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Paolomania posted:AOP questions = "pssst, kid, don't work here we run Byzantine spaghetti systems."
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 00:39 |
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# ? May 11, 2024 09:55 |
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A circular reference in production code would be my answer to that
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 01:06 |
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Blinkz0rz posted:Developers who go far and advance into architecture and management positions are the ones that know how to think in terms of the overall vision of a project where the decision as to the language it's written in is entirely secondary or even tertiary. I agree in principle, but I find it somewhat humorous that the few posts following yours talk about how an interview for a non-Jr position programming in X language would involve specifics of said language up to and including deep framework trivia, non-obvious best-practices, and opinions on various libraries/tools. I guess once you've moved on to a management position (e.g. <30% coding), that stuff is not really relevant or necessary to get the job, but if you want to stay close to pure engineering, I don't see how you can be well-versed on many stacks at the same time.
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 03:35 |
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B-Nasty posted:I agree in principle, but I find it somewhat humorous that the few posts following yours talk about how an interview for a non-Jr position programming in X language would involve specifics of said language up to and including deep framework trivia, non-obvious best-practices, and opinions on various libraries/tools. I don't see that as incongruous. If you've been working in Java for the past 3 years then you should have developed some depth in the language. If you apply for a Java job with zero Java and "5 years Python" on your resume, then you should expect trivial Java questions and deep Python questions (or just algorithm questions if they don't know Python). I don't think most people can be well-versed in many stacks at the same time. I did Java for 3 years but haven't touched the language for the past 3 years. I don't know the answers to necrobobsledder's quiz, but if I was applying at a Java shop I could study up pretty easily because I used to know them. And if someone described a problem to me and asked "why would Java be a good or bad fit for this?" I could probably still give a good answer.
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 05:02 |
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B-Nasty posted:I agree in principle, but I find it somewhat humorous that the few posts following yours talk about how an interview for a non-Jr position programming in X language would involve specifics of said language up to and including deep framework trivia, non-obvious best-practices, and opinions on various libraries/tools. if you're getting asked trivia in an interview - especially if there's no context beyond "used java" - then either the interviewer or that company just doesn't know how to interview and they're worse off for it.
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 05:07 |
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Paolomania posted:AOP questions = "pssst, kid, don't work here we run Byzantine spaghetti systems." Most of what I know about AOP (not much) I learned from this: https://areallygoodrantblog.wordpress.com/2016/02/13/the-aws-java-documentation-is-hosed/
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 05:08 |
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Mniot posted:I don't see that as incongruous. If you've been working in Java for the past 3 years then you should have developed some depth in the language. If you apply for a Java job with zero Java and "5 years Python" on your resume, then you should expect trivial Java questions and deep Python questions (or just algorithm questions if they don't know Python). Its more like his line of questioning (or the impression it gives off) is trying to disqualify people for what they don't know, rather than trying to figure out what a person does know and (more importantly) what they do. if your interview process is all the former then you end up hiring people whose predicted success is a total question mark. EDIT: The explanation with the javadocs and a design problem is much better than "Whats the difference between Map X vs Map Y and why would you use one over the other?" or "Whats the difference between strong, weak, and soft references?"
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 05:13 |
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FamDav posted:Its more like his line of questioning (or the impression it gives off) is trying to disqualify people for what they don't know, rather than trying to figure out what a person does know and (more importantly) what they do. if your interview process is all the former then you end up hiring people whose predicted success is a total question mark.
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 05:19 |
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Vulture Culture posted:It's smug narcissism. It comes down to the interviewer believing that only the problems they've solved on the job are worthwhile problems worth solving, and if you haven't solved them, not only are you not smart, you've also been wasting your time learning the wrong things. Yep. "Deep" knowledge of a language typically only comes because a developer has run into unusual edge cases or problems, or is otherwise pedantically driven to learn the minutiae of the language. It's presence can be a positive, but it's lack is rather neutral. The difficulty lies in determining where the line lies between "professionally good to go" and "deep".
