Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I was asked to crack a program in a job interview

erenyagdiran.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 309 posts

Re: I was asked to crack a program in a job interview

#151

Post by porpoisemonkey »

michaelchisari wrote: post #148
davidgerard wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. Testing for sysadmins is easier: you're after a way of thinking . So a competence test ("can you do what you claimed?") with a freeform "keep notes on your thinking along the way" is quite informative. You still need to interview, of course. I confess I don't know how I'd apply this to developers. They pass fizzbuzz, OK - what do you do next?

For developers that have the academics, but not the experience, I've always said that the industry needs to adopt the apprenticeship programs that other trades have. Where you do a mixture of work for the company, and trade schooling run by the industry to teach you the specific skills you need. For example, an IBEW apprentice will do a lot of gruntwork on the job site. Pulling wire, for instance. But they'll get exp…

Apprenticeship requires a constant stream of mentors. I'm not sure there is an ample supply of professional programmers who would be interested in taking on the responsibility of mentoring in addition to their full-time jobs.

Re: I was asked to crack a program in a job interview

#152

Post by [deleted] »

drblast wrote: post #60
pkaye wrote: post #22

I don't know where you find candidates that can even approach this level of skill or desire to solve puzzles. Most people I interview struggle with a few lines C program coding.

This is fairly basic stuff. If you want to meet hundreds of people who do things like this every day you could attend RECon in Montreal. Or send me an email. We're an expensive group to hire though. :-)

[deleted]

Re: I was asked to crack a program in a job interview

#153

Post by MAGZine »

chris_mahan wrote: post #139
B5geek wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A nice simple test that I like to give as a first-wave elimination: Have a computer setup and running (all properly configured). Pull the network cable out of the jack a little bit (so it looks like it's plugged in but isn't). Ask the person being interviewed to show me an IP being used by microsoft or google. (so ping/dig/nslookup/etc) Let the person know that (a) the computer is in working condition (i.e. no driver…

What if they just tell you, because they've memorized the IP address of Google? You hire on the spot then?

8.8.8.8

Job please 8-)

Re: I was asked to crack a program in a job interview

#154

Post by javajosh »

B5geek wrote: post #84
davidgerard wrote: post #46

Real-life tests are THE best thing to send job candidates. It scales well (you don't have to spend personal hours on them) and you get real information. This applies even to sysadmins. We have a favourite: set up a VM with a slightly-broken application in a slightly-broken Apache and Tomcat, and get them to ssh in and document the process of fixing it. Even people who aren't a full bottle on Tomcat will give useful i…

A nice simple test that I like to give as a first-wave elimination: Have a computer setup and running (all properly configured). Pull the network cable out of the jack a little bit (so it looks like it's plugged in but isn't). Ask the person being interviewed to show me an IP being used by microsoft or google. (so ping/dig/nslookup/etc) Let the person know that (a) the computer is in working condition (i.e. no driver…

Then...they pull out there smart phone and look it up. Moral: just because someone gives you a computer to use doesn't mean you should use it.

Re: I was asked to crack a program in a job interview

#155

Post by umurkontaci »

freehunter wrote: post #5

Really nice overview of the process. I was hoping to get into debugging and breaking code, but my career took a wild turn away from that part of the job. It's still something I would like to learn, so I'm reading as much about it as I can. I'm going to take this way off topic here, but it's a curiosity of mine. Please don't take this as an insult; it seems to be very common and as a language learner myself I'm just w…

Another Turkish here.

The spacing around punctuation in Turkish in the same as English. It's just that OP failed to spellcheck his writing.

Re: I was asked to crack a program in a job interview

#156

Post by jibberia »

chris_mahan wrote: post #139
B5geek wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A nice simple test that I like to give as a first-wave elimination: Have a computer setup and running (all properly configured). Pull the network cable out of the jack a little bit (so it looks like it's plugged in but isn't). Ask the person being interviewed to show me an IP being used by microsoft or google. (so ping/dig/nslookup/etc) Let the person know that (a) the computer is in working condition (i.e. no driver…

What if they just tell you, because they've memorized the IP address of Google? You hire on the spot then?

8.8.8.8

Re: I was asked to crack a program in a job interview

#157

Post by justincormack »

general_failure wrote: post #141
SEJeff wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://blog.docker.com/2014/06/docker-container-breakout-pro... But nothing is stopping you from creating a binary and running it as root that perhaps mounts those filesystems, or sends ioctls / badness to the kernel. I'm just shooting from the hip here and might be wrong, but I'm almost certain devices aren't namespaced. If you were to mknod a block device with the right major / minor numbers as the host's sda/sdb/e…

afaik, devices are namespaced already. http://lwn.net/Articles/564854/

No, I dont think thats upstream.

Re: I was asked to crack a program in a job interview

#158

Post by javajosh »

So the only way for programs to get data from the outside world is to poll with system calls? I always thought that programs defined a "holding area" that the kernel would write into when it had data - the program still might poll, but it's polling (potentially very small, perhaps a single register) local data rather than making a system call.

Re: I was asked to crack a program in a job interview

#159

Post by justincormack »

enjoy-your-stay wrote: post #67

Looks like he was doing this on Linux. A quick experiment shows me that you can call ptrace(PTRACE_TRACEME,..) on OSX multiple times without it failing (the constant is actually PT_TRACE_ME on darwin). I wonder if that's the same for all BSDs ? Interesting and educational writeup though, and just the thing to get me tinkering myself!

presumably it was a linux binary...

Re: I was asked to crack a program in a job interview

#160

Post by michaelchisari »

icelancer wrote: post #150
michaelchisari wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Real-life tests are THE best thing to send job candidates I agree, but only if you're allowed to use references/google/etc and given a reasonable amount of time to accomplish it. I've had a "real-life" test where I wasn't allowed to verify or look up information, or where I'm giving a very short time to execute, and I've always thought those were absurd. The idea that you would ever have to do something like this i…

>I agree, but only if you're allowed to use references/google/etc and given a reasonable amount of time to accomplish it. I've had a "real-life" test where I wasn't allowed to verify or look up information, or where I'm giving a very short time to execute, and I've always thought those were absurd. Employers that do this are ridiculous. As are educators, too. What is this, preparation for when coders are kidnapped by…

> Employers that do this are ridiculous.

In my experience, they're usually startups or smaller companies that are trying to "copy google" in their hiring practices, but don't fully think out how they're doing it. It's not a good sign.

Post reply on HN