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The greatest resume I've ever seen

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Re: The greatest resume I've ever seen

#91

Post by moron4hire »

otterley wrote: post #89
dahart wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Expecting engineers to develop skills they don’t learn/use in their actual professions to prove they’re capable of working a job makes no sense. I used to feel this way, but I think I’ve changed my mind. Interviews aren’t really primarily testing for skills you’ll use day to day, they’re testing for breadth of skills and knowledge and more importantly breadth of understanding. When I’m interviewing, knowing if the…

How do these questions give you any indication that the candidate can do the essential job functions of shipping working code that is actually useful to your business and being a good teammate?

That question is impossible to answer. However, the negation is answerable. "Is the candidate incapable of the essential job function?" Questions like fizz-buzz, et. al. answer that readily.

Put up a job posting on a job board and you'll get hundreds of applications. 90% of those you're going to throw out because the resume doesn't match the job description at all. What does that tell you about the candidate pool? It's an all out assault of candidate spam. You have to employ these sorts of basic filters to even get the number of interviews you do down to a managable number.

Re: The greatest resume I've ever seen

#92

Post by dragonwriter »

moron4hire wrote: post #87
approxim8ion wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difficulty isn't the point. Your ability to invert a binary tree has very, very little to do with you writing CRUD applications.

I see this attitude all the time. It's usually from people who don't know anything about basic data structures like trees. How would you know that they don't apply? It does apply. GUIs are fundamentally tree structures. Relational databases are fundamentally tree structures. JSON documents are fundamentally tree structures. Almost everything you're touching in a CRUD app is some kind of tree and you think knowing how…

> How would you know that they don't apply?

Because implementing low level algorithms like that is almost never an issue for application programming in modern languages, for which robust libraries for such operations exist and are data agnostic.

Unless you are using Go, pretty much the only modern popular language that both features static typing and lacks generics, so that kind of algorithm re-implementation task might make some sense for screening application programmers using Go.

Re: The greatest resume I've ever seen

#93

Post by stephenhuey »

moron4hire wrote: post #43
monster_group wrote: post #7

Interviewer - "That's impressive Daniel. Now can you invert a binary tree on the whiteboard?"

Jesus christ. Inverting a binary tree is not hard. That people keep using this as a joke is more a testament to the stubbornness of people believing they shouldn't have to do no learnin' no more than it is bad interviewing practices.

Neither is counting on your fingers in binary, but would you time someone on that with a stopwatch if they would never use such a party trick during the course of a job in your company? Or perhaps we should just test their Spanish pronunciation since that would be about as relevant as inverting binary trees for any position I’ve held in 2 decades of software jobs (I’ve almost done consulting in Latin America which means my Spanish skills would be even more relevant for solving technology problems than inverting binary trees—at least for me).

Re: The greatest resume I've ever seen

#94

Post by moron4hire »

recursive wrote: post #80
eunoia wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Horizontal inversion (mirror). I was equally confused though the first time I was asked lol.

I would have called it "reversing", but I guess that sounds less technical. Now I'm confused, just in a different way. There's no obscure algorithm for this, just maybe 4 straight-forward lines, depending on language. I guess it tests whether you've ever heard of recursion. I thought the meme depended on it being some obscure, difficult, and irrelevant thing.

Well, now you know. It's a meme that has become its own meta-meme.

Re: The greatest resume I've ever seen

#95

Post by riffic »

eps wrote: post #68

tl;dr - It's a promo post for a book (at 50% off no less) and its author. The direct link to the greatest resume on question is this - https://dsresume.com

you know the book itself is highly overpriced. It'd be much more worthwhile at the $5 to $10 price point.

someone who just bought a copy to skim through.

Re: The greatest resume I've ever seen

#96

Post by mikestew »

JasonFruit wrote: post #60
madflame991 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tangential-ish: I used to live in a place where we had gas resources and gas stoves. Gas pipes would be painted yellow to stand out and people always had some sort of respect and caution around them - you don't mess with gas pipes - I learned that as a kid. At the slightest whif of gas people would light up a match or a lighter and run it along the pipe to check for leaks - I always thought this is what "smoke testin…

Use soapy water instead and watch for bubbles. Less exciting but much safer.

