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

When hiring developers, have the candidate read existing code

freakingrectangle.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 565 posts

Re: When hiring developers, have the candidate read existing code

#121

Post by anyfoo »

swayvil wrote: post #2

You could ask them to show you their favorite personal projects. Have a conversation about that. Seems most natural and revealing.

I'm not looking to interview, but if I would you'd find that my personal projects fall in categories of either being:

a) outdated, because almost all work relevant to my subfield have been at my job for a some years now (and my experience has grown accordingly, since), or,

b) irrelevant, because by now my personal projects are mostly orthogonal to my job (e.g. stuff involving electrical engineering and digital signal processing), which I am absolutely not applying for.

Re: When hiring developers, have the candidate read existing code

#122

Post by teddyh »

jra_samba wrote: post #102
teddyh wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firstly, you seemed to imply that malloc(0) always, for all implementation, returns one or the other, and one of the two answers was wrong and the other was right. Secondly, why should a C application developer know enough about the implementation details of malloc() to answer such an esoteric question? Malloc can not, by definition, be implemented in C, so it seems a bit out of scope.

Of course malloc is implemented in C. Look at the glibc source code.

Malloc cannot, IIRC, be implemented in standard C only. It needs non-standard system calls. Specifically, how does malloc() itself allocate new memory?

Re: When hiring developers, have the candidate read existing code

#123

Post by dasil003 »

mhh__ wrote: post #50
andrewflnr wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, if you're a big company you can more easily afford to have false negatives than false positives, so why not add knife fighting to the list of qualifications, just in case?

arguably worse for smaller companies. if you hire the wrong person you can't even try and move them somewhere better suited to them

Hard disagree on this. Large companies can't afford false negatives because false negatives can hide out and move from team to team without detection. At a small company if the same thing happens it means leadership is incompetent and you have bigger problems anyway.

Re: When hiring developers, have the candidate read existing code

#124

Post by RosanaAnaDana »

whatshisface wrote: post #103
devoutsalsa wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took a job once because they were honest about the fact that the code was a complete shit show, and that’d I’d have to clean it up. I’m sure this is naive on some level, but I’d say you don’t have to lie to people. Just help them imagine doing the job and let them decide if that’s how they want to spend their time.

Bad code + time allowed to clean it up = perfectly well-defined business requirements + a license to think about code craftsmanship. That's a lot of people's dream job.

Its a pretty common paradigm too. Build fast, poorly, more ducttape than boiler plate, and it works.

Bring in a spit and polish crew and build towards an evergreen codebase.

Re: When hiring developers, have the candidate read existing code

#125

Post by beebmam »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #70
BFLpL0QNek wrote: post #41

I like this approach. Far to often I’ve interviewed at places and been grilled by the interviewer only to find out when you start the quality isn’t great, what you where grilled on you won’t be working on “as that’s to hard” or “we don’t do that” despite being grilled on it and the level of skill not to great they just want senior people. It’s the bait and switch. At least being taken through existing code you know w…

> Bonus points for no PR’s and trunk driven development as that shows a very mature team. I'm not sure what Trunk Driven Development is, could you elaborate?

Virtually all game companies use Trunk Based Development, in my experience, including many very large studios. (Outside of game engine development, which isn't really done by game studios anymore with a few exceptions)

Re: When hiring developers, have the candidate read existing code

#126

Post by macintux »

gaoshan wrote: post #85
Aeolun wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long is this interview? I can debug a random React app in 30 minutes, but a whole stack may be pushing it.

1 hour. The initial bug takes most people about 5 minutes or less (the console error practically tells you what to do if you actually read it)

The number of technicians who freeze when they see an error message is really discouraging.

Re: When hiring developers, have the candidate read existing code

#128

Post by SturgeonsLaw »

ddaalluu2 wrote: post #48
johnqian wrote: post #18

I sometimes ask candidates "what kind of interview do you feel would best bring out your strengths?" and try to adapt the interview to their response if I can. It's helpful if they want to talk about side projects or war stories, but doesn't pressure them to. I still give my coding challenge after. Wonder why no one else does this.

Quoted post unavailable.

> What are your strengths and weaknesses,.. hey what is this a psychological scan?

That's exactly what it is, and it's important. It's not helpful over the long run if we hire someone who can crank out good code, but their mindset negatively infects the rest of the team, causing morale to drop and people to leave.

I give technical interviews, but I'm also evaluating soft skills while I do it. I would rather have a team with ok-to-good technical skills, than a team with a rockstar prima donna who sabotages the cohesiveness of the whole.

Re: When hiring developers, have the candidate read existing code

#129

Post by yongjik »

jra_samba wrote: post #84
aunty_helen wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find questions like this lack an on-ramp. Either you know or you don't. If you don't it gives you 0 indication of the skills. I once flunked a faang interview because the interviewer mispronounced (or used the correct pronunciation I was unfamiliar with) of "arp protocol" I had no idea of what was being asked and was racking my brain for something I didn't think I had ever used to down every computer in the library…

No, that's not true. If you know anything about C and writing secure code (which I what I was probing for) you know about using malloc(). You know because you have to know something about the internals of memory management. Imagine you just read a 4 byte value off the network, and it's part of a protocol that specifies how many more bytes there are to read. You might (in error, ahem... :-) pass that value to malloc()…

Unless you are specifically hiring for low-level network performance tuning (which is not how 99% of Googlers are hired), this still seems like a trivia question that's only marginally related to a person's C(++) competency. My impression is that Google discouraged asking such questions.

Source: worked at Google.

Re: When hiring developers, have the candidate read existing code

#130

Post by sgustard »

a_square_peg wrote: post #88

Would really like to see one day a post about 'when hiring developers, read their CV and have a technical discussion about their past work in relation to the role required' becoming a thing.

I do that extensively when hiring and it is valuable. But sadly, many people can hold a technical discussion without actually being able to read/write code. I'd like my orchestra to have a lively discussion of music theory, but I still need to hear them play the violin.
Post reply on HN