i was good at was solving problems in a hurry. We did, in fact, get coffee for our meetup. I scrapped every idea of what a resume should look like - what i envisioned a perfect professional resume looked like - and started fresh. I learned to say no to most recruiters in a way that made them ask me about different "opportunities" more aligned with my personal ethics and values in the future.

I have 4 FPGAs, and i've never done anything with them, because the bitstream is proprietary on all of them. I wouldn't hesitate to tell an interviewer that i am interested in FPGAs and custom ASICs, because i am. I'm also interested in bacteria, but i won't be applying to a bioscience lab anytime soon. I certainly wouldn't say "yeah i can program an FPGA", or C, or do front end development, or any of that.

From my reading of these sorts of comments, in aggregate, most people try to impress the interviewers. I want them to impress me.

Does this make me privileged? Probably. <sigh>

[greyhair]

I have been developing in embedded systems for 38 years, and I have the shortest skill set you will ever see on a resume. I only put down the things I know.

On the other hand, I have reviewed resumes from people with five years of experience that are 'experts' at twenty five unrelated technologies. As soon as I see that, I think, 'yeah..... no'. I worked with some genius level folk at Bell Labs back in the mid 1990s, ten years into my career, and they were each really good at two or three things. I took note of that. Yes, they could figure other stuff out, they could move on to new technology, updating the three things that they were good at, but that list always seemed to be short.

You have to laugh at 'experienced' or 'expert at' followed by JS, JAVA, Full Stack, Python, Linux, BSD, C#, AWS, C, C++, MySQL, PostGRES, Lisp, Lua, Azure, MathCAD, DSP, AI, Excel, SystemC, Perl, regex, Bash, git, assembly, Verilog, ...

[caminante]

FizzBuzz interview questions are fair game[0] , especially if you're not networking in via referrals and are 1/5000 online applicants like the parent.

[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guid...

[rjbwork]

Pretty much. I hold the record for our coding question in my company - 3 minutes and 54 seconds. Granted, I'm one of the two people that put the question together, but still.

We've had candidates with "20 years of experience" completely unable to do what amounts to "call a web service, deserialize some json, write a couple for loops and if statements, and post back some json to a web service" in over an hour, or in a take home scenario.

It will never cease to amaze me that there are people employed in this field that just. can. not. program.

[Cthulhu_]

To be fair: it might be they have never done this before.

At my previous company, we had a technical assessment - this was about ten years ago now. It boiled down to: read XML, do some math / business logic, and build a REST API to do so.

Interestingly, ten years ago, at least half the applicants said they found it interesting because they had never worked with REST or JSON before. A lot were Java developers, so the XML part wasn't a problem, and they would often add some SQL database as a bonus.

But 5-10 years later, as development switched to (Node)JS and web, it became the inverse and people said they had never done anything with XML before.

[usrusr]

And far more likely: done before, but never on anything even remotely close to a blank slate. You can spend years doing X, be very good at doing X, but only ever adapt some pre-existing precedent implementation of doing X to a new use case, or to a new underlying library, but never any green-fielding. That "implement X in a vacuum" test will rate many experienced people lower than some who have never ventured beyond textbook examples. It's not impossible that your real tasks have so much green field work in them that those experienced brown-fielders might actually be bad matches, but I suspect that those situations are much less common than the tests that select for green-fielders.

[nindalf]

No doubt when GP refused to complete the coding assessment the people who designed it thought “aha! Yet another non-coder filtered out by our process!”

[caminante]

Why limit it there?

Add "This person doesn't know about my firm's hiring process, aren't willing to do basic tasks, doesn't want to work at my firm," etc.

[ohdannyboy]

I'm currently doing interviews for a senior firmware dev position and was stunned by this. Today I talked to a guy who couldn't tell me what an interrupt was in any technical detail. His coding was worse than a first year college students. 5 of the 6 people I've talked to so far bombed the coding portion.

[AlotOfReading]

This isn't intended as a rebuttal, but I've learned to stay away from deeply technical questions in embedded. As long as the interviewee is sufficiently paranoid about C, is recognizably experienced via conversation, and knows the basic concepts I don't press too hard on their specific skillset.

There are just too many niches where the knowledge we each consider necessary simply isn't. I had one particularly bad interviewer grill me on how the ARM GIC worked in detail (e.g. interconnect details, differences between versions, etc) because they considered it basic knowledge. I've personally never needed to know anything about it that wasn't in a TRM.

