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The best programmers are the quickest to Google

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Re: The best programmers are the quickest to Google

#81

Post by teebs »

nollidge wrote: post #49

This is something that bugs me about whiteboard-style interviews - they test almost none of the typical day-to-day aspects of programming. Without Google, without docs, without a REPL, without the code-run-debug cycle, how is it that you think you're assessing how effective I am in real life ? EDIT: not to mention that you're also not testing me for one of the most important abilities of a coder in a software shop: h…

Having gone through a handful of whiteboard-style interviews recently, I found that the opposite is true. If you can't remember the interface for hash tables in Java, for example, they usually let you make one up that you think makes sense. If you can't remember that "=" means assignment or that for loops need curly braces around them, you'll be in trouble, of course, but they'll help you with the details.

When it comes to REPL and the code-run-debug cycle, they usually ask you to explain how to code would run to them step-by-step, which simulates having a computer run it. They do the same and pipe up if you miss something. So it's not the same as running the code, but it's similar enough and it also shows how well you understand the code you're writing.

I do think that the major flaw of whiteboard interviews is that it does not show a programmer's ability to organize large amounts of code. In most programming, you won't be solving logic puzzles as much as organizing several parts and sticking them together. The organization is far more important in the long run than the individual code itself, especially since the code will likely be changed later on (which is made easier if it is well organized).

Re: The best programmers are the quickest to Google

#82

Post by polskibus »

Such thinking can only take you up to a certain level of excellence. Having admired some c++ standard committee members in action, I can say that if they had to google every harder bit, their skills would've been mediocre.

If you want to be one of the best, you need to have a local data cache instead of fetching knowledge from a remote resource.

Re: The best programmers are the quickest to Google

#83

Post by ultrasaurus »

nollidge wrote: post #49

This is something that bugs me about whiteboard-style interviews - they test almost none of the typical day-to-day aspects of programming. Without Google, without docs, without a REPL, without the code-run-debug cycle, how is it that you think you're assessing how effective I am in real life ? EDIT: not to mention that you're also not testing me for one of the most important abilities of a coder in a software shop: h…

I agree, we do the whiteboarding but what I really care about is how well you can take a problem and make a solution (that's a big part of my application process http://www.pagerduty.com/jobs/engineering/growth-and-interna... )

Re: The best programmers are the quickest to Google

#84

Post by abraininavat »

codex wrote: post #67
abraininavat wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the best doctor wrote the original material I agree with everything else in your comment, but that doesn't make sense. How do you arrive at that conclusion?

I am, admittedly, handwaving here. "Best" is so subjective that's hard to define, so I define it as "the ones who move the field forward with original work." In other contexts it could mean something completely different.

I see. Well I'd differentiate between a researcher and a clinician. The best researcher may not be the doctor you want diagnosing and treating you.

Re: The best programmers are the quickest to Google

#85

Post by arjunnarayan »

MBlume wrote: post #55
nollidge wrote: post #49

This is something that bugs me about whiteboard-style interviews - they test almost none of the typical day-to-day aspects of programming. Without Google, without docs, without a REPL, without the code-run-debug cycle, how is it that you think you're assessing how effective I am in real life ? EDIT: not to mention that you're also not testing me for one of the most important abilities of a coder in a software shop: h…

A good whiteboard interviewer will be those things for you. And language details are less important -- "well, let's both agree a for loop has this syntax for now"

Yes. A good whiteboard interviewer should constantly stipulate things that seem intuitively right, and let you use obvious helper functions that should exist in your environment, without penalizing you for getting the _name_ wrong. I.E. if we're talking java, you should be allowed to use anything that "feels" like it should be in java.util, without having to name it correctly. Because that part can be quickly googled for.

Sometimes interviewers even let me just define the signatures of helper functions whose behaviors are tedious to write out, but in words we can cleanly go over the expected behavior. I have a habit of writing "pre" and "post" documentation for functions that specify finer grained types than the porous Java type system; chalk this up to my love of OCaml, but it greatly pacifies interviewers who know that I am mentally type checking, and will let those helper functions go unimplemented.

Re: The best programmers are the quickest to Google

#86

Post by janson0 »

jfarmer wrote: post #14

Yes and no. I'm a co-founder of http://devbootcamp.com so I see this every day in the context of people learning to be programmers. "The best programmers I know understand how to architect and build large projects piece by piece. They can focus on the macro because don’t get hung up in the pieces. They know how to use Google to find solutions fast. DRY." I agree with the first and second bit and strictly speaking the…

I really agree with this analysis of the OP. It is pretty interesting to notice that as you watch other programmers you are teaching look for things on Google. That filter comes probably out of more and more googling combined with more and more programming to see which posts lead to a good solution.

Re: The best programmers are the quickest to Google

#87

Post by fyfer »

codex wrote: post #8

"The best doctors are the quickest to Google." "The best scientists are the quickest to Google." "The best engineers are the quickest to Google." Are the above statements true? Quite possibly. I would argue that the best in their fields are those writing the answers that are indexed by Google to be found by others. However, usually the best in their fields are also good at using Google. Unfortunately, the worst in th…

Absolutely.

My doctor, who is a hotshot young doctor at a hotshot medical school, impressed me by telling me she needed to look up my symptoms and then showing me what she found (and, to be fair, also referring me to an expert).

Depending on field, part of being an expert is also knowing where to look for field-specific expert information. Google is a much better search engine than the NCBI PubMed interface, but I know as a biomedical scientist that I should use PubMed or else I'll miss important research.

(Though part of being a scientist is also realizing that you're trying to understand totally new results, and google is of no use past some point. I imagine this is also true of engineers. You're building on previous work but at some point you have to move past what's been done before.)

Re: The best programmers are the quickest to Google

#89

Post by Apocryphon »

What was life like before Google? Sure there was documentation, and code comments, and senior devs you could ask. But surely that was less than Google? Or perhaps the scale of problems were less vast compared to now, so the amount of info you would get by Googling now was unnecessary back then.
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