511–520 of 601 posts
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I was given 5 minutes to ask questions after each round of interview. That part was ordinary too. That's what most of the other companies do (FAANG or otherwise).
The real risk is for people who are too young to know what to ask
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TDD need to die. This is a curse. There should be integration tests along with some property based tests and fuzzy tests. Usually catches a lot of things.Invest in monitoring and alerts too. TDD is like relying on debugger to solve your problem. Is debugger a good tool? yes,it is a great tool. But using it as an excuse to avoid understanding what happens under the hood is plain wrong. The problem lies in industry whe…
And yet tests seem to have made this massive garbage heap actually work and enable a lump of spaghetti to continue to operate as a viable product. It doesn't mean you should write bad code, but it seems like if it can make even the most awful of code viable, then that's a pretty good system. The fact that modern medicine allows the most beat up and desperate to continue to live on isn't an indictment against medicine…
Oracle Database 12.2. It is close to 25 million lines of C code. What an unimaginable horror! You can't change a single line of code in the product without breaking 1000s of existing tests. Generations of programmers have worked on that code under difficult deadlines and filled the code with all kinds of crap. Very complex pieces of logic, memory management, context switching, etc. are all held together with thousand…
Not sure if Oracles is already following this or not. But this is necessary for scalable projects.
Oracle Database 12.2. It is close to 25 million lines of C code. What an unimaginable horror! You can't change a single line of code in the product without breaking 1000s of existing tests. Generations of programmers have worked on that code under difficult deadlines and filled the code with all kinds of crap. Very complex pieces of logic, memory management, context switching, etc. are all held together with thousand…
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> The best way to guess this is to extrapolate from the interview questions. Wouldn't you just ask the developers interviewing you outright, "can you walk me through an example of your day? How long does it take you to push out code? What's testing like? Do you run tests locally, or use something like Jenkins?" etc.
Most new hires are probably not being interviewed by devs, but either by 3rd-party recruiters or internal recruiters with HR. When I was working in recruiting, the last thing either we or the client wanted was for the new hire to talk to either the person who they were replacing or any of the potential coworkers. Heck, one internal recruiter I had to interface with at a company I choose not to disclose said to me, "c…
What the fuck? Am I a spoiled tech-bro, or does that sound completely insane to anyone else? I would 100% not take a job if I didn't get a chance to talk to my coworkers and future manager during the interview process.
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I think TDD is the best way to develop (yet). Obviously tests are code, and if you write crappy highly-coupled tests you will end up with only much more messy code. This is a clear example of bad testing. The greatest advantage of TDD is in design, everything should be modular and easy to unit test, so you could: - reproduce bug and verify your bugfix in matter of ms with proper unit test - understand what code does…
I had some tests on my codebase, but eventually only documentation and integration tests remained. So let's look at a simplified example. https://bitbucket.org/iopq/fizzbuzz-in-rust My tests are in the test folder. They are actually superfluous since integration tests test for the same thing. I cannot break up the program in a way that would unit test a smaller piece of it in more detail. They only tests I can add wo…
This is especially if your "integration tests" are testing the same component, and not actually integrating with numerous other components being developed by different teams - or, if the system is so small it can run on a single workstation.
Working in teams on larger systems, the situation is different. Part of the point of unit tests is the "shift left" which allows problems to be discovered early, ideally before code leaves a developer's machine. It reduces the time until bugs are discovered significantly, and reduces the impact of one dev's bugs on other devs on the team.
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TDD need to die. This is a curse. There should be integration tests along with some property based tests and fuzzy tests. Usually catches a lot of things.Invest in monitoring and alerts too. TDD is like relying on debugger to solve your problem. Is debugger a good tool? yes,it is a great tool. But using it as an excuse to avoid understanding what happens under the hood is plain wrong. The problem lies in industry whe…
TDD is yet another in a long line of "methodologies" that don't work. Tests are not a bad thing of course. The problem comes when you turn testing into an ideology and try to use it as a magic fix for all your problems. Same goes for "agile," etc. Programming is a craft. Good programmers write good code. Bad programmers write bad code. No methodology will make bad programmers write good code, but bureaucratic bullshi…
Of course, this does require that the process itself has been set up with care, thought, and understanding of what's being achieved.
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Most new hires are probably not being interviewed by devs, but either by 3rd-party recruiters or internal recruiters with HR. When I was working in recruiting, the last thing either we or the client wanted was for the new hire to talk to either the person who they were replacing or any of the potential coworkers. Heck, one internal recruiter I had to interface with at a company I choose not to disclose said to me, "c…
> When I was working in recruiting, the last thing either we or the client wanted was for the new hire to talk to either the person who they were replacing or any of the potential coworkers. What the fuck? Am I a spoiled tech-bro, or does that sound completely insane to anyone else? I would 100% not take a job if I didn't get a chance to talk to my coworkers and future manager during the interview process.
Seems like a trap set up for fresh out of college hires. I don’t know any senior developers who would even consider a job under those circumstances.
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That is absolutely insane. I can't even begin to imagine the complexity of that codebase. I thought my Rails test suite was slow because it takes 4 minutes. If I wrote it in C or C++ it would probably be 10 seconds. I can't imagine a C/C++ application where the test suite takes 20-30 hours on a test farm with 100-200 servers. And if you can break 100-1000 tests with a single change, it doesn't like things are very mo…
Tests in C/C++ run shockingly fast. I ported an application from Ruby to C++ and the tests ran in well under a second when it was taking 10+ seconds in Ruby. Granted because of C++'s type system there were fewer tests, but it was fast enough that I kept thinking something was wrong.
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It's like that in other fields of engineering too, when they are making something they haven't built before . That's the essential part: for example, a lot of construction is really just rebuilding the same thing that's already been built 100,000 times in the past 100 years. When they attempt to build something new, it often ends up like software – tremendous overruns in both cost and schedule. C.f. the only new nucl…
> It's like that in other fields of engineering too, when they are making something they haven't built before. Exactly this. I like to use an analogy of building bridges :) - OK, we have this valley and we want to drive cars over it. What do we do? - Hmm, we could just make the road along the bottom of the valley - Wouldn't that cause the cars to fall because of the steep angle? - Good point. Maybe if we built the ro…
This was played for laughs by German satire news website "Der Postillon" (like The Onion, but in German): "Department of Traffic to replace ramshackle bridges by jumping hills"
Nicely photoshopped picture at: https://www.der-postillon.com/2014/11/lander-ersetzen-marode...