[greyhair]

I agree. Why memorize something that is well documented? Do you understand basic interrupt management and the existence of interrupt controllers? Good. Understanding basic concepts matter, but silicon implementations of a concept? No.

One question I have found useful in embedded development is asking someone to discuss the difference between a thread and a process, and the difference between thread based OSs and process based OSs. It is a general question, not bound by anything like CPU architecture, but just gives an idea into whether the person is comfortable about general memory domains.

I have mentored people, bright programmers that never worked in small embedded systems, that initially tripped all over the thread model, but eventually came to understand it.

[ohdannyboy]

Im pretty new to interviewing so I appreciate the feedback. I think I'm dong OK with respect to that but I'll make sure not to assume my own expertise are trivial.

[kamranjon]

I have a different perspective. I feel that specific coding task tells me absolutely nothing about the seniority of the person performing the task and tells me very little about their qualifications.

[Mistletoe]

But shouldn't a blacksmith be able to make a nail before he makes me a suit of armor?

[sodapopcan]

Making direct comparisons of software to trades generally needs to stop. I understand that it's merely an analogy, but it's not a good one. Nails are extremely well understood with little room for improvement while the smallest piece of software is not so well understood and has infinite room for improvement. There are a handful of traits about an engineer that can make them incredibly valuable to an org that you'll never measure by putting the most weight on their ability to balance a binary tree (to use the cliched example).

[sverhagen]

This sub-thread was talking about "that specific coding task", not about binary tasks [edit: trees] in general. You might be very valuable building, say, a database application, while not being able to balance a binary tree, but if you can't do whatever we can all come up with as a small coding assessment ("little deck of cards"). It sounds to me like a good first filter, plus then a good talking piece to have a conversation about in an in-person.

[sodapopcan]

Ya, my bad (and also to your sibling comment), I have trouble with HN comment depth sometimes.

Although I experienced recently what you said exactly! I was asked to build a deck of cards for the screening interview. It was a fun back-and-forth and I felt really good about things. Then in the next steps, I was asked to implement Conway's Game of Life. So like, I've been programming professionally for 13 years, I'm well aware of GoL and maybe should know how to do it, but I've never bothered since there are just a mountain of other projects, programming and not, that interest me over that. It's all good if you want your engineers to be able to solve that type of problem as it's your company and you do what you like with it. But like, they were an e-comm company and I have a ton of e-comm experience and was actually pretty into what they were doing, so why were they using something like GoL to assess me?

On the flip side of things to get a little tangential, I often feel companies reject me because they just don't like me, and I wish they would just say as much since that hurts way less than being told I'm a not a great engineer, lol.

Anyway, maybe a bit too much TMI... interviewing right now is a bit of a shitshow with all the recent layoffs and I'm maybe a little bitter, but also realllllly enjoying unemployment while it lasts.

[SoftTalker]

That's why the programming tasks are simple. FizzBuzz, or "implement a deck of cards."

Sure there are different ways to do this but it's a small enough task that the quality of the solution is easy to judge.

I think the nail analogy works. If a blacksmith can't make a decent nail he shouldn't be hired. Same if a developer can't use one of a few very well-known standard library data structures to implement a deck of cards.

[InCityDreams]

>I understand that it's merely an analogy, but it's not a good one.

Are there any good ones? I find that people introduce an analogy...it is discussed, another 'contradictory' analogy is introduced....and eventually someone has 'won' the argument referring to something completely unrelated, and thereby have 'won' the original argument, by default.

My boss is particularly good at his :-) To me, its a form of gaslighting.

As soon as i hear "But what if...?", or "it's as if...", I refuse to budge, and simply ask "Are we talking about 'the original subject', or 'Blacksmiths'? If it's the latter, let's talk about Japanese swordsmanship first, then the history of European metallurgy first - just to be on the same page."

Often used at the same time is the No True Scotsman fallacy.

Set ridiculous boundaries on the analogy, ignore the fallacies, and the original subject soon gets re-discussed. It's amazing how many people actualy find that uncomfortable.

[nordsieck]

> But shouldn't a blacksmith be able to make a nail before he makes me a suit of armor?

Yes.

But I think there's a reasonable upper limit to the amount of time a company can expect someone to spend on a job opportunity.

If they're burning an appreciable amount of that time on a trivial coding exercise, that's not great.

