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I Am a Bad Developer

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Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#181

Post by david_l »

anip wrote: post #158
lynchdt wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 oth…

I think your onto something.

As a passive job seeker, I think this is something I've used to filter out companies. Ones that want to hire someone yesterday are more likely to suffer from poor planning and may only care about short term results.

I'd rather have someone who may take 2-3 months to get up to speed, and then spend years with me returning that investment more than a simple mercenary that will be with me a year or two and then move on.

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#182

Post by rbeltran »

comet wrote: post #105

Can I please request someone here to offer this man a job? He's onto his last buffer month. He has a daughter, he's desperate & contrary to what he may believe, he IS a good developer. And yeah, please have a broad smile when you have him over. He probably needs it most right now. I'm sorry, but that was too depressing to read. We've all been through this stage of self-doubt and agony. But as they say "This too shall…

This man has a wife and kids and even though I feel for him you can't just quit your job when you have a family that relies on you. I wish him luck but there are people much worse off than this individual.

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#183

Post by danielweber »

vonmoltke wrote: post #179
edent wrote: post #159

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.

> 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.

The company will generate a very small amount of good will (maybe) by giving feedback, against the very scary chance of a lawsuit.

I wonder if there is some way we can encourage companies to provide better feedback, like positive glassdoor rankings on companies that do it.

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#184

Post by papsosouid »

typicalrunt wrote: post #51

I could have written this piece. It hit that close to home. I'm 15 years into my IT career and I can honestly say it's not getting easier. I don't believe it's an ageism thing, but just a symtom of something I still cannot put my finger on. I put myself on sabbatical after realizing that my needs were not being met on a regular basis by my job. While I'll allow short-term ROI to be negative, I will never allow my lon…

>when I type in a URL in my browser's address bar, press Enter, and then the page appears, tell me what happened technically in as low level as possible

I hope you word it much better than that. You certainly do not want to hear what happens in as low level detail as possible. You would be there for hours if I were to actually answer that. As posed, that question is demanding an answer that explains how pressing a key on a keyboard works, how the operating system handles the input, how it passes it to the program, the details of sockets programming, a lengthy discussion on DNS, ethernet, tcp/ip, switching, routing, etc, etc. Unless that question is intended to see how the interviewee handles being given vague and useless directions, it seems to be quite bad.

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#185

Post by typicalrunt »

papsosouid wrote: post #184
typicalrunt wrote: post #51

I could have written this piece. It hit that close to home. I'm 15 years into my IT career and I can honestly say it's not getting easier. I don't believe it's an ageism thing, but just a symtom of something I still cannot put my finger on. I put myself on sabbatical after realizing that my needs were not being met on a regular basis by my job. While I'll allow short-term ROI to be negative, I will never allow my lon…

>when I type in a URL in my browser's address bar, press Enter, and then the page appears, tell me what happened technically in as low level as possible I hope you word it much better than that. You certainly do not want to hear what happens in as low level detail as possible. You would be there for hours if I were to actually answer that. As posed, that question is demanding an answer that explains how pressing a ke…

Heh. Yeah I do ask it in that way and I've had a couple interviewees be cheeky and go right down to electrical signals. That's when I can see they have a bit of a sense of humour and aren't nervous. It also breaks the ice. However, I typically interrupt them and go as low as DNS routing packets and its ilk.

The reason I interrupt them when talk about electrical signals starts (or, as you mentioned, typing a key), is that I mainly hire for Web development positions and would like candidates to understand how the Web works. This knowledge is especially important for when things break down. Knowing how electrical signals work would be useful if you had to do hardware, networking, or anything else, but I just want to know that a candidate isn't just creating Web services without realizing that latency exists because of DNS routing and network hops.

Edit: clarity

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#186

Post by papsosouid »

bicknergseng wrote: post #54
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? 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…

People really need to stop lumping fizzbuzz into their hatred of "trivia" questions. You don't do variations of fizzbuzz. Fizzbuzz is not a challenge, it is not trivia, it is not a trick question or a brain teaser. It is the simplest, most inane function you can ask someone to write. It exists purely to filter out people who simply can not write any code at all. It is a test of "does this person understand the concept of a loop, and the concept of a conditional". That is it.

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#187

Post by jogjayr »

I agree with other people who say that it wasn't the best idea to take 2 months off. At the very least, you must know that a gap in your resume must look bad to recruiters. Might've been better to get a new job offer and tell them you needed a week or 2 before you could join them.

Do you have a Github profile? You sound a million times better as a developer than I am, so I'm curious as to what a "bad developer"'s Github profile looks like :)

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#188

Post by typicalrunt »

berntb wrote: post #149
thedufer wrote: post #133

Earlier 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.

true, it is not about programming, but how much programming does a programmer do? this is over a phone interview and I hate asking actual "type this code" in phone interviews. The way I view this question is the way I view, say, a carpenter. A carpenter must know the different types of wood, the milling technique, etc. Of course, they don't need to know it to any great extent, but have a rough idea because in the course of their work they might come across something new to them, and need to rely on the fundamentals.

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#189

Post by papsosouid »

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.

>They're not useful books in most jobs

Yes, I would certainly question their relevance to most jobs. But we're not talking about most jobs, we're talking specifically about software development jobs. Where they are incredibly useful.

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#190

Post by jogjayr »

jogjayr wrote: post #187

I agree with other people who say that it wasn't the best idea to take 2 months off. At the very least, you must know that a gap in your resume must look bad to recruiters. Might've been better to get a new job offer and tell them you needed a week or 2 before you could join them. Do you have a Github profile? You sound a million times better as a developer than I am, so I'm curious as to what a "bad developer"'s Git…

If you want to stay anonymous, DM me @jogjayr
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