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Ask HN: What did I do so wrong in this coding interview

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Re: Ask HN: What did I do so wrong in this coding interview

#41
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it seems like it. Gotta find VIM script to catch those

listchars works pretty well. I have this in my .vimrc: set list set listchars=tab:>=,trail:~,extends:>,precedes: Edit: you can also configure it to use one type of indentation. I use "set expandtab" so that my files are always indented with spaces.

Thanks for that

Re: Ask HN: What did I do so wrong in this coding interview

#42

I'm trying to figure out how much effort went into this. I ran cloc, and here's what I got: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Language files blank comment code -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Javascript 1803 66480 85484 423029 HTML 57 847 79 20374 SASS 19 21 8 12114 C++ 38 1011 763 7700 C/C++ Header 45 816 713 5165 CSS 16…

TIL about cloc! Thank you good sir. It seems as though this is because he had node_modules checked into source control on the frontend part. npm basically likes to download the whole internet when you run npm install, so these stats do not suprise me. Checking in that directory is generally discouraged, but its possible he wanted to avoid adding the node dependency in order to ease installation.

Re: Ask HN: What did I do so wrong in this coding interview

#43
post #32

Disclaimer: I'm posting this under a new dummy account because I don't want this to be seen as feedback from my company. We didn't interview you, but I'm a senior manager and I want to help w/o implicitly dragging my team into it. (The key word is also "help"; I'm not trying to belittle you, just give my honest assessment of this project, quick as it was to create.) tl;dr: I agree with the assessment that this doesn'…

So using abstraction is not something a senior does ? It seems to me like the contrary. The more experience I have the more I like to abstract things instead of making them from scratch. But even so it seems a bit heavy of judgement to disqualify me with such strong word over this choice.

Abstraction is good. Gratuitous abstraction is bad. Experienced engineers can make that distinction.

Re: Ask HN: What did I do so wrong in this coding interview

#45
post #21

It may have been a red flag if they asked you for a simple memory game with a tiny back end and you gave them a Laravel install with a Node.js dependency that you admittedly "cut corners" on and left "a couple of minor bugs" in. I don't know exactly what they were expecting from you if anything in terms of efficiency or scale but there is a chance this looks like a massive, bloated chunk of unnecessary dependencies a…

I think this is the root of it. Looking at the repo, you shouldn't have to go through 20 steps to just install the app. I believe Node is just for compiling and gulp stuff, so that's fine for front-end.

I can't say I'd pass the interview but my idea of how this would work would be:

- simple instal.php script that would use PHP's PDO to create a DB and a table with necessary info - simple api.php script that would take API calls in order to save scores and that's it. You could easily do this in Node as well thus keeping everything javascript - javascript front-end with no PHP involved there. An actual index.html file with everything in it, referencing one (non-minimized) JS file and whatever images and CSS.

This is hindsight 20/20 obviously especially since we all want to show EVERYTHING we know during an interview and I'm guilty of doing things like this as well. I'm guilty of doing the opposite too, keeping things too "prototype-y" and messy.

Re: Ask HN: What did I do so wrong in this coding interview

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With all due respect, it's a memory game, not a large-scale web application. I don't understand why "frameworks" are the answer to everything these days. There's nothing wrong with interacting directly with the DOM, especially for something like this.

Perhaps framework was the wrong choice of word. I wouldn't call jQuery a framework, but it certainly would have helped. A library like Rivets.js or similar would have been great to see as well, since at that point there'd be (close to?) 0 manual DOM manipulation required (thus obviating the need for jQuery), and he could still keep the page weight easily under 10k.

But what's the point? These days, there's not a whole lot jQuery does that can't be done easily with vanilla JavaScript. Would you rather hire someone who can write lean code with minimal dependencies or someone who throws in whatever library is getting the most buzz "just because"?

Re: Ask HN: What did I do so wrong in this coding interview

#47
post #23

Eh. These things are highly subjective. Seems competent overall: I'm not wowed, but these types of assignments are, as you surmised, about establishing baseline competency. Some thoughts for the future: 1) PHP was a bad choice; some people have a burning, irrational hatred for it, and it leads them to judge your work in the harshest light instead of an evaluative one. 2) Speaking of burning irrational hatreds: PLEASE…

(Note: the following is not criticism directed at you. I'm merely using your comment as a springboard for commentary about the industry on many matters you also show you are aware of.)

These things are highly subjective.

Yes.

leads them to judge your work in the harshest light instead of an evaluative one

Should any professionals have to present apologetics for others in his procession doing such a thing? We are all human beings, but shouldn't we be trying not to be this quickly and arbitrarily judgemental?

Speaking of burning irrational hatreds:

Somehow the social expectations of the programming profession are that we can get away with acting these out.

PLEASE DO NOT MIX TABS AND SPACES. Drives me nuts--I would have dinged you for that.

Yes. This can be problematic. The fact that it is still problematic after all these decades is a good indicator of how backwards we are as a profession.

If you look at the various analyses answering the op as detection of signalling -- well, it's all about signalling. I'm not so sure this is too much more substantive than an interview where you need to have the right school name on the right degree and a properly pressed suit.

Re: Ask HN: What did I do so wrong in this coding interview

#48
This whole interview practice seems a bit odd to me. Does anyone else out there give these types of "Homework" assignments to candidates after they've already been through HR and tech interviews? If I gave out an assignment like this at all, I'd be inclined to give it before the on-site interview as a pre-screen. I thought the whole point of such a thing would be to screen out people who can't code at all before they take up valuable man-hours interviewing, with a secondary goal of creating discussion material for a technical interview. Assuming it doesn't completely suck, I'd use part of the technical interview to discuss various aspects of the solution - the merits of frameworks used, tradeoffs of design decisions you made, what would you need to do to scale to 1M users, where are the potential performance bottlenecks and security challenges, etc.

Doing it like this makes me wonder if their real motive is something else. What are they really trying to determine with this sort of test at this time? They do it at a time where there isn't much opportunity to discuss the result, so what's the real goal? Whether, without prompting, you used their favorite language/framework/database and happen to have the same coding style as them? Seems pretty silly to me.

Did you get any possible feeling that maybe they have some hidden or political reason for not wanting to hire you, and threw this test at you as a way to create an excuse for why they won't hire you? That would explain why they gave it after the interviews and don't seem to be interested in discussing why it doesn't meet their standards.

Re: Ask HN: What did I do so wrong in this coding interview

#49

Disclaimer: I'm posting this under a new dummy account because I don't want this to be seen as feedback from my company. We didn't interview you, but I'm a senior manager and I want to help w/o implicitly dragging my team into it. (The key word is also "help"; I'm not trying to belittle you, just give my honest assessment of this project, quick as it was to create.) tl;dr: I agree with the assessment that this doesn'…

It all depends on what they asked for. Did they ask for an example of how to structure "real"-sized web-application? Because otherwise this could have been seen as a bit of overkill for something where perhaps a hundred lines of Javascript, one sql table (or some other storage) and two backend routes (post score, get scores) would have been enough.

Re: Ask HN: What did I do so wrong in this coding interview

#50

Disclaimer: I'm posting this under a new dummy account because I don't want this to be seen as feedback from my company. We didn't interview you, but I'm a senior manager and I want to help w/o implicitly dragging my team into it. (The key word is also "help"; I'm not trying to belittle you, just give my honest assessment of this project, quick as it was to create.) tl;dr: I agree with the assessment that this doesn'…

I'm not the OP but I really appreciate your answer. Thank you for taking the time.

What is the "right" amount of time/effort to put into a "job-application" project like this?

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