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 06:39 |
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And further, it's stupid. Who cares if I know a WeakReference or a SoftReference when a quick trip to the java documentation can illuminate the answer easily. I've been around the industry for a while and I've been wondering for a while why our hiring practices are the way they are. As an industry we seem to take perverse pleasure in quizzing our interviewees on minutiae that probably doesn't even matter and then we wonder why our hiring practices are so hosed. The more I deal with new hires and the hiring process the more it enforces my belief that an interview should be a multi-day affair, scheduled at as close to the convenience of the interviewee as possible, that lets them work on a real problem with the team and get paid to do it. It strikes me that we'd see much better outcomes in hiring if we oriented ourselves around who performs best when presented with an actual working scenario rather than a quiz show and the secondary benefit is that during a hiring period it forces the team to have strong onboarding practices and documentation or risk paying for someone to do nothing.
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 13:31 |
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A big part of the problem of hiring practices is ego. "What do I know that I think others should know." It's also coupled with the fact that engineers aren't the best at interviewing . Which is its own skill. I'm with you in thinking you need to sit down and see someone work before you can make any meaningful conclusions. It's frustrating to convince people to get off the trivia train. I wonder if chemists get grilled on knowing the atomic weight of every element....
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 13:43 |
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moctopus posted:A big part of the problem of hiring practices is ego. "What do I know that I think others should know." I'm not certain, but there's a pretty solid, greater-than-zero chance that we're one of the only industries that actually does this kind of interview. No one else I know in other fields has ever had to whiteboard a problem or even answer questions unrelated to the things on their resume.
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 13:47 |
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Blinkz0rz posted:It strikes me that we'd see much better outcomes in hiring if we oriented ourselves around who performs best when presented with an actual working scenario rather than a quiz show and the secondary benefit is that during a hiring period it forces the team to have strong onboarding practices and documentation or risk paying for someone to do nothing. It's not exactly the same, but our main skill test once past the phone screen is a pairing exercise lasting an hour or so with one of the team's senior guys (we're big on pairing in general). It seems to work pretty well for a) finding out which people can't code their way out of a paper bag and b) to some extent at least, finding out which people just can't work with someone else. Senior candidates get a whiteboard exercise too, but it's more 'how would you architect this thing' than code details.
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 14:28 |
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Blinkz0rz posted:And further, it's stupid. Who cares if I know a WeakReference or a SoftReference when a quick trip to the java documentation can illuminate the answer easily. Blinkz0rz posted:It strikes me that we'd see much better outcomes in hiring if we oriented ourselves around who performs best when presented with an actual working scenario rather than a quiz show and the secondary benefit is that during a hiring period it forces the team to have strong onboarding practices and documentation or risk paying for someone to do nothing. That said, I've had a very good track record with open-ended interviewing styles where you get the candidate to show you what they're good at instead of playing process of elimination games and hoping you find the right thing. Blinkz0rz posted:I'm not certain, but there's a pretty solid, greater-than-zero chance that we're one of the only industries that actually does this kind of interview. No one else I know in other fields has ever had to whiteboard a problem or even answer questions unrelated to the things on their resume. Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 14:55 on Mar 1, 2016 |
# ? Mar 1, 2016 14:47 |
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Vulture Culture posted:It's smug narcissism. It comes down to the interviewer believing that only the problems they've solved on the job are worthwhile problems worth solving, and if you haven't solved them, not only are you not smart, you've also been wasting your time learning the wrong things. This is basically interviewing in a nutshell. Most interviewers are (subconsciously, or not) trying to hire clones of themselves.
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 16:01 |
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My biggest gripe with my current job is that the expectations for picking up new tech are sometimes unrealistic. For example, I had very little JS experience coming in but I picked up certain aspects of Node and became an "expert" (with the system flow not Node - probably the best on the team) with one of our very simple tracking systems and can fix bugs or help people add new endpoints very quickly. Now management is pushing me to work with a consultant with about 5 years of pure vanilla Javascript experience on an event-based video player and I'm struggling pretty hard cause I'm not a front-end person. I can write tests for it and make small fixes and understand the high-level flow, but it's confusing as gently caress and nothing like I've ever seen before. My manager has no idea how it works, but keeps pushing me to work on it on top of the other things I'm responsible for and expects me to be the point of contact when our consultant's time is done cause they don't want to hire someone full-time, even though literally hundreds of thousands of dollars a day are reliant on this system functioning. Please tell me all management isn't this insufferably stubborn.
