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How to win the coding interview

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Re: How to win the coding interview

#171

Post by hvidgaard »

Merad wrote: post #159
fao_ wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For my course it is part of the criteria. They want every single line commented. It's a nightmare of irritation.

Having been a TA for CS1 classes, I can understand the rationale behind it to some degree. It's ridiculous how many students go online and ask for someone to do their homework or even copy chunks of code off of stack overflow. Forcing them to explain every line is one way of judging how well they actually understand what they're writing (if they do at all). Of course it's going to be annoying to anyone who already ha…

For the first programming courses I can understand the commenting, but I've been TA for advanced courses where many of the students have passed the compiler class. They don't need comments anymore, and it really detract from the readability of the code.

Re: How to win the coding interview

#172

Post by snarfy »

pc86 wrote: post #166
snarfy wrote: post #163

> Your code should avoid breaking at all costs. This type of practice hides bugs. Whatever happened to 'fail fast, fail often'?

"Fail fast, fail often" does not refer to the build status of your project, it refers to the business . How does writing code that builds hide bugs?

Fail fast, fail often isn't just about the business. It's about code too.

If the palindrome function does not support unicode correctly, it can:

1. Try to function anyway, return true/false even without a real match

2. Detect unicode and always return false

3. Throw an exception

It would be best to throw an exception. Why is a function that doesn't support unicode being called with unicode input? That's the real error.

Re: How to win the coding interview

#173

Post by dominotw » 

  >“Is this client side or server side JavaScript?”
  >“should an empty string be considered valid input?”
  >“Do I need to handle unicode characters?”
these questions seem a bit much for a palindrome test.

Re: How to win the coding interview

#174

Post by amorphid »

jacalata wrote: post #134
amorphid wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some reasons against a 1 week working interview: * It can take up to a week just to get someone ramped up with access to things in many environments (setting up accounts, configuring dev environment, etc.) It's not free to create and disable a dev's access. * Most places I've seen aren't set up to ramp someone up in a week. I think Pivotal Labs gives people a try for 3 week contracts, and they have a culture of rampi…

Pivotal Labs definitely doesn't require a 3 week contract before hiring, and it never even came up as a theoretical option when I interviewed with them and got an offer last year.

Gotcha. Maybe the one example I am remembering is a special case, or that person simply didn't work out after three weeks.

Re: How to win the coding interview

#176

Post by mathgeek »

Merad wrote: post #159
fao_ wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For my course it is part of the criteria. They want every single line commented. It's a nightmare of irritation.

Having been a TA for CS1 classes, I can understand the rationale behind it to some degree. It's ridiculous how many students go online and ask for someone to do their homework or even copy chunks of code off of stack overflow. Forcing them to explain every line is one way of judging how well they actually understand what they're writing (if they do at all). Of course it's going to be annoying to anyone who already ha…

> It's ridiculous how many students go online and... copy chunks of code off of stack overflow.

You could easily replace "students" with "coders" and that statement is still true. Just an observation.

Re: How to win the coding interview

#177

Post by sickbeard »

>Write the most efficient function you can that determines wether a given string is a palindrome.

>When I offer a challenge like this in an interview, the first thing I’m looking for is wether or not you ask me any questions

> / * Tests wether or not a given string is a Palindrome * @param {string} stringToTest - the string to test. */

Don't take coding advice for someone who can't spell whether.

Re: How to win the coding interview

#178

Post by ogsharkman »

di4na wrote: post #139
hvidgaard wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had students that did this. It's a real pain to read code like that, and the 2nd time they handed it in, it was an automatic fail. Comments explain assumptions, and often "the why", never "the what" unless it's obscure because of optimizations.

As someone that was a student until last year, the real hard problem is that we have teachers that want this type of comments. Having different standards for different teachers the same day is a lot of context switching... A better idea would be to get a standard code style for all course...

My school actually had standard coding styles for each language they taught. Naturally, they all wanted a metric fuckton of comments (luckily the TAs didn't care as much about the comments part of those guides).

Re: How to win the coding interview

#179

Post by ionforce »

DigitalSea wrote: post #100
kayman wrote: post #36

I'm tired of companies asking me to code at their interviews. I have 10 years experience with references. I have code that I've built, deployed to production still running today. I have cultivated my own clients, gathered requirements and built something that delivers business value. Instead of a coding interview, I'll make a counter offer. Why not hire me on a 1 week contract to come and do some real world work. Wor…

I have done what you have proposed and it worked for my latest job (2 years and counting). I flat out refused a coding interview. I openly said, in my experience as a developer, great candidates fall through the cracks because they fail under a controlled environment which does not reflect the real world. They actually agreed with me. I came in and did a one week trial, I brought in my own computer, they gave me acce…

How did you have the bandwidth to work there for a week?

Re: How to win the coding interview

#180

Post by neotrinity »

sickbeard wrote: post #177

>Write the most efficient function you can that determines wether a given string is a palindrome. >When I offer a challenge like this in an interview, the first thing I’m looking for is wether or not you ask me any questions > / * Tests wether or not a given string is a Palindrome * @param {string} stringToTest - the string to test. */ Don't take coding advice for someone who can't spell whether.

Apparently wether is a castrated male sheep or a castrated male goat. Just saying.:D I have learnt something new today !
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