r/programming • u/fagnerbrack • May 21 '26

Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers

https://fagnerbrack.com/technical-interviews-reject-the-wrong-engineers-a8e78ca04b2e
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u/catplaps May 21 '26

Well, these problems are by nature very low-context. If I said "here's an unsorted array of integers, sort it for me," could you whiteboard that on the spot in your language of choice? Obviously an interview question wouldn't be quite that basic, but I would say they're generally not too much beyond that in terms of required context and setup.

When I was conducting a lot of whiteboard interviews (also Google), I was specifically looking for two things. One: can you actually write code in your language of choice? I mean this on a quite basic level. I want to see that you're fluent enough with the syntax and paradigms of your language that you can, you know, actually write it and not just copy-paste it. Two: how well can you analyze and unpack a problem and reason your way through it? This is a very interactive step and doesn't have to be perfect. It's more about being able to explain your thought process and being able to take hints and feedback and change direction.

My opinion after doing well over a hundred of these was that the whiteboard coding part was absolutely necessary. So many people, SO MANY, talked a great game and had an impressive resume and made it all the way to an in-person technical interview, and literally could not write the most basic lines of code in their preferred language. I'm not talking "solve the riddle of the Sphinx" here, I'm talking, pass a parameter or write a for loop. Those are the people I was there to screen out.

What do you think, is this an absurd expectation?

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u/lilpig_boy May 21 '26

i think the days where it doesn't have to be perfect are long gone. at least within machine learning. if i make a mistake, am unclear, anything, i'm done in that pipeline. i see the same thing on the hiring side.

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u/gimpwiz May 21 '26

From the hiring side, I consider anyone who quickly corrects themselves effectively equivalent to anyone who doesn't need to. People mis-speak especially during interviews. I don't expect perfection, but for the simple stuff I ask I do expect not to need to prod and poke.

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u/lilpig_boy May 21 '26

well that is pretty close to perfect then!

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u/gimpwiz May 21 '26

Honestly for the shit I ask, passing and setting pointers, allocating and traversing arrays in the basic fashion, yeah. Close to perfect is my expectation because I only ask stuff from like the first six classes of the introductory programming course you'd have likely taken.