The perfect interview coding problem is one that will be easy for a great candidate, hard for a good candidate, and impossible for everyone else. Unfortunately, most of the problems you come up with are going to be way too hard, and will have to be thrown away. It’s great if a candidate gets one […]
Category Archives: Interviewing
Why bother? No one prepares for technical interviews. After all, why should you? Whether you’re a college student or a 20 year industry veteran, you’ve spent years honing skills that simply need to be demonstrated. You’re as ready as you’re going to be, and no preparation could be a substitute for the years of your […]
You’re a great coder. You’re easy to work with. You know your data structures and algorithms backwards and forwards, you laugh at discrete math, and your methodology is so agile you can scrum while XP’ing. You know you could crush any technical interview, but no one will give you the chance. No matter how many […]
In my previous post, I described a simple interview question and the various approaches different types of programmers take. These weren’t mistakes per se, but they revealed biases and were good indicators of potential future problems, or holes in a programmer’s mental map. Like the candidate who sees everything in terms of recursion (or avoids […]
Over the past three years, I’ve easily done over a thousand technical interviews, each of which involved having the candidate write code on a whiteboard, either in person or online. There are lots of people who will try to convince you that this is a bad approach – that you should focus on what candidates […]
An introduction, with some quick comments on interviewing.
Dan Dreams of Coding 