Tech Nightmares: Ghostline the flux

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How many quarters after Q1 2016 till Marissa Mayer is unemployed?
	1 or fewer
	2
	4
	Her job is guaranteed; what are you even talking about?

Soy Division: Aug 12, 2004

ToxicSlurpee posted:

The problem with the little algorithm puzzle challenges is that once one becomes popular enough you'll have incompetent people just memorizing the answers to as many of them as possible. Aside from that some of the time limits are just ridiculous. Just because I can't remember a little bit of trivia that would make doing that puzzle trivial in 20 minutes doesn't mean that I'm a lovely developer.

I can see using little code tests to make sure a person understands basic coding things like, you know, the syntax of the languages, for loops, recursion, functions, etc. but some of the questions I've seen asked on code tests are absurd.

Granted the other side of it is that just because somebody can figure out the little algorithm puzzles doesn't mean they can engineer gigantic programs properly or write readable, maintainable code.

Yeah there are already study guides out there that cover all of the commonly asked algorithm questions. It's basically like the consulting case interview at this point, what's being tested is not your ability at the job but your ability to identify a problem's type and shoehorn it into a pre-memorized solution technique.

After all it's not like you need to be Alan Turing to memorize and drill the 20 most common data structures and algorithms that appear in interviews.

Coincidentally this style of learning and assessment is what people who get into top CS schools and get hired by Google tend to be good at, otherwise their test scores wouldn't have gotten them into Stanford and past Google's GPA bar.

# ? Mar 30, 2016 05:03

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# ? May 18, 2024 06:59

LeJackal: Apr 5, 2011

Wank posted:

Help me figure out how to gently caress over disabled people.

If your interview space is at the top of some steep stairs all those wheelchair jockeys will give up.

Hope this tip helps your department win the Frisbee tournament at the annual picnic!

# ? Mar 30, 2016 12:03

cowofwar: Jul 30, 2002; by Athanatos

Do interviews seriously involve take home work? If I interview somewhere and they want me to do work for free then it's a huge red flag to me as someone that doesn't value an employee's time. You have my CV and you can talk to my references.

It's like having to buy poo poo for a job you don't have yet. gently caress that scammy poo poo.

# ? Mar 30, 2016 14:17

pangstrom: Jan 25, 2003; Wedge Regret

I have done three take-home projects. I actually suggest one in an interview because IMO I do good work and, FOR ME, that's a more flattering/revealing light than I can demonstrate with my resume, because my work products are typically confidential (in the most boring sense of that word).

I learned a lot from all three, only one was sort of scammy (it was a LOT to do, or at least a LOT to do it correctly, in that I analyzed a pile of poorly formed business-relevant user data for a start-up that they didn't know how to look at, i.e. it was essentially free contract work) but even that one was a win win, really, and they weren't being cheap they were just a start-up that folded a few months later when their funding was pulled. I know this sounds like buzz word corporate spineless lacky bullshit to some of you and I'm not excusing the worst exploitative homework assignment you can think of but really, often the independent projects you want to do are actually less "good for you" than independent projects that land on you, and sometimes it leads to different jobs and relationships down the road.

# ? Mar 30, 2016 14:42

feedmegin: Jul 30, 2008

duz posted:

We mainly use it to make sure they didn't lie about knowing C since so many people think C is the same as C++, C# or even Java.

But from the point of view of writing fizzbuzz they basically are? Same logical operators, after all, so unless they literally can't conceive of a function that's not in a class or I guess if they don't know about printf it'll work about the same way.

# ? Mar 30, 2016 14:55

Mozi: Apr 4, 2004; Forms change so fast
Time is moving past
Memory is smoke
Gonna get wider when I die; Nap Ghost

I hadn't heard about fizzbuzz before but had the same thought as some of you ('it can't be that simple, right?') Came up with my own solution then checked online - I have to think that an interviewer would prefer a straightforward and readable solution over something like this?

code:

def replaceMultiples(x: Int, rs: (Int, String)*) =
	rs map {case (n, s) => Either cond (x % n == 0, s, x)} reduceLeft ((a, b) =>
	a fold ((_ => b), (s => b fold ((_ => a), (t => Right(s + t))))))

 def fizzbuzz(n: Int) =
	replaceMultiples(n, 3 -> "Fizz", 5 -> "Buzz") fold ((_ toString), identity)

 1 to 100 map fizzbuzz foreach println

Which I think is neat but I wouldn't want to deal with it unless there's a good reason for it. Guess we're straying from the thread topic anyways.

