Hacker Bits, April 2016

Programming
How to pass
a programming interview
By AMMON BARTRAM
Being a good programmer
has a surprisingly small role
in passing programming
interviews. To be a productive
programmer, you need to be
able to solve large, sprawling
problems over weeks and
months. Each question in an
interview, in contrast, lasts less
than one hour.
To do well in an interview,
then, you need to be able to
solve small problems quickly,
under duress, while explaining
your thoughts clearly. This is a
different skill. On top of this,
interviewers are often poorly
trained and inattentive (they
would rather be programming),
and ask questions far removed
from actual work. They bring
bias, pattern matching, and a
lack of standardization.
Running Triplebyte, I see this
clearly. We interview engineers
without looking at resumes, and
fast-track them to on-sites at YC
companies. We’ve interviewed
over 1,000 programmers in the
last nine months. We focus heavily
on practical programming,
and let candidates pick one of
several ways to be evaluated.
This means we work with many
(very talented) programmers
without formal CS training. Many
of these people do poorly on interviews.
They eat large sprawling
problems for breakfast, but
they balk at 45-min algorithm
challenges.
The good news is that
interviewing is a skill that can
be learned. We’ve had success
teaching candidates to do better
on interviews. Indeed, the quality
that most correlates with a
Triplebyte candidate passing interviews
at YC companies is not
raw talent, but rather diligence.
I fundamentally do not
believe that good programmers
should have to learn special
interviewing skills to do well on
interviews. But the status quo
is what it is. We’re working at
Triplebyte to change this. If
you’re interested in what we’re
doing, we’d love to have you to
check out our process. In the
meantime, if you do want to get
better at interviewing, this article
describes how we think you
can most effectively do so.
12 hacker bits