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I Am a Bad Developer

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Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#31

Post by dclowd9901 »

I just turned someone down today who was by all accounts competent, but just came across as the kind of person I wouldn't want to work with.

You might want to take a lot more time working on that personality if yours. Everything you wrote in your post and your post's general tone screamed to me "humorless with a chip on his shoulder."

And dump the self deprecation bit. No one's gonna hold your hand here. I doubt you're a bad programmer, I just think you suck at being likable. Shitty, I know. Now do something about it. Much more than you've been doing. Be approachable. Politics will always get your much further than skill.

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#32

Post by redact207 »

dpiers wrote: post #22

On Friday I had a remote interview where I was asked to search for the value closest to X in a sorted 2D array (columns and rows are both sorted in increasing order). I came up with a trivial solution to find a specific value, but got tripped up modifying it to find an unknown value that could be higher or lower than the target. I have not heard back from the company. On Saturday/Sunday, I went to AngelHack SF and di…

Or is the hiring practice of reducing someone's technical competence to a handful of esoteric questions arbitrary and broken

The irony is whenever someone posts some esoteric "gotcha" programming trick here on HN, inevitably there'll be comments like "have to include this in our next interviews."

So what would you do differently? This is a genuine question after I came off 3 months of interviewing daily. I'm curious what does represent a good developer and how to decide this in 30 minutes over the phone? What's important? - Past projects? - Communication? - Open source contributions? - Ability to write code? - Telling me how they'd Google a problem? - How to break down problems? - Some % combination of these?

My interviews are generally structured: 10 min: introduction to the role, expectations, motivations, try to start a conversation, get a feel for the candidate, nerves etc 15 min: technical questions: - fundamentals on the job's tech stack (must provide code) - turning a requirement into a design - troubleshooting issues (db performance, web server issues) 5 min: - wrap up, q&a

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#33

Post by boyter »

arghbleargh wrote: post #26
nixy wrote: post #17

Anecdotally I have come across developers that match the description the OP gives of himself. They read a lot of papers, they know a lot about the inner workings of many common and obscure programming languages. Many know and love development process theory and they contribute to open source projects. Here is the but: when push comes to shove, they can't deliver to production. I've seen many smart coders falling shor…

It's clear that the author is very motivated and probably pretty smart, but I wonder if there might be some gaps in his knowledge foundation. I was surprised for example that he was learning about information theory, and yet he had trouble analyzing the computational complexity of a function that he coded.

Not sure if that's really relevant. Unless you are applying for a job where time is money stock trading or some such I don't see how knowing a method you are writing is O(log N) rather then O(N2) is useful. Its something to keep in mind sure, but I would rather have the slower method integrated into the code base faster.

Yes performance is a feature but realistically you can get away with some fairly awfully performing code for a long time in most situations.

I remember a conversation a while ago where people we asking if you could have a language that offered X increase in performance over C for X increase in processing time what value of X would you pick? In most cases people are willing to trade a lot of performance for a lot of productivity.

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#34

Post by gizmo686 »

boyter wrote: post #33
arghbleargh wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's clear that the author is very motivated and probably pretty smart, but I wonder if there might be some gaps in his knowledge foundation. I was surprised for example that he was learning about information theory, and yet he had trouble analyzing the computational complexity of a function that he coded.

Not sure if that's really relevant. Unless you are applying for a job where time is money stock trading or some such I don't see how knowing a method you are writing is O(log N) rather then O(N2) is useful. Its something to keep in mind sure, but I would rather have the slower method integrated into the code base faster. Yes performance is a feature but realistically you can get away with some fairly awfully performi…

Knowing the time complexity a given function you write is generally not important. However, the skill to analyze the complexity is an important one to have, because when performance issues to come up, it is often a very powerful tool to have.

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#35

Post by mseebach »

boyter wrote: post #33
arghbleargh wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's clear that the author is very motivated and probably pretty smart, but I wonder if there might be some gaps in his knowledge foundation. I was surprised for example that he was learning about information theory, and yet he had trouble analyzing the computational complexity of a function that he coded.

