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More on Hiring Software Developers

hesh.am

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Re: More on Hiring Software Developers

#11

Post by invalidOrTaken »

johnnyfaehell wrote: post #2

Seems to me like, you may not be as good as you think. If throwing a RSS feed at throws you then how you going to deal with real life legacy(sometimes not so legacy) crazyness?

Fairly easily? If you're maintaining legacy code, here's what happens: you dive in, are horribly confused, and figure it out. Aaaaaaand...now you know it. Who cares if it took you three days to figure it out? You're going to be maintaining that codebase for a long time, aren't you?

We're kidding ourselves if we believe that our dev work is "all-new algorithms, all the time." It's not.

Re: More on Hiring Software Developers

#12

Post by ronilan »

It's like, really, totally, entirely, off-topic, but, like I heard, somewhere, that some companies, like might, may be using, sometime, the following puzzle in their hiring process:

Imagine a world in which:

1. A players hire only A players;

2. B players hire C players; and C players hire D players etc. all the way down to Z players.

Assume that:

1. The trickle-down effect from B to Z causes bozo explosions in companies.

2. Bozo explosions are bad.

3. No one knows what letter player they are.

Develop a computer vision algorithm to minimize the risk of a bozo explosion.

edit: puzzle concept source: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/391717-steve-jobs-has-a-say...

Re: More on Hiring Software Developers

#13

Post by johnnyfaehell »

invalidOrTaken wrote: post #11
johnnyfaehell wrote: post #2

Seems to me like, you may not be as good as you think. If throwing a RSS feed at throws you then how you going to deal with real life legacy(sometimes not so legacy) crazyness?

Fairly easily? If you're maintaining legacy code, here's what happens: you dive in, are horribly confused, and figure it out. Aaaaaaand...now you know it. Who cares if it took you three days to figure it out? You're going to be maintaining that codebase for a long time, aren't you? We're kidding ourselves if we believe that our dev work is "all-new algorithms, all the time." It's not.

Who cares? Stakeholders who are pissed of the legacy system isn't working and want it fixed now. If it's legacy and you're changing it, it's generally because it's broken and someone finally noticed.

Re: More on Hiring Software Developers

#15

Post by thezoid »

ronilan wrote: post #12

It's like, really, totally, entirely, off-topic, but, like I heard, somewhere, that some companies, like might, may be using, sometime, the following puzzle in their hiring process: Imagine a world in which: 1. A players hire only A players; 2. B players hire C players; and C players hire D players etc. all the way down to Z players. Assume that: 1. The trickle-down effect from B to Z causes bozo explosions in compan…

A players should work on pulling people in other categories into their category. If everyone works on making everybody better you can make the place better.

Rejecting people because they don't match your idea of an A player (I'm assuming 'perfection') is pretty narrow minded.

Re: More on Hiring Software Developers

#16

Post by thezoid »

jheriko wrote: post #10

"I took me 2 hours to figure out how to parse the RSS feed, extract the data I need using regex (since it was all inside a single tag) and present it in a table view." i hate to be negative or damning in anyway - you make many valid points. however what you did there is an awful performance imo. i suspect it comes from living in web circles too much. i mean... you used a regex? this is one of the rare cases where i w…

Let's throw you into a high stress environment give you data you've never worked with before and on top of that, just for funzies throw some namespaced SOAP at you. Oh and here's the WSDL, we want you to use that too, no parsing it on your own by hand.

A lot of people don't parse XML as much anymore. Most API providers have moved over serving up JSON and pretty much ask developers to only use that API.

Also this company fucked up. So you can't provide access to an API, but here read this RSS feed instead of something like serving up a static JSON file from a server somewhere.

As for the regex there's shipping, and there's doing it right. For all we know, they had to have it done before the 2 hours were up so they cut corners and got it done within the time requirement.

Re: More on Hiring Software Developers

#18

Post by ricardobeat »

thezoid wrote: post #16
jheriko wrote: post #10

"I took me 2 hours to figure out how to parse the RSS feed, extract the data I need using regex (since it was all inside a single tag) and present it in a table view." i hate to be negative or damning in anyway - you make many valid points. however what you did there is an awful performance imo. i suspect it comes from living in web circles too much. i mean... you used a regex? this is one of the rare cases where i w…

Let's throw you into a high stress environment give you data you've never worked with before and on top of that, just for funzies throw some namespaced SOAP at you. Oh and here's the WSDL, we want you to use that too, no parsing it on your own by hand. A lot of people don't parse XML as much anymore. Most API providers have moved over serving up JSON and pretty much ask developers to only use that API. Also this comp…

Reading a XML feed instead of JSON is not comparable in difficulty to your examples at all. Getting XML parsed is not rocket science, just use a library. That was probably not the hardest part of the problem.

We have no idea where the expectation of working with their JSON API on the interview came from, the RSS feed could be their standard test problem. They didn't "fuck up", I'd even say their filter (reasonable or not) is working as intended.

Re: More on Hiring Software Developers

#19

Post by ricardobeat »

ronaldx wrote: post #4
johnnyfaehell wrote: post #2

Seems to me like, you may not be as good as you think. If throwing a RSS feed at throws you then how you going to deal with real life legacy(sometimes not so legacy) crazyness?

You seem to have missed the point. Consider the following two developers. Who would you rather hire, and who will get hired under this system? 1. Developer completes the task, unfamiliar to them, in 2 hours, or 2. Developer completes the task, familiar to them, in 1.5 hours?

Maybe I'm biased (no Objective-C experience), but in the platforms I work with this is a 15-minute task, so I wouldn't hire either. There is nothing extraordinary about being familiar with XML or regular expressions.

Re: More on Hiring Software Developers

#20

Post by Xdes »

jheriko wrote: post #10

"I took me 2 hours to figure out how to parse the RSS feed, extract the data I need using regex (since it was all inside a single tag) and present it in a table view." i hate to be negative or damning in anyway - you make many valid points. however what you did there is an awful performance imo. i suspect it comes from living in web circles too much. i mean... you used a regex? this is one of the rare cases where i w…

>i mean... you used a regex?

That was my initial impression, but after I reread the sentence I interpreted it as he used an RSS parser to get to the element with the data and then used a regex to extract the information from the data.

He didn't specify how the data was formatted inside the RSS element which leaves me to believe it might be something custom and not a simple CSV. This would be a perfectly valid use case for a regex.

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