# ? Mar 30, 2016 15:05

Paradoxish: Dec 19, 2003; Will you stop going crazy in there?

If it even occurs to you that there might be more than one way to write fizzbuzz or, hell, if any solution at all occurs to you in a minute or less then fizzbuzz and that whole class of problems are not for you. They're screening questions designed to quickly rule out candidates for development jobs who literally cannot program. It's pretty much "did you completely lie about your qualifications y/n?"

# ? Mar 30, 2016 15:41

axeil: Feb 14, 2006

Paradoxish posted:

If it even occurs to you that there might be more than one way to write fizzbuzz or, hell, if any solution at all occurs to you in a minute or less then fizzbuzz and that whole class of problems are not for you. They're screening questions designed to quickly rule out candidates for development jobs who literally cannot program. It's pretty much "did you completely lie about your qualifications y/n?"

I mean poo poo, even if you come from a math background and can't code for poo poo you can figure out it's all just modular arithmetic and work your way back from there.

This is why we hire people who are mathematicians typically as you can teach a mathematician to code as code is just applying math concepts. You can have coders who don't understand why/how something works, but it's basically impossible to graduate with a degree in math and not understand why/how logic gates or loops or recursion works.

# ? Mar 30, 2016 15:49

Arsenic Lupin: Apr 12, 2012; This particularly rapid💨 unintelligible 😖patter💁 isn't generally heard🧏‍♂️, and if it is🤔, it doesn't matter💁.

Spotify raised another $1B, doubling its total lifetime venture capital. It's convertible into stock at a discount to IPO price.

quote:

As consumers have turned from CDs and downloads to streaming, Spotify has developed a powerful position in the music industry, helping albums by young stars like Drake, Justin Bieber and Ed Sheeran reach high levels on the charts. The service has amassed 30 million paying users, far more than any other similar outlet.

But Spotify has been challenged by Apple, which introduced a competing service, Apple Music, last year, as well as by a growing array of new streaming outlets. YouTube also introduced a paid version last year, and Pandora, which dominates Internet radio with more than 80 million listeners, is negotiating with record companies to enter the on-demand market alongside Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal and Rhapsody.

Spotify, which has both free and paid versions, has also found itself on the defensive as record companies have withheld major new releases for brief periods to try to increase sales on just paid services, which tend to pay higher royalty rates. Lately, new albums by Gwen Stefani, Future and the 1975 have been withheld from Spotify in their opening weeks.

For its music, Spotify depends on licensing deals with music companies. It does not have long-term contracts for two of its suppliers. Universal and Warner Music, two of the largest record companies, have had �month to month� licensing deals with Spotify for some time, according to two people with knowledge of those deals, which puts Spotify at risk of facing stricter licensing terms in the future, or even, potentially, losing that content.

But as Spotify has grown more powerful, the labels and artists have come to need it as much as it needs the music companies.

I am so not buying that unsupported final sentence. Streaming businesses are threatened whenever a single major company can pull content and switch it somewhere else. The labels can see-saw licensing fees between Apple, Pandora, YouTube, and Amazon, and thus can diminish Spotify's profit margin whenever renewal comes. Furthermore, as mentioned earlier in the article, some artists are deciding that they don't need Spotify, because it's competing with sales that actually make them money.

# ? Mar 30, 2016 16:01

Inferior Third Season: Jan 15, 2005

Paradoxish posted:

If it even occurs to you that there might be more than one way to write fizzbuzz or, hell, if any solution at all occurs to you in a minute or less then fizzbuzz and that whole class of problems are not for you. They're screening questions designed to quickly rule out candidates for development jobs who literally cannot program. It's pretty much "did you completely lie about your qualifications y/n?"

