
Don’t Cheat on Interviews. It’s Obvious When You Do - rmason
https://medium.com/@Hackbyrd/dont-cheat-on-interviews-it-s-obvious-when-you-do-fce92825d879
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haburka
The interviewer is incentivizing this behavior by playing gotcha with computer
science knowledge. The only reason I know about radix sort is from college and
I have never used it. If they are hiring a college professor, then I
understand but otherwise this is ineffectual and biased towards young college
grads.

If your interview is breaking when someone googles information, then your
interview is flawed.

~~~
dvtrn
I had a similar thought reading this. The interviewee gave what the
interviewer admitted were normal and valid answers, though ‘not what I was
looking for’ (uh ok—job seekers aren’t mind readers) but effectively badgered
the individual into “cheating” after they repeated multiple times not knowing
the fuller answer.

To me, were I the interviewer at that point we’d have already moved on to the
next problem set or next question in the interview.

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morelandjs
I want to point out the insanity of filtering on an interview question that
has a low success rate.

Presumably your candidate has a bachelor's degree. By this point in their life
they've answered thousands and thousands of questions. They taken countless
exams, and there is solid aggregate data which summarizes their performance
(GPA, standardized tests, certificates, etc).

By filtering on a few challenging questions, the interviewer is throwing these
statistics in the trash and rolling the dice to disambiguate the best and
worst candidates. What do you think the variance is on a five question exam?
Not great.

Rather than try to assess decades of expertise with five questions, I think
you are better served by asking questions which pull in orthogonal
information.

Do the candidates career goals align with the companies? Do they seem pleasant
to be around (also high variance, but orthogonal). Are they enthusiastic about
the position?

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JMTQp8lwXL
Hiring someone based on whether or not they know a particular algorithm that
may or may not have any business relevance to their work, speaks to the
process. Obviously the candidate was in the wrong here, but I question what
this sort of teaser question actually buys you.

Experience and depth are varied. If you happen to ask a niche question where
someone has a lot of depth, then you've identified perhaps deep knowledge on
that narrow topic, but what about general problem solving and programming
skills?

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noitsnot
I think you are correct in the issue here is the author is bad at interviewing
and taking feedback. At the point where the interviewee didn't know the
algorithm, he should have then moved on to another question and or ended the
interview shortly after if that one answer was somehow the deal-breaker. The
interviewer asked a question and the interviewee said he was not familiar.
Interviewer proceeded to attempt to push him further.

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tuxxy
Funny that the Author says counting sort is O(n) when it's really O(n+r). It's
almost like making interviews around the knowledge of some case specific
sorting algorithm is a bad idea...

~~~
gopiandcode
Given that in the problem the value of r was fixed to 1000, the specific
algorithm that would solve the problem instance would have been O(n) in terms
of the input size.

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cbanek
> At this point, it was very obvious to me that he googled the solution. I was
> amazed that he had the guts to do so in an interview. Just WOW.

Frankly, I'm amazed at the guts to say you shouldn't just search for the
answer. It's what you want an employee to do. Not just sit around and "think
about it" for an hour, only to write something terrible. Search it and find
someone who's already done it and use their working solution.

I've also had the "guts" to search for things on google in interviews. I've
done it doing remote interviews where I share my screen with them. Best time
was when I was asked "how do you iterate through a json dict in javascript?"
Not being a javascript developer, I'm not sure why they were asking me. But I
searched it, and found that one of results to stackoverflow was purple. I told
the interviewer "this must be good, since all the other ones are blue." We all
laughed (it was a group kind of interview) and I was told "Your Google-Fu is
strong."

I very quickly received an offer.

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scarejunba
This is a low quality cheat. There’s a website where people share how they got
through interviews and it includes stuff like “Wait for the interviewer to
look at the code you’ve written for this specific problem and spot the bug on
Line k. They will then ask you if you can think of any edge cases. Try the
following edge cases that appear to pass until you hit this edge case that
detects the bug. Fix it. Wait for a hint on making it more efficient, then
depending on the hints follow this action”. Oddly enough k the person is
probably well trained on the problem by that time. Don’t know why they
memorize the tree.

For the people who talk about work experience in the past, there are also
extensive guides for this sort of thing. They assume a simulation of what they
did. Pretty cool. And incredibly exasperating on the other side.

~~~
kentrado
Which website is this?

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ohyes
I feel like the moral of this is to be better at cheating.

I mean, if the interviewee hadn’t cheated, he still would have gotten the
esoteric sorting question wrong, and probably failed the interview because
another person had happened to remember the esoteric sorting question.

So it was really a situation where there was (aside from ethical
considerations) no incentive to not cheat.

If it were a situation where we were evaluating the candidate based on actual
work related skills, this wouldn’t be an issue. Interviewer could develop a
conversation with the candidate and have an interesting discussion about the
problem that will give insight into how smart they are and if they can hack
it.

That could have been done in this case as well, but instead of giving useful
guidance, (“what if you thought about them as strings”) interviewer gave a
meaningless clue. That is really just restating the problem parameters and has
little to do with the implementation.

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woopwoop
This is selection bias. Of course the cheaters who get caught are obvious. The
question is whether the cheaters you don't catch are obvious. Academics say
the same thing about students who cheat in university, apparently unaware of
the vacuousness of the argument.

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heelix
Man... I do about 2-3 screening interviews a week. Always fun when you hear
them furiously typing on a mechanical keyboard when they are trying to answer
how they did something on their last project. I've had people cheat by
printing off common answers on the wall behind the camera. Last week had
someone try having someone else respond to the questions while they were on
video. Good times. Interviewing is a skill (for both sides) For something as
important as hiring, I'll include my new dev leads/potential s as part of the
hiring process to see how you suss out if a person might be a solid inclusion
to your team. Tell me your greatest weakness or O notation gotcha isn't it...

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durnygbur
> not exactly what I was looking for

Here lies the problem, as long as the interviews are about what you want
and/or what I don’t know - I don’t care.

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flamesofphx
Anyone ask an algorithm question, I am just going to suggest using quantum
bogo sort for everything.. Let the damn program run till the heat death of the
universe. Then interrupt them during the next question, and try to find out
how bad there backend really is..

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morelandjs
I don't understand why an interviewer would create a sterile exam situation
which is nothing like the real world or the job of interest. I'm supposed to
be appalled by the interviewee but I'm more appalled by the interviewer.

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specto
This is very common in my phone screens

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Hackbyrd
Yes, unfortunately its hard to avoid :(

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thecleaner
Anyone else think this was a half-ass attempt at cheating ?

~~~
contravariant
It says more about the honesty of the interviewee than their actual
programming skill.

Arguably it's a more meaningful result than someone who simply does or does
not know the counting sort algorithm.

