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The greatest resume I've ever seen

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Re: The greatest resume I've ever seen

#131

Post by bradleysmith »

JshWright wrote: post #28

"Until I met Daniel, I actually didn't know that "smoke testing" was a term with a literal smoke-related meaning. I'd always heard it used in the context of software tests. Daniel used a tracing technique to follow a problem to its source, instead of just making random guesses." I've always known "smoke testing" to refer to the mythical magic smoke that makes all electronics work. Smoke testing is turning something o…

I've also heard 'smoke testing' refer to sending power to a device or component to see if any magic smoke comes out.

But... I've also seen smoke testing used in automotive and engine diagnostics which could predate or parallel this usage in electronics.

https://mechanics.stackexchange.com/questions/26749/what-is-...

I should imagine this method of troubleshooting sealed hollow-body systems of any kind have been around for a long time.

a quick search yielded a wiki article stating the method being used for sewers since at 1875.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_testing_(mechanical)#cit...

edit: format

Re: The greatest resume I've ever seen

#132

Post by cromka »

mediaman wrote: post #86
jasonpeacock wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> She would culturally fit What does this mean? This is a very loaded term, and without qualitative data it results in biased hiring. Usually, it means "she's young, white, and college educated, just like the rest of us". People don't need to culturally fit to excel at a role.

I agree, "cultural fit" often has biased results. But "cultural fit" is still necessary but must be defined carefully. If a company doesn't care about culture fit when hiring people, it will become a very bad place to work. Questions to address when determining cultural fit: - How does this person resolve conflict with peers? With managers? - How does this person advocate for change in the workplace? - Does this pers…

What you described is what used to be (still is?) called “soft skills”. This is not, from my experience, what people understand by “cultural fit”. At least in NYC it really meant exactly all that you mentioned on your second list.

Re: The greatest resume I've ever seen

#133

Post by jasonladuke0311 »

Kranar wrote: post #72
strgcmc wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Exactly, it's so sad hearing someone not realize that their hiring process is basically discriminatory in nature. Can you tell someone had the chops to figure things out if they came from a different cultural background than one you're familiar with? If they had a different social upbringing from yours? If they presented themselves in a way that you personally misunderstood but someone else would have been completely…

> Exactly, it's so sad hearing someone not realize that their hiring process is basically discriminatory in nature.

Leetcode and take-home assignments, to some degree, filter for younger people. I don't think too many people are going to solve two Leetcode hard questions in 45 minutes without some practice. I suspect this is a feature, not a bug, but I will take off my tinfoil hat now.

Whether or not you like it, people want to work with people they think they will get along with. Someone can crush objective screens but maybe they come off as arrogant or potentially difficult to work with.

Re: The greatest resume I've ever seen

#134

Post by dahart »

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?

This is a good question. However, there is nothing that will tell you this reliably aside from employing the person.

Most people who are smart and get things done will be capable of shipping code, if they can stay motivated. And that’s where having some signal about their interest can help. I want to know if people can inspire their teammates, not just get along, I want to know if they can lead by example, whether they’ll rise quickly, and whether they’ll love it for many years. The essential job functions are just plumbing, the important parts are more than that and aren’t demonstrated by evaluating for narrow, specific job skills.

Look, I don’t in a million years think grinding on Leetcode is some singular answer, or even particularly good. But I don’t see anything wrong with people who are interested doing it, and I also don’t see anything wrong with asking interview questions. I never put a huge weight on such algorithm questions, and there are a dozen other major interview categories. So there’s nothing wrong with asking a few algorithm theory questions, to see the bounds of what people know. I like getting into questions that people don’t know the answer to, whether it opens a conversation about what it means, or whether the candidate has no idea or doesn’t care, that is a small amount of useful signal to me.

Re: The greatest resume I've ever seen

#135

Post by stephenhuey »

moron4hire wrote: post #99
stephenhuey wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So, I just read more about what you do, and you do some cool stuff. I know a ton of developers and most of them do nothing like what you do. The point is lots of people are annoyed at being asked interview questions about things unrelated to the job.

Re: The greatest resume I've ever seen

#136

Post by TheCoelacanth »

mcntsh wrote: post #53
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.

> shouldn't have to do no learnin' 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. If these leetcode puzzles were actually relevant, why do so many engineers have to spend time outside of work "grinding" in order to get better at them?

Inverting a binary tree is nothing but basic pointer-chasing and recursion. Both skills that software engineers need.

It's like a chef complaining about being asked to make a fried egg. They might not be making that exact food in their job, but it's trivial for anyone proficient with the basic techniques that they need in their job.

Re: The greatest resume I've ever seen

#137

Post by JBlue42 »

riffic wrote: post #95
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.

Agreed. It's 133 pages. Content is good for those like myself trying to answer "Where to start" with cloud stuff. Still cheaper than LinuxAcademy/ACloudGuru. If it leads to a six-figure career, a $24 investment is worth it I guess.

Re: The greatest resume I've ever seen

#138

Post by effingwewt »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #113
anamax wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plumbers are essential for civilization. Pretty much everyone else isn't.

If I had to pick one essential profession it would be farmers. Even with peak efficiency it's work that must be done to sustain modern population sizes.

No, it's truly plumbing. We could not have any human gatherings close to what we have without plumbing.

People could grow their own food, eat straight nutrients if we had to.

Without plumbing you have no waste drain and no flowing water. I imagine you forgot about the irrigation aspect of farming.

Discovering plumbing, waste disposal and aqueducts[1] allow society to live in close quarters.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_aqueduct

Re: The greatest resume I've ever seen

#139

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #106
moron4hire wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> you're taking a tree-like thing and first extracting it to another tree structure just to do basic tree operations, Why would you do that? The whole point of libraries of generic operations is that you can apply them to thing you have without copying.

So who writes the libraries? It certainly isn't people who can't manipulate tree structures.

Re: The greatest resume I've ever seen

#140

Post by eps »

mcntsh wrote: post #126
eps wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reversing a tree is not a skill . It's a test of rudimentary experience working with fundamental data strutures. You are not expected to know the solution, but you are expected to produce one if asked. "Leetcode puzzles"... jeez.

Again, if this "experience" so "rudimentary", why do top engineers spend time on leetcode trying to get better for interviews? Wouldn't this "rudimentary" experience be learned through their, you know, actual work experience?

Because these "top engineers" are self-taught with massive gaps in their base CS education? Reversing a tree tests for the knowledge of binary trees and recursion, which is... what?... a second year of a CS program, conservatively?
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