How to talk about yourself in a developer interview • Hacker News Board

Re: How to talk about yourself in a developer interview

#191

Post by hueving » Sun, Apr 30, 2017, 6:15 PM UTC

mwfunk wrote: post #168

hueving wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's what it takes to get a job as an engineer at the big companies, it's not particularly surprising that the quality of their engineers has declined as they've grown. The skills of a con artist are not related to the ability to build good systems.

Good communication skills are certainly essential to being a con artist, but they are also essential to working with other people who are almost certainly going to be very different from them. If someone is incapable of explaining something to another person or discussing and agreeing on a course of action, that's somebody who probably doesn't know a fraction of what they think they know. For every gregarious person…

Communication skills have nothing to do with blowing your own horn.

Re: How to talk about yourself in a developer interview

#192

Post by hueving » Sun, Apr 30, 2017, 10:53 PM UTC

tn135 wrote: post #190

hueving wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's what it takes to get a job as an engineer at the big companies, it's not particularly surprising that the quality of their engineers has declined as they've grown. The skills of a con artist are not related to the ability to build good systems.

> The skills of a con artist are not related to the ability to build good systems. I think it is very very rude of you to call it a skill of "con artist". I have seen teams with average individuals achieving lot more than several very intelligent people simply because together they worked lot more better. Any company who ignored the communication and personal skills of their engineers is bound to fail.

You're suggesting constantly practicing talking about yourself and highlighting your skills. Building confidence is exactly what a con(fidence) artist does.

I'd rather have engineers that can actually discuss technical problems rather than deliver smooth talk about how they are incredible.

Re: How to talk about yourself in a developer interview

#193

Post by erikb » Thu, May 04, 2017, 1:37 PM UTC

lettersdigits wrote: post #22

> What is the hardest technical problem you have run into? I never seem to find a quick good answer for this. Maybe I just almost never work on REAL hard things. So my question to you, HNers, is : What is the hardest technical problem YOU have run into? I am really interested to know what you would consider 'hardest'.. It's probably not going to be something like 'I changed the css property value from "display: block…

Weird that people consider this a question. I think it's objectively possible to say if a task is harder than another:

1) One problem is harder than the other if it requires more knowledge. E.g. to code AI you need to have programming skills, AI related skills, statistics skills and graph theory skills, plus whatever your domain knowledge is (e.g. how to build the code in your company's environment).

2) One problem is harder than the other if it requires more skills.

3) [...] harder if it requires a higher composition level of skills. E.g. configuring a firewall via iptables is harder than configuring a firewall via your router's web gui, since the first requires bash, Linux, tcp/ip related skills as a foundation to even understand what iptables does. The gui may only require a limited set of networking skills and 2 pages of router handbook.

4)[...] harder if it is more complex. Coding your own kernel is harder than coding your own calculator.

5)[...] harder if it requires more departments. "Go to market" of your product therefore is a harder task than "proof of concept".

6)[...] harder if it relies on more legacy code. Legacy code always contains domain knowledge that is unaware to most people, even to the developers. Changing that code or its environment yields a lot of surprises.

Re: How to talk about yourself in a developer interview

#194

Post by erikb » Thu, May 04, 2017, 1:55 PM UTC

andy_ppp wrote: post #80

Never talk about yourself; steer the interview to being about a problem they are solving with work and help them run through how you would solve the problem as if it's a meeting and you are working with them. Rarely fails.

I'd say it's not either or. Do both. Give a short summary of who you are with related projects you worked on. Explain shortly how these experiences made you an authority on their problem. Then explain how you would handle that problem of theirs.