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One time my company had this awful idea to bring in like a hundred intern candidates all in the same day. I have no idea why we did this. We had pairs of developers interview someone in like 30 minutes and each pair got like 6 interviewees. Initially I thought this was going to be sort of fun since I generally like interviewing folks. My job doesn't interact with a ton of folks and it's fun talking to strangers. I was really wrong. A distressing number of candidates were from weird certificate programs or online schools or something. This felt awful because I could tell they were so excited to be there but they knew nothing. I knew we had only half an hour so I was going to go with stupid softball things like "reverse this string". No one came close to reversing a string. Just, whatever language you want, pseudocode even, as easy as possible, and no one was close. Most were like: quote:void Reverse (char * string, unsigned length) { They wrote that because I'd say "imagine I pass in abc in as an example". Like the first time this happened it was sort of funny but then I realized there's all sorts of schools out there essentially scamming over-eager kids. We also had one person who could barely speak English. His resume looked decent I guess, with the exception that he listed a bunch of poo poo about being able to speak English and couldn't hold a conversation with us. I felt sort of bad because maybe he was a programming genius and I had no way of finding out. But really if he couldn't communicate during an interview he probably wouldn't fit in very well. We had one person who said literally nothing the entire half hour. We offered them a drink, asked if they needed something, just nothing. I have no idea what they were doing there or what they thought was going to happen. Maybe they were having a panic attack but probably no one here had any idea of what to do about that. On a separate occasion we asked someone a few simple math questions and from that point forward they kept clicking a whiteboard marker cap on and off out of nervousness. I'm not sure if they knew they were doing it but it was really noisy and distracting. I was worried if I pointed it out it would make them more nervous too. One time someone explained in a written test that they were self taught and hadn't gone to a traditional school. They refused to answer a question because they said they would just google it in a work situation. They wrote like third of a page about how stupid we were for including such a dumb question. We're pretty forgiving people, they could have written a few lines proving they knew what we were asking and maybe a blurb about how it wasn't an important hole in their knowledge. It's not like anyone reading it had written the questions in the first place. Sex Bumbo fucked around with this message at 06:16 on Mar 20, 2016 |
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Mar 20, 2016 06:05
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baquerd posted:You got hosed over in a weird way, but I do want to note enthusiasm in the subject matter is absolutely a key indicator of success. Candidates that are on the fence can become hires by projecting excitement. This can be bullshit if the job is yet another CRUD application, but in areas that are actually exciting to some people, being lukewarm to the subject matter can hurt a candidate. It creates vicious cycle though because then companies self select for people really good at bullshitting.
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Mar 20, 2016 22:32
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I flew out to interview somewhere so I could video conference with people like ten blocks from where I live in the I city I flew away from. I made it explicitly clear over email I have no intention of moving, but figured I'd work remotely or something.
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Mar 22, 2016 00:22
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sarehu posted:You know what, I never thought of that. Some people are really lovely at interviewing. The first several times I was probably more nervous than the person I was interviewing.