I thought a big reason for these types of questions were also to identify programmers who automatically approach every single problem with a mindset of optimizing for speed, regardless of the readability or required programming time. The reason people don't want to do an "and" test for both mod 3 and mod 5 before doing individual tests for mod 3 and mod 5 is that they don't like that the code is "repeating" itself, and thus seems to not be the most efficient at first glance. This is sort of a stupid instinct to have, if the question isn't formulated in a way that requires it to be optimized (which, of course, the interviewee could simply ask as a clarifying question, instead of just assuming). So they make nearly unreadable code, and take more than 45 seconds to do it.

A good programmer can optimize for speed when needed, and for his own time when needed.

# ? Mar 30, 2016 16:01

shrike82: Jun 11, 2005

Back in my days as a dev, the best technical interview I had involved a 6-hour remote coding assignment on a toy problem and a 2-day on site coding project of an actual business problem abstracted. This was on top of the standard fit and quant interviews.

I think most firms don't have that luxury and it only worked due to the attractiveness of the role.

Even so, after joining the firm and being on the recruiting end, the problem with the setup was that it was extremely difficult to make successful offers. Turnover was extremely low fortunately.

# ? Mar 30, 2016 16:03

axeil: Feb 14, 2006

shrike82 posted:

Back in my days as a dev, the best technical interview I had involved a 6-hour remote coding assignment on a toy problem and a 2-day on site coding project of an actual business problem abstracted. This was on top of the standard fit and quant interviews.

I think most firms don't have that luxury and it only worked due to the attractiveness of the role.

Even so, after joining the firm and being on the recruiting end, the problem with the setup was that it was extremely difficult to make successful offers. Turnover was extremely low fortunately.

Hiring is a problem all over the place it seems. Here's a horror story of when I was in government and we were trying to hire an economist. The person who was screening the applicants had no idea what quantitative modeling was and kept throwing us people without ph.ds in economics who had no idea what a regression even was. They then got pissed we rejected all their candidates.

And then when we finally got some ph.d people we'd interview them and they wouldn't get offered for another month and the HR people were confused why they all declined (it's because a bunch of financial shops were able to interview and offer them within a week instead of 2+ months plus they got paid about 50% more).

The one thing the government needs is a complete overhaul of its hiring practices for anyone above entry-level. It's an absolute joke and the main reason they can't get any talent in the door.

# ? Mar 30, 2016 16:18

Arsenic Lupin: Apr 12, 2012; This particularly rapid💨 unintelligible 😖patter💁 isn't generally heard🧏‍♂️, and if it is🤔, it doesn't matter💁.

Nobody wants to buy Yahoo's internet business because the price is too high

quote:

Few companies are serious about buying Yahoo�s core business, according to a person familiar with the matter. The reason: Yahoo wants too high a price.

Some telecommunication and media companies, such as Comcast and Fox, may be open to exploring a deal, but will only do so if private-equity firms join them, the person said. Comcast and 21st Century Fox did not return requests for comment.

�Not one of them is interested in buying the company alone,� said the person. �They think it�s overpriced.�

Yahoo has not publicly discussed how much it wants for its core business, but tech news site Recode reported that the figure is $10 billion. Most analysts estimate Yahoo�s worth in the $6 billion to $8 billion range.

�The $10 billion number is like wishing for the stars,� said Martin Pyykkonen, an analyst with Rosenblatt Securities. �I just don�t see that as an achievable kind of range.�

Note that this is the Internet business that the stockholders value at zero.

# ? Mar 30, 2016 16:48

Soy Division: Aug 12, 2004

Paradoxish posted:

If it even occurs to you that there might be more than one way to write fizzbuzz or, hell, if any solution at all occurs to you in a minute or less then fizzbuzz and that whole class of problems are not for you. They're screening questions designed to quickly rule out candidates for development jobs who literally cannot program. It's pretty much "did you completely lie about your qualifications y/n?"

It also screens for the people who refuse to answer it because it's below them and the people who blast through it and make stupid mistakes like not putting the and condition first in the conditional.

