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The Programming Interview from Hell

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Re: The Programming Interview from Hell

#61

Post by mankyd »

Apocryphon wrote: post #41
mankyd wrote: post #13

I interviewed someone who gave responses akin to "I'd Google it." When presssed, he did finally give some reasonable answers. We ended up hiring him, as we'd interviewed 10 other candidates who'd failed at that point. He ended up being a terrible employee. Seriously, when someone asks you the details of a linked list, they're not trying to find out if you will be able to use one specifically on the job. They're tryin…

If he gave reasonable answers when pressed, despite being initially resistant, it sounds like the interview didn't give any insight into whether he was a good employee or not.

It certainly did! I just didn't understand at the time not to hire employees who simply say "I'd Google it" over and over :D.

Re: The Programming Interview from Hell

#62

Post by havetocharge »

satysin wrote: post #47
kabdib wrote: post #37

The hiring manager of a small software company gave me a quick brief before handing me off to his technical heavy. "He's hard to get along with, but he's really smart. Oh, and he has two PhDs. He'll tell you that." I was ushered in. The Guy with Two PhDs (he showed me his business card first, and there were indeed two PhDs on it) asked me: "What is the simplest way to synchronize two threads?" I rattled off some sync…

If someone asks you the "best" way to do something but does not give you context for the problem being solved then the question is stupid. There is no all-purpose "best" way to do anything when it comes to complex systems. You use the "best" way for the problem in hand that may be shared memory, pipes, writing to a file, RPC, etc.

Well put. If there was the best way, then it would be the only way.

Re: The Programming Interview from Hell

#63

Post by fao_ »

fishnchips wrote: post #15

I once had to use a linked list to implement a sorting algorithm on a huge but partially sorted input. This was to detect duplications in an AST, for a static code analysis startup. This was literally the only time I professionally used any sort of non-trivial data structures and algorithms, and I've been working in the field for some 10 years now.

Wait, how is a linked list a non-trivial data structure? It just consists of: {data, pointer to next element}.

Re: The Programming Interview from Hell

#64

Post by zhte415 »

kabdib wrote: post #37

The hiring manager of a small software company gave me a quick brief before handing me off to his technical heavy. "He's hard to get along with, but he's really smart. Oh, and he has two PhDs. He'll tell you that." I was ushered in. The Guy with Two PhDs (he showed me his business card first, and there were indeed two PhDs on it) asked me: "What is the simplest way to synchronize two threads?" I rattled off some sync…

> I never found out the BEST way to share data between programs. In fact, I'm still looking. I think we all are.

Copy-paste.

Re: The Programming Interview from Hell

#65

Post by golergka »

kppiskingpp wrote: post #14
mankyd wrote: post #13

I interviewed someone who gave responses akin to "I'd Google it." When presssed, he did finally give some reasonable answers. We ended up hiring him, as we'd interviewed 10 other candidates who'd failed at that point. He ended up being a terrible employee. Seriously, when someone asks you the details of a linked list, they're not trying to find out if you will be able to use one specifically on the job. They're tryin…

linked list is not complex for christ sake.

Have you ever hired developers? FizzBuzz is still a very effective filter.

Re: The Programming Interview from Hell

#66

Post by onion2k »

kppiskingpp wrote: post #14
mankyd wrote: post #13

I interviewed someone who gave responses akin to "I'd Google it." When presssed, he did finally give some reasonable answers. We ended up hiring him, as we'd interviewed 10 other candidates who'd failed at that point. He ended up being a terrible employee. Seriously, when someone asks you the details of a linked list, they're not trying to find out if you will be able to use one specifically on the job. They're tryin…

linked list is not complex for christ sake.

linked list is not complex for christ sake

That depends on the language. If you're using something without pointers or references it's quite hard.

Re: The Programming Interview from Hell

#67

Post by tbassetto »

vinceguidry wrote: post #29

I hope I'm past the part of my career where I go on cold job interviews but if I ever had to go on another job hunt, I'd simply announce that I'm a web developer and not a algorithms person and it looks like I might not be the best fit for the position and just see how the interviewers respond. Anything less than tossing the playbook warrants a gentle suggestion that we shouldn't waste any more time here and why don'…

> I'd simply announce that I'm a web developer and not a algorithms person

A while ago I was invited at a startup for a casual discussion about an open position they had (front-end developer). I went because I knew several employees and they were nice. The casual discussion turned out to be several questions about UDP/TCP and writing algorithms on a blackboard (counting leaves in a tree, finding is a word is an anagram, etc.). Nothing really hard, but quite disconnected from the day-to-day job of a front-end developer.

Re: The Programming Interview from Hell

#68

Post by Ntrails »

zhte415 wrote: post #64
kabdib wrote: post #37

The hiring manager of a small software company gave me a quick brief before handing me off to his technical heavy. "He's hard to get along with, but he's really smart. Oh, and he has two PhDs. He'll tell you that." I was ushered in. The Guy with Two PhDs (he showed me his business card first, and there were indeed two PhDs on it) asked me: "What is the simplest way to synchronize two threads?" I rattled off some sync…

> I never found out the BEST way to share data between programs. In fact, I'm still looking. I think we all are. Copy-paste.

See, I was gonna go with Data.txt in a shared network drive.

Btw = if you're worried about conflicts - it's Ok there's a second file called "writeStatus.txt" which you have to claim by replacing the String NULL with your processId - thereby claiming write access to data.txt and causing any other processes to Thread.Sleep until it's free.

Unrelated, who's hiring...

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