interviewing and job hunting is garbage

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > YOSPOS > interviewing and job hunting is garbage

Dijkstracula: Mar 18, 2003; You can't spell 'vector field' without me, Professor!

Oh boy I got some good ones

- hipster newsql database startup that was literally described to me as "a loving rocket ship to kickass mountain" asked me what 2^16 and 2^32 was

- take home project that was "implement literally our primary product in four hours" upon which the engineer ripped it apart over the phone and accused me of name-dropping concepts that I'd given talks at conferences about

- big-name silicon valley company had an onsite interviewer just not show up, so they told me I had to come back down for an additional onsite with one interview

- edit: forgot about that enterprise company that you've heard of that wanted me to work on the CTO's pet project: a custom language implemented in PL/SQL and XML (???????)

i'm not exactly sure why I went to grad school but it was not for this poo poo

Dijkstracula fucked around with this message at 20:07 on Dec 11, 2016

# ¿ Dec 11, 2016 18:57

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 3, 2024 10:04

Dijkstracula: Mar 18, 2003; You can't spell 'vector field' without me, Professor!

fart simpson posted:

what did they mean 2^16 and 2^32? adding them? i don't get how that tests anything other than knowing middle school level math

no like the conversation went:

<them> "what is 2^16"?
<me> "65536"
<them> "how do you know?"
<me, internally> "because I've programmed a computer before"
<me> (something about how it's 1024 times 2^6, which I know is 64)

<them> "ok now what is 2^32"
<me> "Four billion and change."
<them> "how do you know?"
<me> (something about how 2 to the 30s is in the billions, and 2^2 is 4)
<me, internally> "Because I once owned a 32-bit computer and programmed it once or twice."
<me, internally, quieter> "I don't think I'll continue talking to this company.

# ¿ Dec 11, 2016 20:45

Dijkstracula: Mar 18, 2003; You can't spell 'vector field' without me, Professor!

Gazpacho posted:

Not adding them, knowing them from memory. Do you know the value limits of integer types or are you just going to overflow and give no fucks? There are jobs where that's useful to know.

(slides in waving a printed copy of the C standard like it's the constitution) well actually those value limits aren't specified anywhere so if you're not using macros imported from limits.h you're gonna get it at least slightly wrong :spergin:

quote:

e: "because it's the limit of integer types & therefore something to watch out for" is the correct reason btw

Sure, but that wasn't the question that was asked. There's one correct answer to "what's, consistently, the maximum value of an unsigned int" which is UINT_MAX; and, there's one correct answer to "what's the maximum value of a uint32_t", which is "2**32 - 1". Maybe there's something useful to be learned about a candidate if they can or can't answer those outright, but there's no overflow bug that is going to be solved by knowing decimal representations of powers of two off the top of your head imo.

edit: in fact, I would say the worse thing to do is to assume that integer types are some size - as anyone knows who's had to port code from a platform where sizeof(void *) equals sizof(int) to a platform that doesn't, that's a real minefield if you get it wrong.

Dijkstracula fucked around with this message at 21:01 on Dec 11, 2016

# ¿ Dec 11, 2016 20:50

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > YOSPOS > interviewing and job hunting is garbage