# ? Mar 30, 2016 16:58

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Gail Wynand posted:

Citation needed, I've heard wildly varying stories of technical interviews at Google, from white boarding to take home code challenges to easter egg code games triggered by searching for certain Python related keywords.

AFAIK the Easter egg code game thing is just used as a replacement for resume filtering, it's not gonna let you skip onsites.

Gail Wynand posted:

Yeah there are already study guides out there that cover all of the commonly asked algorithm questions. It's basically like the consulting case interview at this point, what's being tested is not your ability at the job but your ability to identify a problem's type and shoehorn it into a pre-memorized solution technique.

After all it's not like you need to be Alan Turing to memorize and drill the 20 most common data structures and algorithms that appear in interviews.

Coincidentally this style of learning and assessment is what people who get into top CS schools and get hired by Google tend to be good at, otherwise their test scores wouldn't have gotten them into Stanford and past Google's GPA bar.

Google maintains a list of banned questions, so it's not as easy to just memorize a bunch of questions as it sounds. Obviously that system isn't perfect, but you're definitely exaggerating how useful raw memorization is for getting into Google. Now, doing a ton of questions as practice IS very useful, for sure.

# ? Mar 30, 2016 18:37

The Larch: Jan 14, 2015; by FactsAreUseless

I don't see what's hard about fizzbuzz, but I know gently caress-all about programming so my immediate thought is always "it's only 100 results, just hardcode them".

# ? Mar 30, 2016 19:10

Arsenic Lupin: Apr 12, 2012; This particularly rapid💨 unintelligible 😖patter💁 isn't generally heard🧏‍♂️, and if it is🤔, it doesn't matter💁.

If you felt like being a smartass, you could write a program that did a Google, opened a pipe to an online fizzbuzz example, then piped it to stdout.

# ? Mar 30, 2016 19:16

twodot: Aug 7, 2005; You are objectively correct that this person is dumb and has said dumb things

Arsenic Lupin posted:

If you felt like being a smartass, you could write a program that did a Google, opened a pipe to an online fizzbuzz example, then piped it to stdout.

Fizzbuzz has a property where when someone talks about the only people who feel compelled to write an implementation are people that are bad at programming so the likelihood of this downloading a wrong example is somewhere near 1.

# ? Mar 30, 2016 19:19

feedmegin: Jul 30, 2008

My plan is to write fizzbuzz in the language I invented and wrote a compiler for myself :smuggo:

feedmegin fucked around with this message at 20:04 on Mar 30, 2016

# ? Mar 30, 2016 19:27

WampaLord: Jan 14, 2010

feedmegin posted:

My plan is to write fizzbuzz in the language I invented and wroteva compiler for myself

Just write a bunch of 1s and 0s and tell them you simplified it down to machine code.

# ? Mar 30, 2016 19:36

duz: Jul 11, 2005; Come on Ilhan, lets go bag us a shitpost

The Larch posted:

I don't see what's hard about fizzbuzz, but I know gently caress-all about programming so my immediate thought is always "it's only 100 results, just hardcode them".

See how easy it is to use it to filter out people who can't program?

# ? Mar 30, 2016 19:43

Radbot: Aug 12, 2009; Can't post for 3 years!

I don't know much about programming, but why not use if(i%3 == 0 && i%5 == 0)? It may not be hyperoptimized, but it's also very clear about what it's doing - and in my limited experience, a LOT of projects benefit from being easily maintainable far more than being a nanosecond faster.

# ? Mar 30, 2016 19:59

feedmegin: Jul 30, 2008

Radbot posted:

I don't know much about programming, but why not use if(i%3 == 0 && i%5 == 0)? It may not be hyperoptimized, but it's also very clear about what it's doing - and in my limited experience, a LOT of projects benefit from being easily maintainable far more than being a nanosecond faster.

This is literally whats expected yes, congrats you are better than a ton of job applicants.

