I’d love to hear it but I know I never will. Hell will freeze-over the day a team of developers say;

“dude, we like you. we can tell you want to excel. we can tell you want to be here. we can tell you have the brain power to do this work. The senior developers on the team have already written functions for about everything we ever need to do, like reversing an array and porting a tree to a linked list. we know that you understand the basics of what needs to happen in these functions. It’s OK that you can’t write them for verbatim on the white board for us. You’ve explained the important parts and showed us code and work you have done. Most people don’t retain things that they don’t use everyday. There has been a lot of code written in the world and rather than spending $75/hr for you to yet again write the stuff that has been done a billion times, one of your first priorities is to learn our libraries and learn our design patterns and architecture. Mostly in the beginning as our newest team member – you will use your knowledge (and continue to gain knowledge) of our design, architecture and libraries – to hunt down and fix bugs. We will support and nurture your learning in our mutual work so that as we grow as a team, we all learn more and especially how to work well together. The real skills you need are being able to manipulate the language. Understand sound system design and computer science basics. but mostly, have the combined intelligence to take all these pieces and put solutions together that meet spec and are cost efficient.

Larry Wall in the camel book has one of the best lines ever in any programming book. He says that a programmer wants to write and keep good libraries so he or she NEVER has to put their brain through the torture of doing the work for a second time. Why do you demand supermen when the real world is made up of mortals?

I have been trying to “do better” at interviewing. I have been trying to be able to write certain functions “cold”. I study something. I completely understand what I have studied. In a programming environment I can rewrite the function in question. Can I go to the white board and write it “cold”? NO. I just don’t work that way. Being in the right environment, a little reference and little Zen and I’m there. I can do the work.

I’m not sure I’ve presented any kind of argument that sways anyone. In a way that’s part of the problem. The developers out there have this “every programmer MUST be superman and we ONLY hire supermen”. Everyone is competing to be the “superist” superman. And then you go on to say you work on teams. But one of the base aspects of a “good team” is a diverse group of people with varied strengths. So what I’m trying to drill down to here is that, the illness is being transmitted by doctors. You developers that say hire only the best and strongest are just perpetuating the illness. You don’t believe that there is a problem so you can’t possibly see the problem. Yet you are all living in a controlled hermetic sphere where everyone agrees with each other. And while you are engaging in your self important chatting in the hall, doing the one-upmanship game, you mention can’t find any good developers. It makes me want to slam my head against my keyboard.

I can’t be of help to you nor can I break into your circle of resistance because I can’t walk up to a freaking white board and write a priority cue. Despite the fact that tests and past work and on and on have proved that I have a make up that makes me excel at this work. Part of me is glad that it is hard for me to retain verbatim being able to reverse an array. I wouldn’t want to be the kind of person that “belongs” in your world. I would be missing out on parts of the picture. I would be closed to other possibilities and options. You have seen the enemy and it is YOU. You are driving away people with a closed supremist attitude.

I’m not going to attempt the coding questions because I have seen all the different solutions (depending on memory/processing time requirements) many times. Besides, I like the thrill of trying to figure out a neat coding question in real-time during an interview. It’s always a fun challenge – I might be sick, but I actually look forward to it

Also, Hi Alvin! Congrats on your position at AutoDesk, I know someone who left AutoDesk recently and joined up at TechSmith. If you want to catch up, you can find my contact info over at my blog

As far as whether coding questions are still good for upper level hires, I say heck yes. If you want to be a dev lead, you better know how to dev. If you want to be a VP of engineering, you better have quite an impressive history of developing and shipping awe-inspiring products. What happens when you hire a manager to lead an engineering team but he/she doesn’t know the first thing about writing code? Oftentimes, you get Dilbert scenarios – no joke.

I’m generalizing here, I’m sure there are a handful of non-technical dev managers out there; but in general, I’m not going to be one to go against the odds, not when it’s an engineering team/product group/company at stake…

Thanks for the great post!

and it’s interesting that i got my internship at autodesk through a phone interview with no coding question. they unfortunately couldn’t make it to campus for their reguarly scheduled interviews with cornell candidates, but nonetheless 6 of us got summer positions at autodesk, and the 6 of us have definitely been productive and useful (or so is my impression ^_^).

… and i will NOT code those little functions you challenge me to code, for i was a 211 ta and have proved my worth already… haha