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Tech Interview Handbook

techinterviewhandbook.org

101–110 of 132 posts

Re: Tech Interview Handbook

#101

"GPA does matter" No, it does not, unless you're a recent graduate. Absolutely nobody pays attention to your GPA, if you're more than a few years in your career.

As a new grad I didn't have my GPA on my resume and it never actually came up except for the occasional transcript request. I had a fine GPA, but not high enough for it to be a nice datapoint. I had plenty of interest with lots of companies, including many FAANGMGOEWVIOPJW companies. This was years ago though.

Googlewhack!

Re: Tech Interview Handbook

#102
post #92
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd probably be surprised how many people you've worked with who are quite competent if not really great at what they do and have gaping holes in what you might consider fundamentals.

Well what you call fundamentals might not be correlated to getting things done in day to day programming.

Think you might be confusing me with the gp :)

Re: Tech Interview Handbook

#103
post #52
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of behavioral problems are you referring to?

The inability to listen to people judge you for not knowing the answer to arbitrary and contrived problems? I’ve been a valuable professional for years, and then this little snot tells me I don’t qualify for his position because I don’t know what happens when you sum two arrays in Javascript? Fuck off.

I believe you are experiencing a 'sarchasm'.

Re: Tech Interview Handbook

#104
post #52
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of behavioral problems are you referring to?

The inability to listen to people judge you for not knowing the answer to arbitrary and contrived problems? I’ve been a valuable professional for years, and then this little snot tells me I don’t qualify for his position because I don’t know what happens when you sum two arrays in Javascript? Fuck off.

If you claimed to be an experienced JS dev, applying for a JS position, asking to be paid big bucks then yes he had every right to quiz you on that

I dont know what really happened though

Re: Tech Interview Handbook

#105
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The inability to listen to people judge you for not knowing the answer to arbitrary and contrived problems? I’ve been a valuable professional for years, and then this little snot tells me I don’t qualify for his position because I don’t know what happens when you sum two arrays in Javascript? Fuck off.

If you claimed to be an experienced JS dev, applying for a JS position, asking to be paid big bucks then yes he had every right to quiz you on that I dont know what really happened though

Except that experienced devs could well have forgotten (at least to the point of it not being in immediate recall) more than they currently "know".

I couldn't remember what happens when you sum two arrays in JS, just that it's weird and you probably shouldn't do it. So I remembered the useful part, but not the trivia.

(FYI, array1 + array2 casts the arrays to strings and then concatenates them).

Re: Tech Interview Handbook

#106
post #52
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of behavioral problems are you referring to?

The inability to listen to people judge you for not knowing the answer to arbitrary and contrived problems? I’ve been a valuable professional for years, and then this little snot tells me I don’t qualify for his position because I don’t know what happens when you sum two arrays in Javascript? Fuck off.

The irony is, not even the world's best mathematicians and engineers could safely predict what JavaScript would do when summing two arrays.

Re: Tech Interview Handbook

#107

I disagree with this resume advice actually. He for example removes that he was in the military sniper team and won best shot, but keeps high school education? I would totally say the opposite, keep the cool the side thing that's a conversation starter, but remove irrelevant educational experience. Including the number of stars on the github projects they worked on seems so.... narcissistic? Promotional? Idk but its…

It is widely suggested that resume should be as metric oriented as possible so I wouldn't think anything bad about the stars. It is similar as to "I built X to increase Y by Z.". It does show impact. Definitely wouldn't throw a resume out for something like this even if it for some reason is a pet peeve for you. However I agree that cool things like the military sniper thing should stay.

To me the stars seem more similar to likes, follows, and subs.. a popularity metric for social media. And unless it spells that they're big, it actually gives me a rather negative vibe. Assuming I'm hiring for a technical role, I'd be unimpressed to see someone attempt to flaunt the 10k karma they scored on HN or the 150 followers they got on twitter.

Also as others point out, if you don't see what their contribution is, it seems even more flaunty. "Talked to a guy with 100k karma"? It's pretty easy to sneak a few low-impact commits into big and popular projects.. (speaking as someone who's got a commit or five e.g. in Mozilla Firefox)

Re: Tech Interview Handbook

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did your CS degree cover algorithms and data structures? Did you learn Big O?

Disclaimer: Not who you are replying to. For myself at least: absolutely yes. That's actually some of the first stuff they taught us. Would I want to be interviewed on whether I can implement a linked list from the top of my head in an arbitrary language and 100% correctly in a high stress interview situation? Absolutely not. (and a linked list in the end is something really really easy if you ask me) Does that in an…

Fully will back you up on this. One does not have to be a metallurgist to be the best welder. In fact, your metallurgist might get a bit too clever playing with alloys when they need to focus more on getting the weld clean.

It’s also really downplaying how much one can learn when they need it for an application - yes it’s true you have to know about something to go after learning it, but there’s nothing stopping someone picking up a book when they get stuck to learn about what they don’t yet know.

Much of a CS course is nice to have knowledge for many programmers, and can be plenty beneficial. But a CS degree is there to show you theory not teach you how to program - the amount of people with degrees that are very poor at even basic programming is not as low as you’d think.

Re: Tech Interview Handbook

#109

I disagree with this resume advice actually. He for example removes that he was in the military sniper team and won best shot, but keeps high school education? I would totally say the opposite, keep the cool the side thing that's a conversation starter, but remove irrelevant educational experience. Including the number of stars on the github projects they worked on seems so.... narcissistic? Promotional? Idk but its…

I sometimes get extremely negative reactions from mentioning I was in the military in tech circles - I would also be cautious sometimes.

Re: Tech Interview Handbook

#110
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never put my GPA on any resume. I had a garbage GPA because the only classes I went to were CS classes so I got horrible grades in all my required electives. I was worried someone would ask and no one did.

Did you not have to submit transcripts of your results?

What can people even do with that info though? You can’t compare universities as each course is different. So I guess you can compare two people at the same university? Not very useful is it.
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