This does hit close to home, I'm a great programmer but I get so nervous in interviews that half the time I can't do fizzbuzz :-(.
(I should do an AMA)
I Am a Bad Developer
171–180 of 223 posts
Re: I Am a Bad Developer
#172I think programmer interviews are really getting ridiculous. We don't ask doctors to remember details from organic chemistry during an interview. We don't ask plumbers what toilets they've unclogged in their own side projects.
Re: I Am a Bad Developer
#173Something has to drive us to get better isn't it? Everybody who is anybody goes through similar pain. The only way to get out of that feeling (IMHO) is to concentrate on what you are accomplishing everyday (as opposed to learning) that is of help to yourself and others, and then look for satisfaction from within not from others' opinion/judgment.
Re: I Am a Bad Developer
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please explain your assertion? Unless you're talking psychology, in which case please don't bother.
Out of fear you might not dare choosing a more rewarding path/job. Should be obvious? I suppose you are also at risk of working longer hours, risking your health.
I definitely do not oppose finding a new job, only quitting your old one first, which seems to be a mistake that everyone makes at most once.
Re: I Am a Bad Developer
#175To the OP: What negative feedback have you received? What have people told you you need to improve?
If that answer is "none," people aren't being honest with you and you need to find people who are.
Secondarily, are none of those people who have hired you in the past currently hiring? If they are, why aren't that asking you? May be related to point #1.
Re: I Am a Bad Developer
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Or is the hiring practice of reducing someone's technical competence to a handful of esoteric questions arbitrary and broken? Certainly the hiring practices of Google et al, generally the worst perpetrators of cs bingo in my experience. Started a startup, you say? Rebuilt a non-trivial webapp? Won a hackathon? That's great, but we're going to need you to implement red-black trees and variations of fizzbuzz until yo…
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…
The problem is a bad metric of evaluation (if not doing interviews actually looks bad at promotion time). I'd suggest that the fact that some people can look at themselves in the mirror in the morning with statisfaction while screwing over both their employer and prospective employees is also a problem.
Re: I Am a Bad Developer
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those "stupid programming puzzles" are about evaluating problem-solving abilities. Asking about architecting a system from a higher level also does this. Asking how a browser works is in the memorization category, and I just don't understand how that can give you useful information. Now you didn't give a lot of details - maybe you're upset about being asked to implement mergesort. That would also be an exercise in me…
To answer how to get an URL in detail would need understanding of the 7 layers of OSI, sockets, http/ftp/etc, SSL, html layout, keepalive, etc etc. The answer should be a really informative about how much someone understand (and check architecture grokking). [Edit: I might try this, thanks!] Cons are: It is specific to web people, of course. And not really a programming question.
On the other hand, it's a good question to see how someone handles limited or lacking knowledge, because knowing everything about an HTTP request down to the wire is hard. There is just so much going on in that stack by now.
Re: I Am a Bad Developer
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're right that it matters very little if you can deduce the exact complexity right off the bat. But it DOES matter is if you can tell if an algorithm is closer to n^2 than log n. OR identify that n is low enough that it doesn't matter. > Besides a O(N log N) algorithm over 10 or 100 items is not going to cause any issues. In the case of your standard CRUD application that's what you are going to be dealing with. I…
Going to have to ask for an example. I am yet to have seen a basic CRUD app that had performance issues due to a bad coding algorithm. Certainly from poor queries but never from an bad algorithm. Keep in mind I would say that a simple CRUD app with millions of entries is no longer a simple CRUD app.
So, the problem with your exclusion of "non-simple CRUD apps" is that simple CRUD apps have a nasty habit of ceasing to be simple.
But yeah, case in point: I ran a small BB-style web forum a number of years ago. As it grew larger (on the order of 10k posts - hardly earth shattering for a web forum), the load on the server got unsustainable, and the page loads were really slow. It turned out that the algorithm to decide if a user had seen a post was to maintain a list of seen post IDs for each user, and compare them at each page view. For active users, the number of seen posts obviously approaches the number of posts: n^2.
Re: I Am a Bad Developer
#179Ask. 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.
> Seriously, this is what annoys me most about people I've interviewed - they rarely ask why they didn't get the gig.
My guess is most of them never ask because most companies large enough to have a legal department tell their interviewers and managers not to answer that question.
Re: I Am a Bad Developer
#180>>>At many organizations I've worked at I championed automated testing
How about getting a "software engineer in test" role to begin with and then moving to dev role?