I recently learned that there is such a thing as "gas leak detector". Bah, looks like fancy soapy water to me. Looked up such things, and it turns out that soapy water can cause corrosion and other bad things. "Gas leak detector" also works at sub-zero Fahrenheit temperatures if one needs to check refrigerant lines. On top of that, I bought some because I need to somewhat regularly crack a propane line on the RV/camper, and it was all of $5 for what is probably a year's supply.

Re: The greatest resume I've ever seen

#97

Post by moron4hire »

dragonwriter wrote: post #92
moron4hire wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this attitude all the time. It's usually from people who don't know anything about basic data structures like trees. How would you know that they don't apply? It does apply. GUIs are fundamentally tree structures. Relational databases are fundamentally tree structures. JSON documents are fundamentally tree structures. Almost everything you're touching in a CRUD app is some kind of tree and you think knowing how…

> How would you know that they don't apply? Because implementing low level algorithms like that is almost never an issue for application programming in modern languages, for which robust libraries for such operations exist and are data agnostic. Unless you are using Go, pretty much the only modern popular language that both features static typing and lacks generics, so that kind of algorithm re-implementation task mi…

You usually have a structure that is already tree-like and need to write custom code to walk over it. If you're taking a tree-like thing and first extracting it to another tree structure just to do basic tree operations, then you're already performing tree-traversal and just wasting a lot of time, disk, CPU, and memory just to bundle every person-under-the-sun's tree structure needs into one place.

Re: The greatest resume I've ever seen

#98

Post by bryanrasmussen »

stuff4ben wrote: post #14

So... smart and gets things done. Honestly that's all I look for on a resume. You also have to talk about it in an interview. I couldn't care less if you can invert a binary tree. One of the greatest developers I've ever worked with, I hired straight out of college. He graduated with an electrical engineering degree but his senior year he took a course in Java and liked it and decided to be a programmer. Couldn't tel…

>So... smart and gets things done.

So... young and has no family or other important time-consuming commitments. That's what we're looking for!

Re: The greatest resume I've ever seen

#99

Post by moron4hire »

stephenhuey wrote: post #93
moron4hire wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jesus christ. Inverting a binary tree is not hard. That people keep using this as a joke is more a testament to the stubbornness of people believing they shouldn't have to do no learnin' no more than it is bad interviewing practices.

Neither is counting on your fingers in binary, but would you time someone on that with a stopwatch if they would never use such a party trick during the course of a job in your company? Or perhaps we should just test their Spanish pronunciation since that would be about as relevant as inverting binary trees for any position I’ve held in 2 decades of software jobs (I’ve almost done consulting in Latin America which me…

If I'm hiring you to develop GUIs and work with relational databases, I'm hiring you to work on tree structures. I think you should have to prove you aren't completely clueless about tree structures.

If I were hiring you to work on raw data streams, I'd expect you to be able to figure out how to count in binary on your fingers in 10 seconds, if you hadn't already figured it out while sitting around bored somewhere.

Re: The greatest resume I've ever seen

#100

Post by Consultant32452 »

strgcmc wrote: post #50
stuff4ben wrote: post #14

So... smart and gets things done. Honestly that's all I look for on a resume. You also have to talk about it in an interview. I couldn't care less if you can invert a binary tree. One of the greatest developers I've ever worked with, I hired straight out of college. He graduated with an electrical engineering degree but his senior year he took a course in Java and liked it and decided to be a programmer. Couldn't tel…

The trouble is, this "je ne sais quoi" that you speak of, that you "could tell he had the chops to figure things out", is unquantifiable and almost totally subjective. To be a bit blunt and cynical, this way of evaluating candidates basically boils down to, "do I like this candidate?" Your criteria for liking someone happens to be that you look for these nebulous "chops for figuring things out". What about the other…

I've been responsible for hiring for most of the last 20 years. I've literally never had a false positive where I recommended someone and they performed poorly. I have had one case where I said no, was overruled, and then the person turned out to be awful. To be fair, I have no idea how many false negatives I've had where I said no but they would've been great.

I'm always puzzled by people/companies who find this difficult. I don't believe for a second that my intuition is magical. I have a very simple interview process and it works really well. I just ask you what you did, and then I keep asking you increasingly more complex or detailed questions about what you said you did until one of us hits our boundary of knowledge. Then I ask a couple of social questions, usually in the form of "Have you ever dealt with x kind of situation?"

Funny anecdote, I asked one guy if he'd ever had a coworker he had personal issues with. He told me some guy made a racist comment and his response was to ask the guy to step outside to fight. We did not hire that guy.

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