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Typing the technical interview

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Re: Typing the technical interview

#41

Post by skybrian »

_ofdw wrote: post #36
mwcampbell wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the solutions shown in this series are just pointlessly esoteric. I'm not actually sure what the point of this series is.

I took it as a commentary about how stupid tech interviews are. The scenarios all present a company rejecting someone who is clearly more skilled than the interviewer.

Yeah, well, that's based on a fallacy. You're assuming that there's a single scale and being more "skilled" on that scale means you should get hired.

But that's not necessarily what interviewing is all about. Type-level programming is cool but wildly inappropriate for most jobs - that's part of the humor.

You are not your job, or your resume, or your ability to pass an interview. There are all sorts of ways people can be elite that are mostly orthogonal to a particular job.

Re: Typing the technical interview

#42

Post by fasquoika »

kabdib wrote: post #40
kybernetikos wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favourite casting of this is 'any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced'.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is insufficiently documented." [I think I coined this one, back in the day. But I was probably preceded by someone even more damaged]

And then we come full circle back to heavy wizardry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_(programming)#Variants

Re: Typing the technical interview

#43

Post by kinkrtyavimoodh »

skybrian wrote: post #17

It's odd. There are people who complain on Hacker News about interviewers who ask about algorithmic complexity: "when are we ever going to need this?" This is about wasting an interview demonstrating a semi-obscure technique that's fascinating but mostly useless, and it gets widely praised. Seems like it's just that fantasizing about turning the tables on an interviewer is fun, never mind whether it makes sense or no…

I think it's clear that the article is satire.

It obviously draws on some commonly identifiable tech interview tropes, and that's what gives it its comedic value, but I don't it intends to say that the way the witch deals with those interviews is the model way.

Re: Typing the technical interview

#44

Post by marcosdumay »

_qc3o wrote: post #33
carterschonwald wrote: post #31

This is decent prolog code ;)

Any sophisticated enough type system contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Prolog.

It's quite formally specified.

Seems to not be very bug-ridden either. But maybe somebody should code a non-backtracking operator extension for GHC. This way, next time he could claim Haskell is a dynamically typed, interpreted, lazy and not-pure language.

Re: Typing the technical interview

#48

Post by rochellle »

occultist_throw wrote: post #7

How.. beautiful. Like I said earlier in the "half-dead chicken thread", the occult is a quiet and powerful force in computer science and related areas. With things like neural networks and learning functions, we're approaching the ultimate. In this case, it was only a handful of lines of a functional language that could solve the N-Queens problem.. Of course, mixed with a bit of Lovecraftian lore and Norse magic. It'…

Take your chintzy superstitions elsewhere, smug smug.

Re: Typing the technical interview

#49

Post by jldugger »

Wazzymandias wrote: post #47

I honestly have no idea what's going on, but his writing is humorous.

As far as I can tell, this is an article teaching functional programmers LISP, using the framing of a LISP programmer who trolls a technical interviewer by writing LISP-like Haskell libraries with which to solve the n-queens problem.

Re: Typing the technical interview

#50

Post by jldugger »

idanoeman wrote: post #29
skybrian wrote: post #17

It's odd. There are people who complain on Hacker News about interviewers who ask about algorithmic complexity: "when are we ever going to need this?" This is about wasting an interview demonstrating a semi-obscure technique that's fascinating but mostly useless, and it gets widely praised. Seems like it's just that fantasizing about turning the tables on an interviewer is fun, never mind whether it makes sense or no…

Do you have no sense of humor?

On the contrary, I found his post a well crafted sendup of the typical HN commentariat who didn't get it.
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