How To Hire Me (or any other programmer)

Post by mgkimsal » Fri, Mar 22, 2013, 8:36 PM UTC

niggler wrote: post #5

RandallBrown wrote: post #4

I can't even begin to describe how worthless I think most coding interviews are. Here's a contrived problem, that will never come up in our work. Now solve it by writing your code by hand without a compiler or any other tools that you would use in real life. I understand that these questions are often about seeing how you think and how you solve problems. Throwing annoyances like writing code on a whiteboard into a h…

Writing code by hand reveals far more than you give it credit for. Someone omits a semicolon? Bam, conversation about semicolons or ASI. It's not about the fanciest solution. And anyone who does it that way is foolish. It's the purest test of Language facility, and a really good springboard for all kinds of questions. Downvoters: have you actually tried to hire someone?

Post by niggler » Fri, Mar 22, 2013, 8:39 PM UTC

lessnonymous wrote: post #45

niggler wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's the purest test of Language facility" None of your alternatives "algorithms? Concurrency? Databases? Testing?" really test language facility. Those are important, and they have their place in the interview process, but so does language awareness.

Your whiteboard doesn't have an inbuilt syntax highlighter or linter that points out when I miss a semicolon. It's such a contrived situation that to expect perfectly written code is madness.

Post by irahul » Fri, Mar 22, 2013, 8:43 PM UTC

lessnonymous wrote: post #39

edw519 wrote: post #23

How to hire me: 1. Tell me about the 3 biggest things you must accomplish. 2. Tell me why you must accomplish them. 3. Tell me when you must accomplish them by. 4. Tell me how you intend to accomplish them. 5. Tell me what you're already doing to accomplish them. 6. Tell me the role you envision me playing in accomplishing them. 7. Tell me what you expect from me. 8. Put me with some of the key people already working…

(The following is made up and CERTAINLY isn't for the job I currently have open for a senior PHP dev in Melbourne.AU) Here's why you don't see question one answered honestly: A. Our sales guys sold our product based on feature "Foo" a year ago. We haven't started coding but they need a demo next week. You have to grok our codebase and write it on your first day. B. The 'Bar' feature was written by a guy who should ha…

Post by taytus » Fri, Mar 22, 2013, 8:45 PM UTC

nollidge wrote: post #61

Also stop with: interviewing based on rote memorization. Yesterday I had a really crappy (third-party!) phone screen assessing my ASP.NET and some general web dev knowledge. Questions included asking me what the stages are in the ASP.NET page life cycle, how to create Web Control in ASP.NET, what elements are new in HTML5, and how to pop up a new window in Javascript. None of which I know off the top of my head (exce…

Post by pekk » Fri, Mar 22, 2013, 8:47 PM UTC

chollida1 wrote: post #58

csmatt wrote: post #27

Excellent! Very well written and expressed. There was an interviewee here today and I heard my boss tell someone to quiz him on big-o notation. I rolled my eyes. Yesterday I had an interview that started off with "Tell me a bit about yourself." No direction as to what the interviewer wanted and, the worst part, as soon as I said I was done, he went right into asking me what the difference between "overloading" and "o…

> Yesterday I had an interview that started off with "Tell me a bit about yourself." To be fair, alot of well meaning interviewers start off that way. It's supposed to be a chance for you to mention all the good things that we may not ask about. In fact that question is so common its a good weeder question; if a person can't blow your socks off with 5 minutes then you can probably predict how the rest of the intervie…