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 17:00 |
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Good Will Hrunting posted:My biggest gripe with my current job is that the expectations for picking up new tech are sometimes unrealistic. For example, I had very little JS experience coming in but I picked up certain aspects of Node and became an "expert" (with the system flow not Node - probably the best on the team) with one of our very simple tracking systems and can fix bugs or help people add new endpoints very quickly. Now management is pushing me to work with a consultant with about 5 years of pure vanilla Javascript experience on an event-based video player and I'm struggling pretty hard cause I'm not a front-end person. I can write tests for it and make small fixes and understand the high-level flow, but it's confusing as gently caress and nothing like I've ever seen before. My manager has no idea how it works, but keeps pushing me to work on it on top of the other things I'm responsible for and expects me to be the point of contact when our consultant's time is done cause they don't want to hire someone full-time, even though literally hundreds of thousands of dollars a day are reliant on this system functioning.
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 17:03 |
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People I've recently hired: a completely incompetent coder that's still a good worker that gives a drat, a network engineer that's beyond retirement age that I can hardly inspire into learning more about anything outside a Cisco manual, a well-rounded sysadmin / devopsy guy, a Java coder just out of school that's been writing Ruby and JS for months now. I literally can't hire anybody like myself because they all quit because they know better - they all have quit within months, in fact, or outright reject the offer. Hell, I rejected the offer initially as well.Blinkz0rz posted:And further, it's stupid. Who cares if I know a WeakReference or a SoftReference when a quick trip to the java documentation can illuminate the answer easily. But another reason for asking for some form of tech trivia is that most places want someone to be productive right away (because they have crap for schedules) and have insufficient resourcing / timelines to accommodate training anyone even if they're self-trained. If you can't get that, you want someone fast at learning then. Still, a decent person in technology should at the least like learning things of some sort and be able to learn, so a measure of adaptability and learning-on-the-job must be determined yet is often impossible. Hence, "read these function / method declarations and tell me something interesting you just learned from it" is the closest stick I have to measure poorly with among other bad sticks for this metric. Blinkz0rz posted:I've been around the industry for a while and I've been wondering for a while why our hiring practices are the way they are. As an industry we seem to take perverse pleasure in quizzing our interviewees on minutiae that probably doesn't even matter and then we wonder why our hiring practices are so hosed. There's a great deal of things wrong with the tech industry though and its schizophrenic state corresponds directly to the fashion-oriented nature of pop-coding combined with a cultural clash of corporatism, arts (just from the design / UX / UI parts), and engineering / academic disciplines. What's clear though is that there's a lot of people that are in supposedly coding jobs that can't write code in nearly any language to even solve FizzBuzz and there's no other industry with this kind of pay that has this staggering ratio of incompetence besides among the managerial or even financial caste which, also showing its bias, selects mostly for pedigree and taste in luxury goods when it comes to interviews despite few correlations with investor / trader performance (admitted even in some of the Harvard Business School courses and articles I've read). Blinkz0rz posted:It strikes me that we'd see much better outcomes in hiring if we oriented ourselves around who performs best when presented with an actual working scenario rather than a quiz show and the secondary benefit is that during a hiring period it forces the team to have strong onboarding practices and documentation or risk paying for someone to do nothing.
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 17:08 |
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necrobobsledder posted:People I've recently hired: a completely incompetent coder that's still a good worker that gives a drat, a network engineer that's beyond retirement age that I can hardly inspire into learning more about anything outside a Cisco manual, a well-rounded sysadmin / devopsy guy, a Java coder just out of school that's been writing Ruby and JS for months now. I literally can't hire anybody like myself because they all quit because they know better - they all have quit within months, in fact, or outright reject the offer. Hell, I rejected the offer initially as well. You should consider changing jobs
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 17:21 |
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Vulture Culture posted:Depends on the job. I mean, at a medium to large company, yeah, this kind of thing is totally unreasonable. At a small business or startup, it's par for the course. I did Rabbit's initial text chat implementation and a good chunk of the UI and I'm the furthest thing from a frontend JS guy (infrastructure!) you're going to find I totally wouldn't mind doing it if it was like "okay we want you to spend a reasonable amount of time getting familiar with this" because it is interesting to me and like I said a small bug could cost 100k in a day. But for me to just be thrown to the wolves indefinitely without any sort of time specced for it? I was already looking to get out but this is just icing.
