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meatbag posted:I flubbed an interview recently, the task was to implement a game of battleship. I'm not a great developer by any means, but the vast majority of my time is spent fixing bugs and tweaking existing code, so making something cohesive from scratch was a surprisingly difficult context switch. The place I work has a question like that in the interview bank and I’ve resolved to never ask it. Pretty sure I’d poo poo myself on the spot if someone led in with “we’re making a game in the next 45 minutes” This poo poo’s high pressure enough, I don’t need a curveball like that
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Aug 22, 2023 20:14
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Y'all should try some of these product manager interviews. True pinnacle of theater, the difference between what you're asked to do and expected to know VS the job you'll be doing. I actually question if it's some kind of tacit collusion, making these processes so onerous.
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Aug 22, 2023 20:27
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epswing posted:I don't think not saying "write a function with a good function name that takes in the right parameter(s) and returns the right type" makes it a trick question. It's an interview, clearly whatever tasks are performed will be evaluated. (In your last interview, were you explicitly told that you should write good function names?) Ya, I think seeing that mental wheel of running the code, recognizing a mistake, communicating it, then correcting it is by far a more important part of interview. I need to see people's troubleshooting and execution process with "correctness" becoming less of the focus.
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Aug 22, 2023 21:59
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Erg posted:The place I work has a question like that in the interview bank and I’ve resolved to never ask it. Pretty sure I’d poo poo myself on the spot if someone led in with “we’re making a game in the next 45 minutes” I actually had something similar asked to me recently, which was "please write me a function which allows me to play Tic Tac Toe. It should accept the player and returns information about the board state or the winner. How you want to do this is up to you." I felt it was actually an excellent question. It was simpler than Battleship, got into aspects of design, testing, interface / injection, etc. I was permitted to use an IDE while screen sharing so I didn't have to try to remember what things were called or notice a compile error. It felt very collaborative, and 45 minutes was a good amount of time for it. I'm generally pretty happy to ask and be asked "hey, I want to do a thing, here's the details / constraints, wyd?" since it's not "I hope you know how to write a red black tree by memory" trivia question, but it also allows for discussion and back and forth. IMO a good interviewer and candidate could get a lot out of something simple. brand engager posted:Every time interviewing comes up in here it reveals that most of you are testing for "can this person read my mind" rather than anything useful. I think you'll find that mind reading is actually an excellent skill for a candidate to have!
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Aug 22, 2023 22:30
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epswing posted:Yeah, it's tough. On one hand, without writing code in the interview, it's very hard to gauge if they can do the job. On the other, it's hard to write code and think straight under pressure which you'd almost certainly never experience on the job. In an interview setting, I would definitely probably write out the expanded version of this with a comment saying, 'You could .Sum this, but I assume we are going to expand functionality'. I'm more and more inclined to write increasingly verbose code that is easier to understand per line. It's easier to revisit. It's easier to train on. It's easier to expand. It's not as sexy and if your team is senior, it takes longer to write, but I'm appreciating more and more the value of writing naive code where it makes sense to do so. Writing the coolest, sexiest code in the fewest number of lines is not the way I'd choose to do thing. I need to write maintainable stuff, not win at code golf.
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Aug 22, 2023 23:03
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I really would not want to work with someone that considers calling the standard library function which does the thing you want to do instead of manually writing it yourself "code golf".
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Aug 22, 2023 23:56
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But it feels so clever to write a one-liner that does the whole function’s work! Yea, you can’t step through the code anymore but that’s a small price to pay.
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Aug 22, 2023 23:59
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if someone asks me to write a function I usually interpret that they want me to "write a function" not "call a function"
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Aug 23, 2023 00:09
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Yah I'm struggling to see a huge issue with making an actual function and using a for loop... You worried about disk space or something, can't afford the extra 5 lines?
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Aug 23, 2023 00:48
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I think your best bet is to just, you know, chat up the interviewer and ask whether they want you to call a standard library function or write your own, because they could be looking for either
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Aug 23, 2023 03:00
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pentium166 posted:I think your best bet is to just, you know, chat up the interviewer and ask whether they want you to call a standard library function or write your own, because they could be looking for either No, you must be thanked for your time and hung up on!
