Ask HN: Scolded on a job interview for not namespacing

I hate typing the same thing over and over... so, yeah, I'd use namespace std.

However, for an interview, you are correct. This is something too trivial to mention or "get mad" at...

Given that your examples of using std::cout are using the wrong I/O direction, I am surprised you have "25 years experience of c++".

Perhaps, that annoyed him too. Still, yelling doesn't help much of anything.

Edit: OP changed post. Not fair to down vote....

I'm with you. I'd say "Thanks for your time" and leave, giving feedback to the recruiter. If anyone at my company did that in an interview, we'd certainly never put them in an interview rotation again, and there might be further repercussions. There's one guy in our office who is a brilliant programmer, but when reviewing code, he's incapable of seeing anything but the negatives. (Upon reflection, he perhaps did this on purpose to get out of interviews... ha.)

A billion? I'd do it for a billion. I could put up with a year of that for unimaginable wealth. Probably even a million to be honest.

To answer your final question: No, I haven't. Lucky me :)

I think there's multiple levels to this.

1. On a personal level: You clearly dodged a bullet.

Also:

> I didn't shout or get mad. I practiced my Buddhist learning and turned the other cheek without emotion.

Kudos to you.

2. On a more organizational level: That's what style guides are for, end of discussion (a coherent code base is worth much more than individual subjective quibbles). Would the guy have been a professional, the answer should have been "you'll have to change the style to match our style guide, but that doesn't matter here".

3. On a technical level: I don't write much C++ code nowadays, but yeah, I also always use the std:: prefix.

My reasoning would be this:

- "using namespace X;" in a header is a no-go anyway (I don't think is negotiable).

- In a .cpp file, I'd rather only operate in one namespace implicitly to avoid a giant mess of overloads. To the argument "compilers are amazing": Editors are not, I can guarantee you that much.

- I never write code for std, since that's reserved for the standard library and STL. So, for me, there's no valid reason ever to use "using namespace std;".

- On the "confusing" argument: I'd wager you'd never use std::cout directly except in very simplistic scenarios. Usually, there's either an abstraction (typedef is your friend there, if you want simpler names), or you write your own functionality on top of it (certainly not in the std:: namespace). Similarly, if one of your functions contains more than a couple instances std::, it probably is way too big, anyway.

But then, the technical level is the most subjective part of all of them.