# ? Mar 30, 2016 20:03

Sundae: Dec 1, 2005

I spent way too much time writing something to call a function to check for a string return contents on question(string $interview) being "fizzbuzz" and then terminating interview.cpp if it's true, only to remember about 10 min later that I can't actually code in anything but GML. :v:

Fizzbuzz: The inevitable end result of any remotely CS-related thread.

# ? Mar 30, 2016 20:13

axeil: Feb 14, 2006

feedmegin posted:

This is literally whats expected yes, congrats you are better than a ton of job applicants.

What the hell do job applicants say then? I've never given a coding exercise in an interview as I feel it's pointless as my job focuses on "do you understand why a program works?" more than "can you write super awesome code that is fast?" So long as you don't write an infinite loop and crash the server I don't care what your code does so long as I can read it.

And being able to read it is very, very important. I've spent the better part of a week doing debug work on someone else's code that looked like it was birthed by a demon. Ran great, but was almost impossible to debug...which is why there was a problem. Any time something upstream or downstream changed the behemoth would throw a fit and bomb out. If nothing changed it was great, but how often is that the case?

# ? Mar 30, 2016 20:14

The Dipshit: Dec 21, 2005; by FactsAreUseless

No loving way. How do people finish a 4 year degree without thinking in terms of modulus?

I'm also totally not a programmer dude.

# ? Mar 30, 2016 20:14

feedmegin: Jul 30, 2008

axeil posted:

What the hell do job applicants say then?

They give you a blank look and panic.

# ? Mar 30, 2016 20:16

axeil: Feb 14, 2006

Claverjoe posted:

No loving way. How do people finish a 4 year degree without thinking in terms of modulus?

I'm also totally not a programmer dude.

Because it was SAS and all written in macro nested in macro nested in macro code. You had to turn on all the macro log printing options to figure out what was getting passed, which would make the simple .txt log files measure in the hundreds of megabytes.

Oh and he didn't code anything except the final output to go to permanent tables so good luck figuring out which of the ~1,000 intermediate tables was hosed.

It was not a fun week. :gonk:

feedmegin posted:

They give you a blank look and panic.

How the hell are they getting to the interview stage then? This isn't a hard problem, you can pass it by just doing some vague description using modular arithmetic. This seems insane :psyduck:

axeil fucked around with this message at 20:20 on Mar 30, 2016

# ? Mar 30, 2016 20:18

Toph Bei Fong: Feb 29, 2008

Radbot posted:

I don't know much about programming, but why not use if(i%3 == 0 && i%5 == 0)? It may not be hyperoptimized, but it's also very clear about what it's doing - and in my limited experience, a LOT of projects benefit from being easily maintainable far more than being a nanosecond faster.

Slightly off topic, but can I ask why folks prefer to use a modulo here, rather than division?

Wouldn't something like

code:

for (i = 0; i <=100; i++) {
    console.log(i);
}
if (i / 3 === 1) {
    console.log("Fizz")
}

etc. etc.

work just as well? I'm still quite the novice when it comes to programming (all online tutorials, save for one Java class about 12 years ago), so I'd like to understand the mindset better.

Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 20:29 on Mar 30, 2016

# ? Mar 30, 2016 20:24

feedmegin: Jul 30, 2008

axeil posted:

How the hell are they getting to the interview stage then? This isn't a hard problem, you can pass it by just doing some vague description using modular arithmetic. This seems insane

Which is why it tends to be used as a pre-in-person-interview filter, or right at the start...

Its 'bro do you even know how to code' and you would be surprised how many CS grads just can't.

# ? Mar 30, 2016 20:24

ocrumsprug: Sep 23, 2010; by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

The ironic part of the very complicated programming questions you get asked during a lot of technical interviews is that you can actually replace most of them with "Implement a Circle class with GetRadius, GetArea, IsInCircle functions. Here are the area and radius formulas as a reminder." and get similar results.

# ? Mar 30, 2016 20:26

feedmegin: Jul 30, 2008

Toph Bei Fong posted:

Slightly off topic, but can I ask why folks prefer to use a modulo here, rather than division?

