131–140 of 160 posts
Lots of folks are good at doing the job but bad at interviewing for jobs. Interview prep is a massive industry. Like with any skill, practice helps. It sounds like you dont really care that you dont do exceptionally well at interview. But if you wanted to improve that skill you could focus some time on it. Think of another skill you only use once every year or two. You are not going to be fantastic at it. I've played…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
OP seems more of a 10x dude IMHO
My fear is, I see many 0.5x programmers / workers who are active drag on products and teams. :-/ The problem with these workers are, the more you have these people on the team, it has a multiplying effect instead of additive in terms of productivity. 0.5x0.5x0.5 (not 0.5+0.5+0.5)
Companies need those 10xdevs because they are bloated with dead weight.
But office politics make it very hard to cut that dead weight.
For a recent interview I was asked to build an IOC dependency injection library in 2h and the task was made “deliberately” unclear according to the interviewer. So I spent 2 days researching IOC libraries, building some nice examples of how it should work to get a feel for the API, writing tests up front, writing the library and adding docs. Then I got an interview! Fantastic I thought, I passed the technical with my…
For better or worse, when I was interviewing developers I would give specifically vague requirements, since requirement gathering is a skill that I think (senior) developers must have. I don't think that's a useful thing to do in a take-home assignment, though, since you can't clarify requirements with your client in that situation. That said, I admit that I would also expect error handling to be addressed in any pie…
I did this for a while and realized that it typically panicked the people we were interviewing, especially if they were on the junior/mid side of things and as a result, gave lower-quality answers.
> I would also expect error handling to be addressed in any piece of software written for any purpose
I guess it depends on what people are hiring for but in the long list of things I need out of that person, this ends up lower on the list
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It seems like this would also select the kind of engineers who aren’t willing to say “no, that’s a dumb approach, we shouldn’t do that, here’s an alternative”? This is exactly the reason why any big enough company is eventually going to s*hit And why founding team doesn’t stay long in a successful startup.
> And why founding team doesn’t stay long in a successful startup. Doesn't the founding team get to determine the hiring practices?
Reading through your post, I am noticing some trivial English mistakes that are common to non-native speakers. It's worth knowing that while you have successfully articulated everything, some people will still see your mistakes as red flags for future communication. Some might even assume that you will be making trivial code mistakes, too; despite there being no evidence of that. That kind of prejudice is common, and…
That is true. I am not a native English speaker. I should work on my English skill though.
Unfortunately, we can't expect all the people we work with to overcome their prejudices, so it's probably still useful for you to improve your English skills.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had an extraordinarily painful conversation with someone who had done pretty well in our DS class but didn’t have a ton of practical experience. Me: “why don’t you just use a hash table here? That array you’re iterating through each time has like 200,000 entries” Him: “I can’t. I need to be able to get both the key and the value and hash tables don’t store the key” Me: “…sigh, school has failed us again”
> someone who had done pretty well in our DS > Him: “I can’t. I need to be able to get both the key and the value and hash tables don’t store the key” How could he do well in the data structures class? This is the definition of a hash map or hashed dictionary, so this is basic knowledge of data structures that is taught in this class and central to know to even have a chance of passing the exam.
For a recent interview I was asked to build an IOC dependency injection library in 2h and the task was made “deliberately” unclear according to the interviewer. So I spent 2 days researching IOC libraries, building some nice examples of how it should work to get a feel for the API, writing tests up front, writing the library and adding docs. Then I got an interview! Fantastic I thought, I passed the technical with my…
For better or worse, when I was interviewing developers I would give specifically vague requirements, since requirement gathering is a skill that I think (senior) developers must have. I don't think that's a useful thing to do in a take-home assignment, though, since you can't clarify requirements with your client in that situation. That said, I admit that I would also expect error handling to be addressed in any pie…
I always view assignments and live coding in interviews as a startup that has runway of an hour or two. Would error handling help this startup survive another day? No. But properly covering the main use case - may in fact be.
It's fair to want the candidate to mention the edge cases and tests for it in the end verbally, there I agree. But expecting 120% performance giving out vaguely formulated problems with extreme time constraints and the pressure of an interview to me seems almost delusional.
For a recent interview I was asked to build an IOC dependency injection library in 2h and the task was made “deliberately” unclear according to the interviewer. So I spent 2 days researching IOC libraries, building some nice examples of how it should work to get a feel for the API, writing tests up front, writing the library and adding docs. Then I got an interview! Fantastic I thought, I passed the technical with my…
This reminded me about obe interview I had a year ago related to environments management in IaC. The Senior Architect that interviewed me asked a question about correct infrastructure state management giving as an example their current infrastructure, giving me a hint that number of environments will grow expenentionally. Ive shortly explained to him that the architecture they chose will be really hard to maintain wh…
> Still I will score quite low in job interview questions ... > I never "studied" computer science in a regular way, You never really mentioned algorithms, and your only mention of data structures was "usage of [hash tables] instead of searching arrays and many other small things that actually enhance the code performance." While you don't need them all the time, a good understanding of common data structures and alg…
This is a common example of a real-world programming. Algos and DS’s make you a better engineer in vitro, but whether they do that in situ is an open question.
As a personal anecdote, I helped businesses to calculate and automate things for 15 years and only once had to use something “advanced” like makeshift BFS (it was a production planning system in a plastics factory that could pick up from any state of shops and inventories and tell which positions/qtys to order to meet the plan). All other algo/data magic is usually behind RDBMS and other well-tested systems.
I don’t think it is worth anyones time to learn to pattern-detect and/or implement these things, except when it is a literal job description. Just being aware that they exist and having some programmer-level intelligence for search is enough, imo.