[joe_guy]

It's 60 minutes as a very high estimate. You might spend a life time together.

[bboygravity]

55 minutes to install the tool-chain and libs and 5 minutes to do the coding?

[caminante]

!!!

You're missing the point.

The premise is that someone capable can blast through trivial assignments in no time. Either this is the final proficiency challenge or there are subsequent, harder questions. In the former case, why not see the salary/offer and then decide?

[eropple]

Typically, because one has other opportunities that are no less compelling and where potential employers show respect for candidates' time.

I have a GitHub profile with a lot of code on it and on my resume I highlight projects I've done a lot of work on. "What if faked tho?"--there's literally too much there to be worth faking. If a hiring manager looks at my resume, has the option of going to my GitHub profile, and between the two goes "I'm going to hand him a college-level Java problem because I'm not sure," then there probably isn't a way we're going to work together. And that's okay, on both sides of it; there are a lot of developers who aren't bothered by that kind of low-trust relationship. I am. Not a fit.

(This is in contrast to, for example, asking a question like that during an interview. Interviews are bidirectional, and are showing an investment in the hiring process on the part of the employer. If a card-deck Java problem is worth addressing with my time, then it's worth addressing with your interviewer's time. The contrapositive is also true.)

[theamk]

And it does not have to, that's what the later stages are for.

This task is just a pre-filter, something to weed out surpirsingly high number of people who claim to be able to code but actually can't.

[Moru]

Now if we could just standardise this so you didn't have to do several coding assignments for every position you apply for. I'm sure most people needs to apply to more than one company to actually get hired, especially with all the layoffs now.

[AlfeG]

And very low ability to do any improvisation. Without specifying every detail of implementation task will not be completed. Even in areas that don't require very specific solutions, and need to just work.

[cratermoon]

Especially now that the "senior" titled is handed out to people with 3-5 years of experience.

[sodapopcan]

Ya, most people who have been in the game for a year ask for "senior" position. I'm pretty sure this is why there is "staff" now. Well, I'm not sure how long "staff" has been a thing as I've never worked at a company that has that title, just interviewed for them (nb: I interviewed for "senior" positions at said companies).

[selcuka]

There was a blog post on HN a few days ago by someone who taught himself programming during covid and landed senior roles (multiple, simultaneously, by lying to the employers).

[FrenchTouch42]

Do you have the link?

[selcuka]

It was this story, but the actual post is gone:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33739094

It's still archived, though:

https://web.archive.org/web/20221119032911/https://overemplo...

and

https://web.archive.org/web/20221116023708/https://overemplo...

Key takeaways:

> I started learning to code in 2019 as my new years resolution.

> Job #1 Senior front end dev

> Job #2 Senior front end engineer

> Job #3 Front end engineer (mid-level)

[AkshatJ27]

https://overemployed.com/ Not parent, but i think they are talking about this blog

[dcow]

And if you think a suit extends card then you’ve violated LSP.

[mosquitobiten]

This type of self-referencing and self-congratulatory comment is what makes this website worse and worse little by little. You don't add any meaningful information or knowledge and it is something shallow a kid would say to look cool in front of his friends. I am not attacking you, you can do better.

[lynx23]

Are you sure you are not talking about yourself? Also, simply writing "I am not attacking you" at the end of an attack doesn't help either.

[fullmoon]

Reflect on the reasons why you’ve just written this very comment.

You might be surprised.

[2devnull]

I was going to post a comment but I decided it didn’t add much. Maybe if we all refrain from liberal posting it would remove the need to post comments asking for better comments. I’m not sure. I may post too liberally myself.

[DocTomoe]

I disagree. The information "Goto has obviously horrible hiring tactics that select Programming-101-graduates for senior positions WHILE operating a security-sensitive product" is meaningful.

[mosquitobiten]

From 3 lines written by someone on some social media site you can infer something is true and a fact? ~Cool!~

[anonyme-honteux]

There are so much bad hiring practices in our industry that I indeed choose to trust the rare companies that do it right over the ones that cargo cult Google brain teaser questions, make you implement quicksort on a whiteboard, give you a take-home project that will take you forever but they will hardly glance at, will stop replying to you because ghosting is good, ...

That's the first impression I get from an unknown company and I decided to trust it.

[HPsquared]

Most things are cargo cults anyway, I wouldn't worry too much.

