When hiring developers, have the candidate read existing code

Post by aunty_helen » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 3:33 AM UTC

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()…

Post by anyfoo » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 3:37 AM UTC

sgustard wrote: post #130

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 by anamax » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 3:40 AM UTC

jra_samba wrote: post #68

llimllib wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not anything other than a C tourist, and I see that the man page says it returns either NULL or a "unique pointer value that can later be successfully passed to free()." I'm kind of at a loss about why it can return either of those two things, somebody want to take a shot at explaining it?

Both NULL and a unique pointer value can be safely passed to free() :-). Answers to this question taught me about the candidates taste and understanding of good API design :-). Both NULL and "unique pointer" are correct answers, but all modern implementations only chose to return one of these. My follow-up question is "why ?" :-).

Post by aunty_helen » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 3:42 AM UTC

PretzelPirate wrote: post #116

aunty_helen wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do miss out on the 'sit down and create a project' aspect though. Which shows things like familiarity with project structure, (python specific) virtual environments and paths etc. These are good skills to have when a dev is debugging as they could get tied up for a long time dealing with something as simple as a relative path issue.

The things you mention can easily be standardized in the company, and starting a new project or setting up a dev environment should be automated to the point that you don’t even have to think about it.

Post by rTX5CMRXIfFG » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 3:43 AM UTC

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.