Not sure if that's really relevant. Unless you are applying for a job where time is money stock trading or some such I don't see how knowing a method you are writing is O(log N) rather then O(N2) is useful. Its something to keep in mind sure, but I would rather have the slower method integrated into the code base faster. Yes performance is a feature but realistically you can get away with some fairly awfully performi…

You should probably read up on why this is, in fact, important before your next interview. Just a free piece of advice.

O(N^2) means that your operation gets n times slower each time n increases.

2000^2 is 4 million. (n log n = 6600)

200,000^2 is 40 billion. (n log n = 1 million)

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#36

Post by pbiggar »

barce wrote: post #23
dpiers wrote: post #22

On Friday I had a remote interview where I was asked to search for the value closest to X in a sorted 2D array (columns and rows are both sorted in increasing order). I came up with a trivial solution to find a specific value, but got tripped up modifying it to find an unknown value that could be higher or lower than the target. I have not heard back from the company. On Saturday/Sunday, I went to AngelHack SF and di…

Ya, I've been the victim of "couldn't balance a B-Tree fast enough so you're not hired but you'll never see a B-Tree at work." You mention that there isn't a better solution. IMHO, I disagree. I think Github has figured out a way. They've been around 5 years and haven't fired anybody and nobody has quit. Most firings are due to a job / job skill mismatch. At Github, they do a week long paid interview so both sides re…

What make you think GitHub haven't fired anybody? I don't know that they have, but it seems very unlikely.

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#37

Post by rubinelli »

dpiers wrote: post #22

On Friday I had a remote interview where I was asked to search for the value closest to X in a sorted 2D array (columns and rows are both sorted in increasing order). I came up with a trivial solution to find a specific value, but got tripped up modifying it to find an unknown value that could be higher or lower than the target. I have not heard back from the company. On Saturday/Sunday, I went to AngelHack SF and di…

First, congratulations. Good luck wherever you choose to go.

It may be counter-intuitive, but the more qualified you are, the longer you have to look for a job. A fresh-faced junior developer just out of college can be hired pretty quickly, because he/she isn't a big risk: the salary is lower, the responsibility is lower, and it's assumed there will be some adult supervision from an experienced developer. A senior developer is expected to hit the ground running, and a bad fit can create a lot of team friction and technical debt in a short time. (And your own standards are higher, so not every company will do.)

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#38

Post by pbiggar »

boyter wrote: post #33
arghbleargh wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's clear that the author is very motivated and probably pretty smart, but I wonder if there might be some gaps in his knowledge foundation. I was surprised for example that he was learning about information theory, and yet he had trouble analyzing the computational complexity of a function that he coded.

Not sure if that's really relevant. Unless you are applying for a job where time is money stock trading or some such I don't see how knowing a method you are writing is O(log N) rather then O(N2) is useful. Its something to keep in mind sure, but I would rather have the slower method integrated into the code base faster. Yes performance is a feature but realistically you can get away with some fairly awfully performi…

If you put an O(N^2) algorithm in production, you'll kill whatever relies on it. If that's our funnel, we're out of business. If its our DB, it'll go on fire. Not being able to reason about complexity is a no-hire for me.

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#39

Post by jradakov »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #31

I just turned someone down today who was by all accounts competent, but just came across as the kind of person I wouldn't want to work with. You might want to take a lot more time working on that personality if yours. Everything you wrote in your post and your post's general tone screamed to me "humorless with a chip on his shoulder." And dump the self deprecation bit. No one's gonna hold your hand here. I doubt you'…

I think the guy was just being honest. I've never been in his situation before, as I subscribe to the notion of not leaving an opportunity until you have another sure fire opportunity (I know this isn't a popular outlook here), but I bet he's scared and just did a brain dump of his feelings.

I don't know the guy, so I'm not qualified to comment on his personality. From the several paragraphs I have to decipher his personality, he doesn't seem like a bad guy, and he seems to be good at communicating his thoughts. Maybe he's just looking for jobs in all the wrong places?

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#40

Post by cafard »

Four months and 10 interviews does not sound like that much. It is unfortunate that he is looking at strained finances.

I know a certain number of young women (not long out of college) whose fathers are about my age. As far as I can tell, mostly these women think well of their fathers, for all that the fathers mostly have pretty quotidian jobs. Show up, provide a sense of security, provide some discipline for the kid to push back against, and you're probably fine.

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