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 17:29 |
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At my current job they only asked me like one or two JavaScript questions (my best language was js and the position was mostly for js) and those were super easy ones that anyone with a decent enough amount of js experience should have aced*, one I remember being asked is the "var variable in a for loop with an event handler/callback using the var" issue. The rest was just general programming thinking questions and open ended questions (how do huge sites manage to serve media so well, i.e. Netflix or steam; what are some of your go to development tools and why; how do you approach testing; etc). I thought it was a pretty good model that gave a lot of leeway to different candidates and didn't corrupt the question from the interviewers experience too much. Of course I also say that after they hired me so maybe I'm a bit biased. * yes I see irony in saying everyone should know it when it may just be that I was lucky enough to have seen that problem, but I think I would have gotten the job even if I couldn't answer the js questions perfectly.
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 18:02 |
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Blinkz0rz posted:The more I deal with new hires and the hiring process the more it enforces my belief that an interview should be a multi-day affair, scheduled at as close to the convenience of the interviewee as possible, that lets them work on a real problem with the team and get paid to do it.
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 18:21 |
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Thread: help me evaluate a job offer. Boston, 92k base, some sort of bonus (historically ~10%), ESOP 17%, 5k signing/relo. Is this terribly low for mid-level? I have a somewhat job history; current resume skips around every ~10-15 months going back to graduation in 2011. I'm not used to room mates, and I know housing there can be a shitshow. What would a 700-900 sq ft apartment/condo look like on the monthly somewhere close to where I would want to be? Where would I want to be?
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# ? Mar 2, 2016 01:03 |
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FamDav posted:You should consider changing jobs
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# ? Mar 2, 2016 01:26 |
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leper khan posted:Thread: help me evaluate a job offer. Boston, 92k base, some sort of bonus (historically ~10%), ESOP 17%, 5k signing/relo. Is this terribly low for mid-level? I have a somewhat job history; current resume skips around every ~10-15 months going back to graduation in 2011.
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# ? Mar 2, 2016 02:26 |
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leper khan posted:Thread: help me evaluate a job offer. Boston, 92k base, some sort of bonus (historically ~10%), ESOP 17%, 5k signing/relo. Is this terribly low for mid-level? I have a somewhat job history; current resume skips around every ~10-15 months going back to graduation in 2011. that's a pretty high ESOP. If it's a decently old public company with relatively stable stock (not groupon/zynga), then the offer sounds okay. If there's any chance they're worth nothing, then don't bother unless the work really interests you. edit: also make sure the contract allows you to sell soon so it's not all concentrated MeruFM fucked around with this message at 09:57 on Mar 2, 2016 |
# ? Mar 2, 2016 09:54 |
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leper khan posted:Thread: help me evaluate a job offer. Boston, 92k base, some sort of bonus (historically ~10%), ESOP 17%, 5k signing/relo. Is this terribly low for mid-level? I have a somewhat job history; current resume skips around every ~10-15 months going back to graduation in 2011. I currently work for an ESOP and I'm not sure how I'd put a percentage on its contribution to my comp, but it's a recent transition for the company so maybe that's due to my inexperience?
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# ? Mar 2, 2016 17:22 |
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17% ESOP seems high to me but I'm looking for a very tiny company to move to eventually and should probably educate myself in this realm before I start looking so I don't undersell myself (again).
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# ? Mar 2, 2016 17:35 |
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MeruFM posted:that's a pretty high ESOP. Offloading the company equity would be somewhat difficult. Privately held/employee owned; fully vests after 5 years, they buy it out if I leave. They also reimburse one course/semester which I could leverage toward a masters. Forgot to include my present situation.. Right now I'm making a fair bit less (similar cost of living to Boston) making bad candy crush clones for a small games company. I anticipate enjoying the work more than my current job. Seems like the consensus is that it's a little below market, but not grossly so. This is (sadly) a step up for me anyway, so I'm leaning towards taking it. Thanks thread; if you want to follow the e/n I'm sure I'll eventually drop by the coding horrors thread.
