The Mother of All Interview Questions

Post by gingerbread » Thu, Aug 04, 2011, 3:13 AM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #20

raganwald wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question of bias is an excellent one to ponder. I agree that my phrasing is biased, but so is: The last three times you faced a "build or buy (/use open source)” situation, which did you choose, and why? ...in a way, as it only covers places where there is a perception that there was a straight-up choice. One of the things I am interested in is places where the invetion-oriented folks didn’t perceive there was a…

When I was at Google I wished they had a few 'uncoders', people who made it their goal in life to leave the source tree with fewer lines of source than they found it. True story: I went to a talk given by one of the 'engineering elders' (these were low Emp# engineers who were considered quite successful and were to be emulated by the workers :-) This person stated when they came to work at Google they were given the…

Post by AaronInCincy » Thu, Aug 04, 2011, 8:34 PM UTC

api wrote: post #118

brosephius wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a startup fired you for showing initiative and doing more with less? messed up.

IMHO, I think they really fired me because I one of the co-founders didn't like me because graduated from the University of Cincinnati instead of MIT, Stanford, Harvard, etc. I figured this out later when I checked their blog and he had prominently mentioned how they like to make sure their candidates are the "right people" from the "right schools." It was a very explicit statement, essentially that being from the "r…

Post by rdingwall » Sun, Aug 14, 2011, 1:03 PM UTC

Arwill wrote: post #122

sitkack wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a working mapreduce job that was 300 lines of fairly high level java code. Compact, terse, expressive, everything you don't see in most Java. I came back over a the weekend and my boss/coworker made it 'configurable' which means he added 800 lines of code. I fucking cried. He was like, "I hoisted out some stuff that should have been behind interfaces." ... I didn't need an interface because I only had ONE and s…

"Adding interfaces" to improve is when i start to freak out too, also splitting a well-defined piece of code into multiple classes. I call that symptom "knowing object oriented programming principles too well".