<story><title>I Am a Bad Developer</title><url>http://eewz0z.pen.io</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dpiers</author><text>On Friday I had a remote interview where I was asked to search for the value closest to X in a sorted 2D array (columns and rows are both sorted in increasing order). I came up with a trivial solution to find a specific value, but got tripped up modifying it to find an unknown value that could be higher or lower than the target. I have not heard back from the company.&lt;p&gt;On Saturday/Sunday, I went to AngelHack SF and did a solo-project that ended up placing 2nd amongst +80 teams and netted me a $2500 credit from Firebase and an invitation to AngelHack&apos;s accelerator.&lt;p&gt;Am I a bad developer, too? Or is the hiring practice of reducing someone&apos;s technical competence to a handful of esoteric questions arbitrary and broken?&lt;p&gt;I am much more proud of the things I have built and the reputation I have with the other developers I have worked with than I am of my ability to find the longest common subsequence between two strings.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m guilty of asking these kinds of questions, too. The truth is it is incredibly hard to gauge a programmer&apos;s skills and figure out whether they fit into your team over the course of a half-hour interview, and nobody really has figured out a good way to do it. We&apos;re stuck with arbitrary questions that yield false negatives (and positives) simply because there isn&apos;t a better solution.&lt;p&gt;Edit: Aaannd in the course of writing this I received an offer letter and an email from someone at a16z asking about my AngelHack project, so I guess my job hunt is over. When it rains, it pours.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>redact207</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Or is the hiring practice of reducing someone&apos;s technical competence to a handful of esoteric questions arbitrary and broken&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;The irony is whenever someone posts some esoteric &quot;gotcha&quot; programming trick here on HN, inevitably there&apos;ll be comments like &quot;have to include this in our next interviews.&quot;&lt;p&gt;So what would you do differently? This is a genuine question after I came off 3 months of interviewing daily. I&apos;m curious what does represent a good developer and how to decide this in 30 minutes over the phone? What&apos;s important?
- Past projects? 
- Communication? 
- Open source contributions? 
- Ability to write code? 
- Telling me how they&apos;d Google a problem? 
- How to break down problems? 
- Some % combination of these?&lt;p&gt;My interviews are generally structured:
10 min: introduction to the role, expectations, motivations, try to start a conversation, get a feel for the candidate, nerves etc
15 min: technical questions:
- fundamentals on the job&apos;s tech stack (must provide code)
- turning a requirement into a design
- troubleshooting issues (db performance, web server issues)
5 min: 
- wrap up, q&amp;#38;a</text></comment>
<story><title>I Am a Bad Developer</title><url>http://eewz0z.pen.io</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dpiers</author><text>On Friday I had a remote interview where I was asked to search for the value closest to X in a sorted 2D array (columns and rows are both sorted in increasing order). I came up with a trivial solution to find a specific value, but got tripped up modifying it to find an unknown value that could be higher or lower than the target. I have not heard back from the company.&lt;p&gt;On Saturday/Sunday, I went to AngelHack SF and did a solo-project that ended up placing 2nd amongst +80 teams and netted me a $2500 credit from Firebase and an invitation to AngelHack&apos;s accelerator.&lt;p&gt;Am I a bad developer, too? Or is the hiring practice of reducing someone&apos;s technical competence to a handful of esoteric questions arbitrary and broken?&lt;p&gt;I am much more proud of the things I have built and the reputation I have with the other developers I have worked with than I am of my ability to find the longest common subsequence between two strings.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m guilty of asking these kinds of questions, too. The truth is it is incredibly hard to gauge a programmer&apos;s skills and figure out whether they fit into your team over the course of a half-hour interview, and nobody really has figured out a good way to do it. We&apos;re stuck with arbitrary questions that yield false negatives (and positives) simply because there isn&apos;t a better solution.&lt;p&gt;Edit: Aaannd in the course of writing this I received an offer letter and an email from someone at a16z asking about my AngelHack project, so I guess my job hunt is over. When it rains, it pours.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>barce</author><text>Ya, I&apos;ve been the victim of &quot;couldn&apos;t balance a B-Tree fast enough so you&apos;re not hired but you&apos;ll never see a B-Tree at work.&quot;&lt;p&gt;You mention that there isn&apos;t a better solution. IMHO, I disagree.&lt;p&gt;I think Github has figured out a way. They&apos;ve been around 5 years and haven&apos;t fired anybody and nobody has quit.&lt;p&gt;Most firings are due to a job / job skill mismatch. At Github, they do a week long paid interview so both sides really know what they&apos;re getting into.&lt;p&gt;I don&apos;t work at Github, but am such a fan of their company.</text></comment>