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# ? Mar 2, 2016 17:36 |
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Munkeymon posted:I currently work for an ESOP and I'm not sure how I'd put a percentage on its contribution to my comp, but it's a recent transition for the company so maybe that's due to my inexperience? The org I have an offer from gets appraised yearly and drops a flat % value of your base into an account for you. Not sure how others work, but it should be pretty easy to derive either by them stating explicitly they give you X% of your salary or by multiplying the amount of stock by the stock price. e: I have no idea what happens when the stock pool runs dry. leper khan fucked around with this message at 17:44 on Mar 2, 2016 |
# ? Mar 2, 2016 17:41 |
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Blinkz0rz posted:I'm not certain, but there's a pretty solid, greater-than-zero chance that we're one of the only industries that actually does this kind of interview. No one else I know in other fields has ever had to whiteboard a problem or even answer questions unrelated to the things on their resume. That's because other fields have even worse interviewing practices. "Tell me about a time when..."
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# ? Mar 2, 2016 17:59 |
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yeah even though 6-8 hour technical interviews are pretty bullshit, 2-3 should be fine and plenty, it's better than going in and hoping they like your face (because they sure as hell won't like mine)
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# ? Mar 2, 2016 20:43 |
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leper khan posted:The org I have an offer from gets appraised yearly and drops a flat % value of your base into an account for you. Ah, ours are allocated according to how long we've been with the company according to some formula I didn't memorize. Probably split shares. Shares also return to the company when people leave/retire.
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# ? Mar 2, 2016 20:50 |
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Jeb Bush 2012 posted:That's because other fields have even worse interviewing practices. "Tell me about a time when..." If you haven't had a rock solid technical candidate go off the rails when you get to behavioral questions, you're really missing out.
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# ? Mar 2, 2016 21:01 |
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JawnV6 posted:If you haven't had a rock solid technical candidate go off the rails when you get to behavioral questions, you're really missing out.
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# ? Mar 2, 2016 21:42 |
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Watching people have a meltdown from innocuous questions is somewhat entertaining compared to watching someone fail to write FizzBuzz after 30 minutes of wrangling what modulus does (and still getting it wrong).
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# ? Mar 2, 2016 22:13 |
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I still don't believe people fail anything that easy in job interviews. I just can't wrap my head around ever asking something that absurdly simple.
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# ? Mar 2, 2016 22:14 |
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Good Will Hrunting posted:I still don't believe people fail anything that easy in job interviews. I just can't wrap my head around ever asking something that absurdly simple. I don't understand it because didn't they need to pass some sort of screening before that point? How do you pass the written/phone tech screen and then completely dump core when asked a simpler question in person? Or do some organizations not screen prior to the on-site?
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# ? Mar 2, 2016 22:26 |
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Good Will Hrunting posted:I still don't believe people fail anything that easy in job interviews. I just can't wrap my head around ever asking something that absurdly simple. It's unfortunate, but that's why *actually* talented developers have to be subjected to BS coding challenges during interviews. I've interviewed a number of candidates that are smooth talkers and can drop buzzwords with the best of them, but put them in front of a computer with a simple exercise, and it's a head-shaking level of embarrassment. As an example, the last test I was using had a simple skeleton already laid out, and all the candidate had to do was implement some statistical functions (e.g. average, median - and the formula was provided) that operated on a list of decimals. The candidate also had to write some unit tests to ensure correct output. While it's only somewhat real-world, it's about the simplest exercise I could come up with that didn't require any domain or deep background knowledge.
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# ? Mar 2, 2016 22:28 |
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# ? May 11, 2024 09:55 |
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In the Google interview prep presentation I went to, the presenter mentioned that they see a lot of people who have spent their entire careers doing something along the lines of "take the data out of the database and put it on the UI" and can't manage to do literally anything else when asked.
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# ? Mar 2, 2016 22:48 |