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Aug 23, 2023 03:07
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I generally go "Oh, you could obviously use the reverse() function of StringBuilder, but I'll write it out" because if I don't it's a goddamn guarantee that their second question is going to be "what if you couldn't use any built in functions?".
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Aug 23, 2023 06:59
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I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with using a for-loop there but I'd be extremely concerned about someone writing a for-loop on an array that doesn't actually touch the array for anything.
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Aug 23, 2023 08:36
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One of those cases where people expect you to use the built-in library a lot is heapq in Python. Despite actual conscious effort to cram it into stuff at work sideways, I've yet to manage to actually need it for anything in a professional context. I've only ever used it for coding puzzles and interview questions. I've used other Python collections, but not that. As a bit of a passive-aggressive gesture, I even had my hand-written toy Python interpreter project successfully run the module, but I've still never had to actually use it for work.
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Aug 23, 2023 16:41
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:One of those cases where people expect you to use the built-in library a lot is heapq in Python. Despite actual conscious effort to cram it into stuff at work sideways, I've yet to manage to actually need it for anything in a professional context. I've only ever used it for coding puzzles and interview questions. I've used other Python collections, but not that. As a bit of a passive-aggressive gesture, I even had my hand-written toy Python interpreter project successfully run the module, but I've still never had to actually use it for work. Huh, never heard or used this but it does seem useful.
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Aug 23, 2023 18:50
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Falcon2001 posted:Huh, never heard or used this but it does seem useful. poo poo, let me know if you cram it into something. Maybe I suck at finding ways to use it in the wild.
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Aug 24, 2023 06:12
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There are very few things that need priority queues, the most common one is pathfinding.
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Aug 24, 2023 08:32
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Xarn posted:There are very few things that need priority queues, the most common one is pathfinding.
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Aug 24, 2023 15:24
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Management are trying to force code climate, a code analytics tool to see 'prodoctivity,' of your team. It has such great insights such as 'Number of commits' 'Number of pushes' 'Impact' (which seems to be number of lines changed/added)
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Aug 24, 2023 16:44
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sounds like you're one vscode plugin away from being the most productive employee at the company by an order of magnitude
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Aug 24, 2023 16:45
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Mega Comrade posted:It has such great insights such as But enough about my wife
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Aug 24, 2023 16:47
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I'm going to make a code productivity analyzer called khorne that measures lines deleted in a pr
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Aug 24, 2023 16:48
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I did a single line commit yesterday with a huge impact score, so looked into why and it doesn't differentiate if a line change is actual code or white space. So rider auto formatting the bad whitespace on the page boosted my single line score to that of a 400 lines commit.
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Aug 24, 2023 16:55
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these kinds of metrics are stupid and dont really say anything about who is actually doing the most productive work what you need to be judging people on are profiling metrics like whose lines of code are being executed the most or who is writing the highest impact code, by memory usage your data is immediately getting "garbage collected"? sounds like your work might be "trash"!
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Aug 24, 2023 17:01
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Fellatio del Toro posted:these kinds of metrics are stupid and dont really say anything about who is actually doing the most productive work We all know this. Management only sometimes does, or doesn't want to do their actual job so they use this (or they use it to justify firing someone they wanted to anyway.
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Aug 24, 2023 17:22
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Fellatio del Toro posted:these kinds of metrics are stupid and dont really say anything about who is actually doing the most productive work So the solution is global variables everywhere?
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Aug 24, 2023 17:24
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Volmarias posted:We all know this. Management only sometimes does, or doesn't want to do their actual job so they use this (or they use it to justify firing someone they wanted to anyway. Funnily enough one of our worst Devs looks like some 10x savant by his stats because he commits almost every bloody line ,writes awful spaghetti code and moves onto new tickets without properly finishing the last.