This company doesn't seem to follow the ways of the cult though, that's the concern.

[ExitPlatosCave]

Honestly his account was helpful. Lax hiring practices seem quite relevant to the security issues being revealed.

However, your comment comes across as an attack intended to maybe silence his experience.

[wruza]

What would be better, given the info in their comment is correct?

It’s arguable whether a simple senior filter and “HR stuff” is a red flag or not, but how does it make this site worse?

[gorgoiler]

Sounds silly, it’s a shame you didn’t get past the initial screen. It’s a process that has to be humored and you could have added a lot of value just by joining and then patching their hiring process.

When I was teaching in high school the deck-modelling thing is one that the kids come up with a lot especially when it came to doing their term project. I love the idea of being asked to implement a deck of cards using Java and inheritance! Here’s my implementation:

    SUITS = “♠♥♦♣”
    RANKS = “A23456789XJQK”
    deck = {(s, r) for s in SUITS for r in RANKS}

That’s about all you can commit to. Suits and ranks should probably be enums but we can start from these three lines and see how it goes.

Sorting? Depends on the game. Value? Depends on the game, and some games give the same card two values. Inheritance? Shared behavior depends on the game and is orthogonal to the card itself and often is dependent on game state as well as what card you have. Are we even playing a game, or is this just for rendering poker themed wallpaper? Calling it a “deck” is probably wrong. A deck is ordered and may have duplicates… it depends on the game! This is more of a pack than a deck.

It’s probably an amazing question for interviewing candidates in person to see how far they dig into the premise. As a take-home question, you could probably spend a minute on the code above and then an hour on implementing three different games. Maybe that was the original docx, but it didn’t sound like it.

[marginalia_nu]

Yeah I'd model it as something like this maybe?

  public enum Color {
    RED, BLACK
  }

  public enum Suit {
    Diamonds(RED, '♦'),
    Hearts(RED, '♥'),
    Clubs(BLACK, '♣'),
    Spades(BLACK, '♠');

    Color color;
    char symbol;

    public Suit(Color color, char symbol) { this.color = color; this.symbol = symbol; }
  }

  public enum Rank {
    Ace('A'),
    Two('2'),
    //...
  }

  public record Card(Suit suit, Rank rank) {
     // ... 
  }

The question is fundamentally broken because data objects shouldn't be inheriting anything. That's in almost all cases bad design that demonstrates only that you have no clue how to write sensible object-oriented code.

You wouldn't want to check whether a poker hand has a pair by using a bunch of instanceof's or getClass()-shenanigans. You also don't want to encode knowledge about poker into into the card object. That's just data.

[gorgoiler]

Nice. Very thorough, that’s a more positive take than what I was presenting, though I feel we are both (rightly) being standoffish on the whole inheritance requirement.

[lesuorac]

Hey, the client just said they want to play with Jokers can you add this in by lunch for the demo?

Thanks!

[marginalia_nu]

In that case I'd probably add a Joker Rank and Suit and require in Card's constructor that either both fields say Joker, or none do.

[bigDinosaur]

Unfortunately you have been rejected due to: a 'SyntaxError: invalid character in identifier'. Better luck at your next interview ;-)

[fredley]

This interview is for Goto, not Google I believe.

[twobitshifter]

Some other things you could do with a deck of cards to add useful functions.

Shuffle

Draw

Deal

Cut

Pile

Turn

Now imagine you have pinocle uno and cribbage as games. they each start with a different set of cards, but can use the functions above. The fact that it’s a 52 card deck with suits and ranks isn’t stated by GP, and there’s also the optional jokers.

For a real game, you’d probably need the back of cards as well for animation, and maybe you implement card designs to give the game some customization - now the deck needs some more properties or methods.

After all of that, think of whether the generic deck could be used to play magic or pokemon by using inheritance.

For lastpass, the closest parallel they might have to a deck is a password generator. Implementing that would seem like work. The deck stuff is all premature optimization for a single game, but they are checking your knowledge of inheritance, so just go along with it.

[marginalia_nu]

To be fair, none of the functions you listed, as far as I can tell, need to know anything about what they're operating on. You can implement all but the last on a generic list of objects.

The last I'd probably implement as a container object Turnable<C> that adds an orientation state to any parametrized type, including Reversi disks.

I feel the card itself should be immutable as far as possible. It's state: orientation, owner, location and whether it's dog-eared should be kept separately.