Wouldn't something like
code:
for (i = 0; i <=100; i++) {
    console.log(i);
}
if (i / 3 === 0) {
    console.log("Fizz")
}

etc. etc.
work just as well? I'm still quite the novice when it comes to programming, so I'd like to understand the mindset better.

Integer division truncates. Floating point is imprecise so '==0' is not guaranteed to be true when you think it should be, and historically its also slower.

# ? Mar 30, 2016 20:27

Shooting Blanks: Jun 6, 2007; Real bullets mess up how cool this thing looks.

-Blade

axeil posted:

Because it was SAS and all written in macro nested in macro nested in macro code. You had to turn on all the macro log printing options to figure out what was getting passed, which would make the simple .txt log files measure in the hundreds of megabytes.

Oh and he didn't code anything except the final output to go to permanent tables so good luck figuring out which of the ~1,000 intermediate tables was hosed.

It was not a fun week.

I would ask how much of it was documented but I think I know the answer.

# ? Mar 30, 2016 20:27

Absurd Alhazred: Mar 27, 2010; by Athanatos

This discussion is kind of going way off topic. I think the detailed job interview stuff would probably be best moved to somewhere in BFC, and the explicit coding stuff to Cavern of COBOL or YOSPOS.

# ? Mar 30, 2016 20:30

axeil: Feb 14, 2006

edit: removed as it's off topic.

here's the BFC interview thread, maybe we can talk about it there: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3553582

axeil fucked around with this message at 20:37 on Mar 30, 2016

# ? Mar 30, 2016 20:33

Arcteryx Anarchist: Sep 15, 2007; Fun Shoe

People fail fizzbuzz because:

a) they can't program at all
b) their brain locks up under stress in the interview

Tons of developers spend all day programming within framework APIs and working on CRUD apps; it involves no mathematical exercise, even something as seemly trivial as that, so there could be a lot of b's in the failure pile

# ? Mar 30, 2016 20:34

Pimpmust: Oct 1, 2008

Back to startups, anyone posted this? A couple weeks old but holy poo poo
The Futurist Start-Up Sui Generis Is Uber, but for Techno-Socialist City States

Choice picks:
"corporate socialist"
"Free market, designed for pleasure and freedom."
"We don�t really believe in democracy."

# ? Mar 30, 2016 20:52

Arsenic Lupin: Apr 12, 2012; This particularly rapid💨 unintelligible 😖patter💁 isn't generally heard🧏‍♂️, and if it is🤔, it doesn't matter💁.

Pimpmust posted:

"corporate socialist"
"Free market, designed for pleasure and freedom."
"We don�t really believe in democracy."

I, too, read Oath of Fealty.

# ? Mar 30, 2016 22:00

Radbot: Aug 12, 2009; Can't post for 3 years!

Pimpmust posted:

Back to startups, anyone posted this? A couple weeks old but holy poo poo
The Futurist Start-Up Sui Generis Is Uber, but for Techno-Socialist City States

Choice picks:
"corporate socialist"
"Free market, designed for pleasure and freedom."
"We don�t really believe in democracy."

Why are libertarians so loving deluded that they completely lack the ability to envision a scenario where having a corporate board decide everything doesn't go super well for the average citizen? I mean, it's one thing to be enthused about an idea despite the downsides, but these folks seem incapable of even imagining them.

# ? Mar 30, 2016 22:15

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# ? May 18, 2024 06:59

cheese: Jan 7, 2004; Shop around for doctors! Always fucking shop for doctors. Doctors are stupid assholes. And they get by because people are cowed by their mystical bullshit quality of being able to maintain a 3.0 GPA at some Guatemalan medical college for 3 semesters. Find one that makes sense.

Pimpmust posted:

Back to startups, anyone posted this? A couple weeks old but holy poo poo
The Futurist Start-Up Sui Generis Is Uber, but for Techno-Socialist City States

Choice picks:
"corporate socialist"
"Free market, designed for pleasure and freedom."
"We don�t really believe in democracy."

Virtually every response given in that piece was either total fantasy devoid and disconnected from any shred of reality or completely nonsensical.

# ? Mar 31, 2016 00:05

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