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Aug 24, 2023 17:30
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I personally love this kind of stuff. I've used metrics on rework and concurrent open PRs to push policy changes and headcount approvals because even (specifically) people who don't understand anything about the code fully grok the storytelling SLOC is pointless at the individual level, but across an entire company, at the scale of months, it's really good at visualizing the impact of, for example, how quarterly/annual planning cycles impact an org's throughput in aggregate e: I did one really funny analysis showing that when teams were blocked on other teams, they generated more code than when they weren't blocked. Everyone started spinning up pet projects or working on bucket list problems, where the fluency of greenfield dev and only solving the problems you want to solve makes the SLOC count go brrrrrrrrrrr Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 17:36 on Aug 24, 2023 |
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Aug 24, 2023 17:32
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I was never sure wtf happened culturally at my job that everyone started being the annoying 10 nitpick comment guy on every PR. Then I found out at my mid year I dinged for being too low on our KPI for loving GitHub comments lol.
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Aug 24, 2023 17:38
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Metrics by themselves are not inherently bad. They are only problematic when applied without critical thought by useless middle management
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Aug 24, 2023 17:42
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Mega Comrade posted:Management are trying to force code climate, a code analytics tool to see 'prodoctivity,' of your team. Our lead dev turned manager gets those stats from github somehow, and complains in the 1:1 that I'm below some average LoC that supposedly people at other companies hit.
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Aug 24, 2023 17:50
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brand engager posted:Our lead dev turned manager gets those stats from github somehow, and complains in the 1:1 that I'm below some average LoC that supposedly people at other companies hit. I wrote the most code when I was intermediate, as soon as I hit senior I was writing less code and now at staff I pretty much just drink and know things.
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Aug 24, 2023 18:09
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Macichne Leainig posted:Metrics by themselves are not inherently bad. At the same time that I talk about how I use them when I have them, they sort of are inherently bad too. If your employer is collecting metrics about your work that nobody is looking at, there's zero chance that in twelve months, someone is going to look at those metrics and do something good for you with that information. On the other hand, if they want you out, there's a strong chance they're going to mine those kinds of systems for pretext. And sure, that information is technically already available in your systems, because that is really your work, and those are really your commits. But having that information available a click away really improves a company's plausible deniability if anyone is challenged about when they started collecting and using that information.
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Aug 24, 2023 18:28
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Fellatio del Toro posted:these kinds of metrics are stupid and dont really say anything about who is actually doing the most productive work Nah, you really need to not be using metrics at all to judge people. I see value in using metrics as a guide for where to start looking at someone’s work from a non metrics perspective (like, this tool says this person did barely anything! Let’s look at what they did. or the opposite) Goodhart’s law is highly applicable here.
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Aug 24, 2023 19:20
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Vulture Culture posted:Don't sell metrics short—they're also problematic when applied maliciously by management that knows what they want and absolutely knows what they're doing. Yeah, all of this. I got docked during a performance review because I had less pull requests compared to others, even those in different job families.
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Aug 24, 2023 19:27
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Steve French posted:Nah, you really need to not be using metrics at all to judge people. Notably though, that law doesn't say you can't measure something, it says not to turn it into a target.
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Aug 24, 2023 19:36
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Steve French posted:Nah, you really need to not be using metrics at all to judge people. sorry I was hoping that "number times a line of code is executed" as a metric would very obviously be a joke
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Aug 24, 2023 20:00
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Mega Comrade posted:I did a single line commit yesterday with a huge impact score, so looked into why and it doesn't differentiate if a line change is actual code or white space. So rider auto formatting the bad whitespace on the page boosted my single line score to that of a 400 lines commit. brand engager posted:Our lead dev turned manager gets those stats from github somehow, and complains in the 1:1 that I'm below some average LoC that supposedly people at other companies hit. The two of you need to make a buddy on the team that just uses different auto-formatting settings and you'll both be rockstars.
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Aug 24, 2023 20:03
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Fellatio del Toro posted:sorry I was hoping that "number times a line of code is executed" as a metric would very obviously be a joke Wow, my bad. in my defense, there do exist some really bad unironic opinions, and also I broke my arm two days ago and drugs. I clearly did not read what you said very well, or at all. Falcon2001 posted:Notably though, that law doesn't say you can't measure something, it says not to turn it into a target. In my addlebrained context, "judging by a metric" was considered a form of turning the metric into a target.
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Aug 24, 2023 20:41
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I was the number one ranked for LoC in the codebase at my last job because the previous contractors didn’t use semicolons in JS and I turned on a Prettier rule to add them and committed the result.
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Aug 24, 2023 20:46
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