[tsukikage]

Can you even commit to this much?

Many card games have a reduced deck - e.g. lots of French card games use a 36-card deck. Some card games use multiple decks mixed together (e.g. Canasta). Some have extra cards (jokers are common, there are others); some have entire extra suits (e.g. games that used to be played with various forms of tarot decks).

All this stuff needs to be parameterised, and suddenly you have an enterprise-worthy class hierarchy and a ton of complexity before you've even really started on game-specific stuff.

[patrickdavey]

That is a neat enumeration, but, the question did ask for classes and inheritance which this definitely isn't.

Would you really just ignore the requirements and give the simplest starter as a way to start a conversation?

[gorgoiler]

It’s important to be solving an actual problem. Modelling a deck of cards is probably not the problem — what are we actually solving? Building a new hearts.exe? Rendering a custom deck for a laser cutter? Tracking casino fraud?

Those would be better questions which could start off with a discussion about the general solution, followed by a quick “how would you model the cards part of this?” component.

[kd5bjo]

When applying for a senior role, yes. Part of a senior developer’s job is to push back against “requirements” that don’t further business needs; in this case, an accurate, maintainable, and useful model of a deck of cards.

[Yhippa]

> It’s probably an amazing question for interviewing candidates in person to see how far they dig into the premise. As a take-home question, you could probably spend a minute on the code above and then an hour on implementing three different games. (Maybe that was the original docx, but it didn’t sound like it.)

I did a take home for Walmart Labs once and they completely ghosted me. What a complete waste of time.

[chadash]

I have interviewed many “senior” candidates who can’t do simple coding exercises. I think that starting out with a simple exercise like that weeds out a ton of people without putting undue burden on the good developers.

[InvaderFizz]

I ask a lot of questions that I preface with: I hope you are slightly insulted by the questions I'm about to ask.

They get progressively more complex as we go, but the candidate is fully aware they are filter questions that I hope they clear with zero effort.

[nucleardog]

I have a series of questions in various areas designed to be in increasing order of difficulty, but I don't expect them to clear them all0-they ramp up to "deep and esoteric knowledge".

When I'm explaining the process I usually preface with these being designed to gauge their skill level, not just make sure they meet some minimum floor, so there are going to be some easy questions and some that are hard and I don't necessarily expect them to answer all of them and not to get discouraged or be afraid to say they don't know. I usually just keep going until they miss a couple in a row.

If someone actually doesn't know the job, I'm only asking maybe 5-10 relatively simple questions and thanking them for their time.

[deepfriedbits]

That's a clever approach to the situation.

[tomjen3]

Why not just start with the questions you consider the minimum level to clear?

[InvaderFizz]

Because my goal isn't usually to get trivia answers. I'm laying foundation and jumping off points for a conversation.

I have some technical hurdles candidates have to clear, but I try to speed run past them and get the background stories on things that stick out to me in their resume. Also, hitting them with the DevOps equivalent of a LC hard right out the gate is a dick move that sets a bad tone and demonstrates a hostile process.

[plgonzalezrx8]

Bro wat? This comment is basically "I'm too smart to work for this company".

Your ego will be your downfall.

There is so much I can learn from a developer, junior OR senior by just seeing how they implement something simple like that. I feel like you have a full fledged case of Dunning Kruger effect. Since you don't know what exactly they were looking for, you brush it off to "LeL, LaST pAsS so DuM aSsEsMeNt".

[KingOfCoders]

Only answer to this one: Don't use inheritance (unless you're building an UI framework, and even then ...)

[plgonzalezrx8]

The whole point is probably to weed out people who can't do it or don't understand inheritance.

If thats what they are asking for, implement it, programmers and their ego always trying to "LoL, DuM iNtErViEw QuEsTiOn".

There is so much to learn from a person by just seeing how they solve a simple problem like this one.

[KingOfCoders]

Well yes, I'm asking String Reverse hundreds of times and learned a lot.

[firstSpeaker]

I did. Interview for AWS principal engineer position and their screening call had a 20 minutes make a code like structure to solve this problem. They did not ask me to write Java or anything compiled but something that shows I can actually turn my idea into some for of code. I think having such kind of question is very much expected and I would wonder if a company does not have it for external/unknown hires.

[eyho_wins]

Plot twist, you didn't know how to implement inheritance properly in Java therefore you withdrew your application.