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The Startup CTO's Handbook

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Re: The Startup CTO's Handbook

#211

Post by closeparen »

femiagbabiaka wrote: post #207
reducesuffering wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has everyone accepted that? 3/4 companies in the Bay Area senior software engineer interviews require a System Design interview where they will tell you "what if you had 10m users" and expect a distributed write-heavy sharding answer

Well that's the thing. You don't need a NoSQL database to design a data tier that scales to accommodate distributed write-heavy workloads.

Lots of people were mad that my employer developed a new distributed NoSQL database engine, but it was literally just an API to encapsulate what an application doing "sharded MySQL" would do in its own data tier. A lot of this is a question of framing and storytelling.

Re: The Startup CTO's Handbook

#212

Post by methods21 »

I tend to disagree a tad with what you have said below, I've lost count how many interviews I've done at this point, one challenge is on the intake side and how many darn applicants there are or can be and that its typically the recruiting team interacting with them at this point.

The question in your example, is fine to include, but you need a non, yes or no or scale question to weed out unqualified candidates. For me, this is a very succinct question with a definitive answer. You'll be surprised at how many people will answer 'extremely comfortable' with Javascript yet not know what === means, so I'll ask something along the lines of 'what is the strictly equal operator in Javascript"... while any javascript programmer will know this, you'll be surprised that this type of Q alone knocks out 50% of the applicant pool, most of whom probably selected 'extremely comfortable' btw, and save my org. a TON of time.

"For example, for a role that requires experience in JavaScript, it's not unreasonable to confirm that experience in the questionnaire with a question like, Rate your comfort level working with JavaScript on a scale from not comfortable to extremely comfortable."

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