How to Interview Engineers

Post by kafkaesq » Wed, Jun 28, 2017, 12:16 AM UTC

npizzolato wrote: post #421

BeetleB wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Being a professional programmer is not an entirely stress-free job. Often, time matters and you have to think on your feet Not once in my career had I had to fix a problem in an hour, let alone 10 minutes. I have had senior people get mad at me when I couldn't give an answer during a meeting - that's the closest to an interview type scenario where you need the answer now. But even then, I did not stress that I'd los…

Do you work on services that are expected to be working 24/7? It's not exactly uncommon for a production service to have problems and need to be fixed ASAP.

Post by bogomipz » Wed, Jun 28, 2017, 1:12 AM UTC

drewmol wrote: post #342

zippergz wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think "the final interview" means a single person. I took it to mean the onsite round, with however many people that entails, skipping the recruiter screen, phone screen, etc.

Interesting, someone clarified below that it is indeed final round. I would take it to mean 'the final interview', singular, as written. Seems misleading.

Post by deathanatos » Wed, Jun 28, 2017, 2:09 AM UTC

trishume wrote: post #193

deathanatos wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What language would you recommend using a singly-linked list in, aside from Lisp? Why is it any less valid in non-GC'd languages? (Aside from memory management in C is fraught with error, but that's a problem not unique to singly-linked lists.) I've never looked (at least, that hard) at the language; it was always a question of "is this the appropriate data structure for this task?". Linked-lists have somewhat peculi…

Linked lists make way more sense in languages with bump-pointer allocating garbage collectors specifically. In those languages (e.g Haskell, OCaml, Java) allocation is really cheap and they preserve locality so allocating all the links isn't as much of a penalty. Also if you don't have a garbage collector you have to do reference counting, and if you want parallelism your reference counting has to be atomic, which wh…

  struct LLNode {
    LLNode *next;
    LLNode *prev;  // if doubly linked
    T item;
  }

Post by nsxwolf » Wed, Jun 28, 2017, 4:23 AM UTC

kudokatz wrote: post #446

nsxwolf wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And now imagine you have 4 little kids like me and how that affects the equation! You want me to move out to Seattle, Amazon? Do you have any idea how much you'd have to pay me to have anything like the lifestyle we have in the Chicago suburbs?! The attitude out west is "You want to earn enough to raise a family? You should have thought about that before you had kids". It also seems to me that the people who have the…

> the people who have the most trouble with work/life balance in development jobs, at least out here, is that they are too afraid of saying "no" absolutely true (at least in my case). I'd rather do that than end up on the other end, though. Without stronger protections for employees, I'll hold out for a stronger financial position on my own before I start negotiating hard about "work/life balance".

Post by watwut » Wed, Jun 28, 2017, 5:51 AM UTC

kafkaesq wrote: post #422

watwut wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but here the topic is simple question being considered unfair, because someone might be too stressed. I would argue that asking questions is not unfair level of stressing people.

It's not simply a matter of "asking questions". It's about getting asked (often gratuitously difficult)† in an intrinsically awkward and confrontational situation -- quite often by someone who not only might not have adequate social skills for the task; there's a good change they may not really know why they're asking that question of you in the first place. "I dunno - they put me through this stuff, or some variant,…