Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We created a new programming language just for our interview process

blog.momocentral.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 25 posts

Re: We created a new programming language just for our interview process

#2

Post by uberman »

I guess if they really wanted to:

"...hire not only coders who are familiar with today’s technology but those who are capable of learning any new technologies that spring up in the future."

But it seems like a vanity project with brogrammer goals and a huge waste of resources.

I personally feel that interview gimmicks like this are a major reason we lack diversity in our field. Want to keep marginalized candidates out of your organization? Create a gimmick to intimidate and mock them during the interview process. Then sit back and pat yourself on the back for being so clever.

This is like looking to hire an English teacher then asking them to prove they can teach in Esperanto in order to get a job.

Re: We created a new programming language just for our interview process

#6

Post by seattle_spring »

uberman wrote: post #2

I guess if they really wanted to: "...hire not only coders who are familiar with today’s technology but those who are capable of learning any new technologies that spring up in the future." But it seems like a vanity project with brogrammer goals and a huge waste of resources. I personally feel that interview gimmicks like this are a major reason we lack diversity in our field. Want to keep marginalized candidates ou…

> brogrammer goals

What exactly are "brogrammer goals"?

Re: We created a new programming language just for our interview process

#7

Post by uberman »

seattle_spring wrote: post #6
uberman wrote: post #2

I guess if they really wanted to: "...hire not only coders who are familiar with today’s technology but those who are capable of learning any new technologies that spring up in the future." But it seems like a vanity project with brogrammer goals and a huge waste of resources. I personally feel that interview gimmicks like this are a major reason we lack diversity in our field. Want to keep marginalized candidates ou…

> brogrammer goals What exactly are "brogrammer goals"?

When you go out of your way to create a programming language for interviews that says to me that you think you are smarter than everyone else and you have nothing better to do than prove it by belittling candidates until you find one with the balls to push back. That is a brogrammer move.

Further, I'll naturally assume your entire workplace culture is poisoned by code ownership and interpersonal hostility and that your most promising employees "failed" your recruiting tests or quit following an endless barrage of bike shedding code reviews.

I've already done enough "ping-pong balls in the aircraft" nonsense that I tell recruiters up front that questions like these and other make work tasks designed to make the interviewer feel superior will simply not be tolerated and I will and have walked out of such interviews.

I once was interviewed for a C# position but then when on site asked to complete a coding assignment in Visual Basic on a computer with no mouse. I told them to go fornicate themselves just as I would today if asked to compete coding tasks in some made up language.

Re: We created a new programming language just for our interview process

#9

Post by eyelidlessness »

This feels so almost right and so full of footguns at the same time. Learning a New Language is something that can be 2-3 weeks or several months or even years. Learning a New API should be N + M where N is the complexity of understanding ~basically what’s being expressed and M is the complexity of the API. (With a big amount of wiggle room for wildly different abstract concepts)

I’m all for “we created a new language for interviewing”, but I think its primary goal should be resiliency from language unfamiliarity (eg it must be both interpreted and reasonably able to translate approximately correct pseudocode to whatever its runtime or compiled code expectations), and then you can evaluate how people interact with the new API they learned.

Re: We created a new programming language just for our interview process

#10

Post by eyelidlessness »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #9

This feels so almost right and so full of footguns at the same time. Learning a New Language is something that can be 2-3 weeks or several months or even years. Learning a New API should be N + M where N is the complexity of understanding ~basically what’s being expressed and M is the complexity of the API. (With a big amount of wiggle room for wildly different abstract concepts) I’m all for “we created a new languag…

And I don’t even know if any of that’s realistically achievable but I’d find it much more valuable than evaluating also can you learn an in-house private language while trying to demonstrate you can code?
Post reply on HN