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Mar 23, 2016 05:10
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Yeah but... recursion is the wrong way to produce Fibonacci numbers. There's no reason to do it like that. Just put it in a loop and it's better code. We're selecting for specifically bad coders. Probably because that's how we got here too. The cycle of badness. The laws of interviewing: - never ask a question relevant to the position being hired for - the more irrelevant a skill is, the more importance it should be given - never under any circumstance should existing practices be used on interviews. No metrics or data or testing about them should ever be gathered
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Apr 16, 2016 19:07
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I think there's this bug in people's heads that tells them if someone is good at solving academic style problems then they'll be good at creating software. In my own job I can think of a ton of better questions than that. To date I've never once had to solve fibo numbers myself, and I don't think I've ever used recursion. I got a typical programmer education so I know what they are but I'd be just as good at my current job if I didn't. I'd rather ask things like: - why is this example code slow / how do you fix it - how would you design something for some set of requirements/customers - describe the implementation of some actual, useful algorithm or data transformation If they can't do real examples, obviously they wouldn't be able to do their job. If they can't write something recursively, I dunno, I think they'll manage somehow. Or I could give them a 5 minute lesson. baquerd posted:Edit: not going down this rabbit hole. https://www.nayuki.io/page/fast-fibonacci-algorithms Hey look it's fast fibonacci algorithms. I found it, with bing. Just kidding I used google. Sex Bumbo fucked around with this message at 22:15 on Apr 16, 2016 |
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Apr 16, 2016 22:04
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Back in the dark ages of DirectX, where to be fair everything was extremely lovely but DirectX was definitely no exception. He's the quintessential boring male midlife crisis haver: http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2013/01/06/getting-fired-from-microsoft/ Sex Bumbo fucked around with this message at 19:33 on Apr 18, 2016 |
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Apr 18, 2016 19:26
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 quote:lazy millennials
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Apr 18, 2016 20:18
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E: this is a train wreck waiting to happen
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Apr 18, 2016 20:57
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You're him aren't you. You're the guy that wrote all those bad words.
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Apr 18, 2016 21:20
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Never mind
Sex Bumbo fucked around with this message at 03:49 on Apr 19, 2016 |
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Apr 19, 2016 00:51
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My Rhythmic Crotch posted:Your version of reality sounds really buggy, are you sure you've applied all the latest patches? Works on my machine, must be you. I keep getting quoted past edits.
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Apr 19, 2016 08:22
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They could have just asked why you didn't use linq when you were there? Sounds silly on their part.
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Jun 29, 2016 02:03
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Has anyone intereviewed using HackerRankX?
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Jul 11, 2016 21:16
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I would give zero fucks about anyone's grades in college. It doesn't even correlate well with work performance. I would maybe be interested in the projects that were done in college though.
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Jul 16, 2016 01:40
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sarehu posted:If somebody has a 2.0 GPA you can guarantee they're retarded, the curve representing the probability you'd hire somebody given GPA starts out flat at 4.0 but it does tail downward at some point. I'd still avoid passing someone up due to a low GPA (why would they list a low GPA anyway though) since there's mitigating factors as to why that happened. A common one is just having to work a lovely job during school.
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Jul 16, 2016 02:00
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MrMoo posted:I'm starting to see less of the Boost hatred adverts, but one dufus one is still there: What the hell is this, I can't even read it.
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Jul 18, 2016 18:15
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I never use boost but I guess I'm glad it exists? C++17 features are great. I would have liked them a few decades ago but what can you do.
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Jul 18, 2016 22:11
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Indexes is instant rejection.
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Jul 24, 2016 22:05
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C++ has probably crossed the threshold where it's more bullshit trivia than a language at this point. The rabbit hole of nonsense goes on seemingly forever.Cuntpunch posted:This thread circles the point, but for hiring up to a mid-senior developer/engineer, there's only so much you can do in a limited time to screen a candidate's technical knowledge. I'm currently involved in tech screening for two positions - one a senior/lead, and one a mid-senior seat - and I find that I'm having reasonable success by having a mix of stuff. Some soft "oh hey just tell me about stuff" to get a feel for whether you're bullshitting by putting it on your resume - does your answer to "So tell me about F#" sound like a stack overflow/wikipedia page? But also mixed in some hard technical trivia around the languages - if they're physically present I'll ask for whiteboarded code, but that isn't always possible. Trivia is pointless because you're not getting much if you hire someone whose main selling point is not having to do two second google searches. As weird as C++ is, once you get a vague understanding of the rules you can make fairly reasonable assumptions about performance and memory and you can easily verify your assumptions by looking at the assembly it generates. You can just bang on a lot of things until they come out how you want them to. Rather than ask trivia you can ask more senior people about projects they've worked on, the complications they ran into, and how they solved them. You're giving them a prompt, a ton of rope, and an opportunity to hang themselves or not. You can work even if you personally don't have a great understanding of the platforms they were working on.
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Aug 24, 2016 07:53
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