101–110 of 693 posts
I spent a few minutes trying to recall how it would work and I couldn't, and it seems like a fully working Math.pow is a little complex for a gatekeeper question – or maybe I just forgot the trick.
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That depends. Mostly because front end job listings still often list a CS degree as a requirement. Also, I think it's great when people enjoy working on the front end since I don't particularly, but I still want to work with people that aren't hyper specialized.
I think you might be underestimating the breadth of front-end skills required to properly develop, test, deploy, deliver, monitor, analyze, and optimize front-end applications. Including the myriad third-party integrations that other teams need, from CS to marketing.
"I could feel my frustration rise as I am struggling to come up with a solution on a whiteboard....yep, I am definitely not going to pass this interview. I ran out of time before coming up with a working solution." Instead of standing there with nothing its better to be straight up and just say "No idea mate" and then name reasons why that is but how you'd solve it in a normal situation. It is a lot about human psych…
Funny. I'm like that too, if the interviewer isn't focused on the actual position and what I'd be doing in it and the problem solving and knowledge surrounding the actual work I'd be doing on a day to day basis, I bail because it's a bad sign to me that I'm talking to people who are way too comfortable wasting time. But luckily I'm usually in the hiring manager's chair these days and my interviews aren't easy but the…
"I could feel my frustration rise as I am struggling to come up with a solution on a whiteboard....yep, I am definitely not going to pass this interview. I ran out of time before coming up with a working solution." Instead of standing there with nothing its better to be straight up and just say "No idea mate" and then name reasons why that is but how you'd solve it in a normal situation. It is a lot about human psych…
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Trees and graphs are fundamental to computer science and there are only two ways to traverse them. I don't know what kids are doing these days, but I learned this because of my high-school curricula. In other words, it's OK if you don't have a formal education in computer science, but when you don't have it, you need to make up for it by learning on your own, because this is basic stuff that high-school kids are lear…
I think this makes sense if you consider an interview as extending a hand to a poor, down-trodden vagrant, rather than an exchange amongst equals. The article might go over the top a bit with self-pity, but personally I just see it as suboptimal behaviour. http://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/ - Dan Luu explains better than I can. I think fundamentally the idea of paying developer X 40K and developer Y 80K (because…
From my point of view, an interview really isn't an exchange between equals, but a meetup where two parties meet, state their demands and evaluate each other. It works in both directions of course.
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It's still not realistic. People don't code on whiteboards. You code (today) with all the resources of the internet at your fingertips, and if you need to invert a binary tree you will use a well-tested implementation from a standard library.
People often do code on Whiteboards – but not actual code, but diagrams, plans, etc.
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Most specialized fields have jargon. It is the common language between the practitioners of that field. At what point should a person be expected to know some basic ideas and the words associated with them for the field they work in?
Well, if the knowledge of a particular thing is useful for that job, then yes, that's reasonable. But we know that most of the time this isn't true. If I'm a multinational company, I want my accountant to know what transfer pricing is. If I'm a self employed joiner, I don't. Problem solving tests are good. Memorization tests are terrible. We have search engines for that.
I don't consider asking a developer about basic data structures and their properties as terrible. This is foundational knowledge that is useful for nearly every programming job. Knowing about lists, hash tables, trees, etc and their operations or tradeoffs is extremely important.
Similarly, having a developer that can reason about the runtime and memory complexity of the code they write is important as well.
These are the "lingua franca" things that I was speaking about in my previous post. Even if particular developers think that the above things aren't useful to them, I would argue that they are probably wrong and just don't know how or why they are.
Is it even just hiring? Every employer I've worked for has made the experience farcical. If not at the start, then over time. You interview for one job, and eventually end up doing something else. A full time career that doesn't pay enough to buy a home. And they say software developers are overpaid. I think the end-game for me is to just go camping with a laptop or something. I'll code for fun, rather than trying to…
LOL yeah, that's what happened to me for my last job. A recruiting process that lasted 4 bloody months for an electronic designer position, and when I was finally hired they put me on software testing; not only I had never done this, but I had never heard it was a thing. Anyway, after less than 2 months I was better as this than the CS graduates who had been doing it for several years and they were asking me for help in their work.
But now I have been unemployed for 2.5 years, I made it to the interview stage only once during that time, and I have given up on even just applying to any job offer for the last 5 months because it is absolutely pointless and humiliating to be repeatedly discarded by people who are clueless, who don't give a flying fuck about the persons they "harvest" and lack the basic respect in social interactions (like spending 2 minutes of their precious time answering a question, not blatantly lying, doing what they said they'd do, or even just showing up at the very appointment themselves fixed!).
So yes, in a way, I've quitted and I am getting ready to become a street beggar when all savings are gone. In the blogger case, his situation is too fresh, I don't think his mood of the day will last long for this time (and after all, he got plenty of interviews, at least), but I am really really tired of these completely nonsensical recruiting processes and their humiliating consequences.
I'm 100% self taught, having never set foot in a CS classroom, and this is what I do for every interview process: 1. Find everything you can about company and their interview style; 2. skim over Algorithms in a Nutshell; 3. Take an hour to refresh Big O notation; 4. Read up on "best practices" for the technologies the company uses.
Finally, after the interview always follow up -- say something nice and memorable, be humble and express interest in learning their technology stack _before_ your first day on the job.
I find it takes 2-3 company's before I hit my "interviewing stride".
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IT (By IT I'm talking about my industry, I'm an IT administrator, not programming) hiring is based a lot on certifications, certifications which are abundantly easy to scam. You can find full exams with answers of CCNA and every Microsoft cert imaginable, I've worked for companies that incentivise certifications, and i watched coworkers use these 'tools' en masse to gain easy pay bumps and pad their resumes. I've had…
None of the employees I would consider working for gives f k about certifications. I agree with you that certifications are crap but I haven't encountered a single good company that cares about them.
Vastly fewer responses and recruiters on major sites, but i've got about another 6 months to go on a really interesting couple of projects at my current job, so I'm not too upset about it.