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I Am a Bad Developer

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Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#151

Post by rejschaap »

michaelochurch wrote: post #58

Being a good programmer is not the same thing as being a good engineer or developer. Also, there are the true and corporate varieties of each. True Developer: builds technical assets (apps, scripts) based on business needs, often by self-initiated awareness of what the company's needs are. Corporate Developer: turns managerial ideas (with no audit of whether those are good ideas) into apps that sorta work, very quick…

I agree it seems OP is bad at interviewing, as well as some others who have replied to OP. It would be better to view the interviewing process as a game with a weird set of rules, half of which you don't even know when you join the game. Realize your chances of winning the game (i.e. getting the job) are generally not increased by ferociously attacking the rule book.

Also, from the companies perspective, if you can't even accept their interview process. How on earth are you going to accept all of their other wacky corporate rules you will have to comply with day-by-day. On your first day you will probably be like "I have to put my opening brackets WHERE? Dude, that's sick..." or "I can dig the spinning in my seat three times before committing code, but why the hell can't I commit when the line count of the commit is negative?"

You will not make a good corporate slave.

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#152

Post by _sabe_ »

iguana wrote: post #53
resu wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you give some examples?

Go on Dice, then search for any job listing requiring J2EE/struts/hibernate. The technical interview will consist of explaining what polymorphism is and a handful of OO design patterns like singletons and factories. Then give a poignant speech about the evils of multiple inheritance, why interfaces are better, why you love XML, why writing SQL statements in the code is wrong and the only way to talk to a DB is with O…

Why is the only way to talk to a DB with an ORM? Why cant you have SQL in the code? Sounds like you think the only way to write well structured and clean code is by introducing more layers of complexity?

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#153

Post by philwelch »

rhizome wrote: post #104
pbiggar wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Shouldn't it be OK to have a knowledge of programming that doesn't derive from the theoretical canon? You can learn programming concepts in the context of "not killing the whatever-is-relying-on-it." To be sure, not being able to reason outside of the canon is a long-standing occupational hazard and trait of the humanities, so there could be something a little more pathological in perpetuating these interviewing tech…

Big-O notation takes five minutes to comprehend. I don't see the problem.

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#154

Post by philwelch »

boyter wrote: post #108
army wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it comforting that a coworker isn't going to unknowingly hide lots of superlinear algorithms in the codebase that will blow up without warning when data sets get significantly larger than the test data. Sometimes you have to make a decision to just go with the inefficient solution, but I'd like it to be an informed decision if the codebase is one I have to work with and maintain in production.

The fact that someone can tell you what the big O of an algorithm is wont prevent that though. You would be better off following a decent peer review process and performance profiling the application.

It's not an either-or. Competent developers and teams can do both.

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#155

Post by eli_gottlieb »

mynameishere wrote: post #20
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…

Tend to agree (though it's impossible to say about any particular person.) Mentioning TAOCP and SICP at an interview (as he did in the post) would raise some alarms with me. They're not useful books in most jobs, and bringing them up just makes you look like the kind of person who doesn't understand that.

Yes, surely we wizards have no desire to leave our big dinners and comfy armchairs at the Unseen University to do any actual magic.

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#156

Post by meerita »

2 months ago I went to an interview for a hot startup here in Spain. They just were looking for an IA who can code frontend languages so even I'm working i decided to give them a shot and went to their interview.

The first thing that made me shock it was the questionary. The interviewer gave me a silly cuestionario and I totally denied at first: "I'm not gonna fill a questionary". I poped up my work, pointed him to my website, my github account and still, the guy wanted me to fill this questionary with silly questions, things like "what is "pixel perfect" for you" and such. He told me the questionary was made so they can "classify me" with the rest of the guys they were to interview.

Is this the level of recruiting startups want? I never had problems to recruit people. I dont need them to put stress on to solve problems in a blackboard nor tell them to solve my problem on the interview session. I really like to connect with people and see their interests, their capacity to evolve and grow, but testing skills is just silly.

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#157

Post by Tichy »

nevinera wrote: post #76

You had some money, and you didn't feel "fulfilled", so you took a break for a few months? And all the comments are about how poorly designed the interview process is.. The thing I want everyone to take away is "don't gamble with your fucking income." You know what's worse than ennui? Being broke and jobless is. Going into debt because of a radical misunderstanding of job markets is worse. I'm sure you are a perfectl…

Living in a permanent fear of being jobless could be quite harmful in the long run...

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#158

Post by anip »

lynchdt wrote: post #150
weareconvo wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did interviews for 5+ years at Google... the real problem is that there's no uniformity to the hiring process. I was allowed to just make up my own questions and judge candidates based on those. And I did so. And admittedly, the questions I asked were so difficult that I seriously doubt I myself could've answered them when I first got hired. But I didn't give a crap, because hiring is something you're kind of coerced…

> And admittedly, the questions I asked were so difficult that I seriously doubt I myself could've answered them when I first got hired Sometimes I have to stop myself doing this before conducting interviews. I think it's an ego thing, or perhaps an insecurity. When I worked at Amazon the culture drove this kind of rubbish and skewed our hiring process immensely. There was something perverse about being in an intervi…

There are some problems with the trial period. It doesn't account for those that don't have specific domain knowledge. From my experience, I have worked with people that have hit the ground running and been really productive straight away, but in the long run have not been as innovative as others.

I prefer to hire a candidate that might take 2-3 months to get productive but have some really innovative ideas, that others in the company might have missed. Puzzle questions do give me a sense of how someone approaches and solves problems, and I think you can infer how they will handle real problems since the building blocks to problem solving are essentially the same regardless of what domain. Solving puzzle questions is just a component of things I look for:

1. Experience in solving challenging problems 2. Good university results 3. Personality fit, easy to get along with 4. Leadership potential 5. Enthusiastic/passionate

Not all five are needed, but candidates need to be strong in more than 1-2 areas.

If you have issues with interviews specifically, you could enter a TopCoder competition, or Google Code Jam, and use that as evidence that you can solve those types of problems.

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#159

Post by edent »

Ask. For. Feedback.

Seriously, this is what annoys me most about people I've interviewed - they rarely ask why they didn't get the gig.

Sometimes because they didn't answer the coding questions, sometimes its because we found lies on their CV, or we had 3 candidates who were better qualified.

If you don't ask, you'll never know the reason.

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#160

Post by jaredsohn »

_sabe_ wrote: post #152
iguana wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go on Dice, then search for any job listing requiring J2EE/struts/hibernate. The technical interview will consist of explaining what polymorphism is and a handful of OO design patterns like singletons and factories. Then give a poignant speech about the evils of multiple inheritance, why interfaces are better, why you love XML, why writing SQL statements in the code is wrong and the only way to talk to a DB is with O…

Why is the only way to talk to a DB with an ORM? Why cant you have SQL in the code? Sounds like you think the only way to write well structured and clean code is by introducing more layers of complexity?

I don't think those are the GP's thoughts; rather the GP is saying that if you say that you have those beliefs you have a good chance of getting hired at those companies.
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