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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

#81

Post by mahesh_gkumar »

honestfeedback wrote: post #19

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 wish all companies who ask their candidates to solve a coding exercise give honest feedback like this after the end of the interview. Most times its just the canned 'Sorry you are not a fit' or the response the OP got.

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

#82

Post by msantos »

honestfeedback wrote: post #19

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'…

Your great feedback takes me back to something I've heard in a conference sometime ago.

These are not the speakers exact words but nearly..

... unless the role and the job post clearly state a particular framework as pre-requisite,

resorting to frameworks in an attempt to impress interviewers when applying to a senior role

is the worse thing you could do.

i.e. just because you know your way around Photoshop that doesn't make you a designer,

it makes you a Photoshop operator.

The same logic applies to coders who are too focus around frameworks.

They are not necessarily good programmers.

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

#83

Post by Jemaclus »

mahesh_gkumar wrote: post #81
honestfeedback wrote: post #19

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 wish all companies who ask their candidates to solve a coding exercise give honest feedback like this after the end of the interview. Most times its just the canned 'Sorry you are not a fit' or the response the OP got.

If I gave this level of feedback for every candidate I talked to, I'd never get real work done. I think there's also the idea that we don't want to burn any bridges or upset you. It's easier and safer to say "You're not a fit" than to say "Your code isn't good enough, and here are all the problems we found with it." If you take that poorly, then it stresses everyone out, and I'm at risk of getting irate emails from whoever. Furthermore, I don't want you to be badmouthing our company because you think your code is the shit and we disagree.

I think the best way to get feedback on a rejected code sample is to give your code to an objective third party and ask their opinion, like OP did here.

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

#84

Post by Jemaclus »

ufmace wrote: post #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…

We always give some sort of programming test, usually a dumbed down version of a problem we've recently solved ourselves. You shouldn't have to spend more than two hours on it, if that. Most of the time our applicants say they spent less than an hour on it. It also weeds out a non-zero number of people who aren't really super interested in the position.

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

#85

Post by ufmace »

Jemaclus wrote: post #84
ufmace wrote: post #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…

We always give some sort of programming test, usually a dumbed down version of a problem we've recently solved ourselves. You shouldn't have to spend more than two hours on it, if that. Most of the time our applicants say they spent less than an hour on it. It also weeds out a non-zero number of people who aren't really super interested in the position.

That sounds fine; it's more a question of the timing. I'm guessing you give your test before the in-person interview? That would make a lot more sense to me than doing it after, which they apparently did to OP.

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

#86

Post by ugh123 »

notaio wrote: post #14
ryen wrote: post #12

>Run sudo chmod -R 777 app/storage. Certainly opening up write access to everyone isn't going to win you any points.

I would have made it 755 on my environment but I wanted to make sure the install work properly as I know this is often a friction point during install of Laravel

Then clearly you don't understand how to use your framework, or you don't understand how to run a webserver. Saying "I would have made it.. but..." is certainly not something i'd let fly in my dev team.

I've taken a look at your code and you do not appear to be senior-level material. You managed to turn a relatively small game into 40+ files and 15+ directories of mostly useless framework fluff just to make what appears to be a mostly-javascript game.

- Trying to review your code, I have to navigate a nested tree of framework php and nodejs includes to actually discover what the heck is going on. - Why do you need nodejs for development? That just introduces yet another framework to install and deal with packaging and deployment. Why not just stick to backbone or some other minimal framework tool in javascript? You're not even importing that much useful stuff to warrant using npm. - You're doing a lot of manual dom manipulation which looks sloppy - You've committed a minified css file

Maybe some of the code you wrote might be okay, but your choice of setup and prep for a project seems pretty junior. Get some experience working with veteran developers on more complex projects (i.e. not simple web dev).

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

#87

Post by ugh123 »

notaio wrote: post #75
honestfeedback wrote: post #19

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'…

Composer is package management for PHP. Just like Gem or NPM. IMO such a test can be interesting to assess the ability of a developer to organize his logic and architect an application, but using it to evaluate the ability to produce "production ready" applications is my opinion missing the point as it's in the former that you can see the core ability of a developer while the later just requires time investment and t…

No, just stop. Listen to what the parent says here. You made it hard for anyone to review your code because of all the framework misdirection. He/she also reports on your liberal mixing of ui and game state code in javascript which points to lack of understanding of MVC, or separation-of-concerns in general.

If you want to respond, respond to those items, not excuses <- denotes junior-level mentality.

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

#89

Post by notaio »

honestfeedback wrote: post #19

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'…

Here is what I would have replied to the reviewer should he have asked:

- The choice of using a Laravel back end was an informed decision to emulate as close as possible what would be my workflow on a real life app. Beside as opposed to front-end framework it has almost no cost attached and makes the back-end more maintainable and agile - Laravel is an amazingly clean framework. Finally the assessment of the basic PHP knowledge such as using PDO to connect MYSQL had already be made on paper test so there was no point repeating this there.

- The JS is certainly not perfect, game.js could use some refactoring, but my intent was not to make a production ready app but to show that I know how to write proper and maintainable vanilla JS. Given more time I would have addressed those details (which BTW are not the real issue in that code). Also you'll notice that I chose NOT to use a framework there as it was not needed. Again this was an informed decision.

- Sudo: I was worried that whom ever would try to install the app bumped into permission issues so I tried to make easier to install. I should have made a note of that. So point taken here. As for composer, I wouldn't want to work with any company that use PHP everyday and don't know what composer is.

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

#90

Post by notaio »

ugh123 wrote: post #87
notaio wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Composer is package management for PHP. Just like Gem or NPM. IMO such a test can be interesting to assess the ability of a developer to organize his logic and architect an application, but using it to evaluate the ability to produce "production ready" applications is my opinion missing the point as it's in the former that you can see the core ability of a developer while the later just requires time investment and t…

No, just stop. Listen to what the parent says here. You made it hard for anyone to review your code because of all the framework misdirection. He/she also reports on your liberal mixing of ui and game state code in javascript which points to lack of understanding of MVC, or separation-of-concerns in general. If you want to respond, respond to those items, not excuses <- denotes junior-level mentality.

There, I posted a response, it was due.

Why the dummy account ?

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