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I Am a Bad Developer

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Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#211

Post by yuliyp »

boyter wrote: post #141
yuliyp wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does "poor queries" mean other than queries with poor asymptotic complexity based on the query plan?

Doing something like the following would classify as a poor query in my book with a very simple query plan, select * from table;

The query plan for that is simple, but the number of bytes transmitted per query is O(size of table) (as is the disk IO on the DB), which should clearly set off a red flag if you know that size of table can get large. You don't need a large exponent; You need to understand the rough cardinality of values, then you need to look at asymptotic complexity.

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#212

Post by nilkn »

lynchdt wrote: post #150
weareconvo wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did interviews for 5+ years at Google... the real problem is that there's no uniformity to the hiring process. I was allowed to just make up my own questions and judge candidates based on those. And I did so. And admittedly, the questions I asked were so difficult that I seriously doubt I myself could've answered them when I first got hired. But I didn't give a crap, because hiring is something you're kind of coerced…

> And admittedly, the questions I asked were so difficult that I seriously doubt I myself could've answered them when I first got hired Sometimes I have to stop myself doing this before conducting interviews. I think it's an ego thing, or perhaps an insecurity. When I worked at Amazon the culture drove this kind of rubbish and skewed our hiring process immensely. There was something perverse about being in an intervi…

> I love the idea of a paid working trial of some length

How long of a trial are you thinking of? If it's a significant amount of time, I think this could be hard to do from the perspective of the candidate.

If I'm currently employed, there's probably no way I'm going to quit my job for a month-long paid trial period somewhere else. If it didn't work out, I'd find myself without a job and would be forced to take a hopefully short sabbatical for more interviews (and this wouldn't be possible at all for people who haven't saved up enough money to do so). It just seems too risky.

If it were longer, say six months, I might consider it, but I'd expect a decision to be made well before the end of the sixth month--that way if you didn't want to hire me full-time I'd have time to talk to other companies before losing my income. Even with this concession, I'd have to want to work for your company an abnormal amount to do this, though.

Perhaps a happy medium is a take-home project taking one or two weeks of part-time work, paid for at market wage.

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#213

Post by virgi1 »

bearmf wrote: post #202

> exercise to write a function which returns a boolean in > response to the question of whether sequence A is a sub- > sequence of sequence B. If you can't solve this really fast it means you haven't practiced enough for the interviews. > of course calculating the permutations of a list is n- > squared If I understand you correctly, it is actually n!, because there are n! permutations of n objects. Basically, your pr…

This. I can't believe nobody else pointed out that it's not n-squared. (but, lots of people pointed out that complexity is really about reasoning not about memorisation - and you have to be good at reasoning in order to be a good programmer).

And this is not an "esoteric question" - you should really have a good grasp on complexity in order to understand the limitations of your system, and when you can use certain algorithms/data structures, and when you can't.

See this write-up: http://www.infoarena.ro/blog/numbers-everyone-should-know - but don't memorize the numbers, that would be pointless - the idea is to get a feel of why complexity is important. (you'll notice for instance that between O(n!) and O(n^2) there is a 2-3 orders of magnitude difference in the acceptable input data size... so your confusion between factorial and n-squared is actually quite big)

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#214

Post by lynchdt »

nilkn wrote: post #212
lynchdt wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And admittedly, the questions I asked were so difficult that I seriously doubt I myself could've answered them when I first got hired Sometimes I have to stop myself doing this before conducting interviews. I think it's an ego thing, or perhaps an insecurity. When I worked at Amazon the culture drove this kind of rubbish and skewed our hiring process immensely. There was something perverse about being in an intervi…

> I love the idea of a paid working trial of some length How long of a trial are you thinking of? If it's a significant amount of time, I think this could be hard to do from the perspective of the candidate. If I'm currently employed, there's probably no way I'm going to quit my job for a month-long paid trial period somewhere else. If it didn't work out, I'd find myself without a job and would be forced to take a ho…

I've seen six months work - that's time enough to ramp up somewhat and deliver. In that regard, it's plenty of time to assess the traits that we're looking for in strong developers.

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#215

Post by barce »

pbiggar wrote: post #36
barce wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ya, I've been the victim of "couldn't balance a B-Tree fast enough so you're not hired but you'll never see a B-Tree at work." You mention that there isn't a better solution. IMHO, I disagree. I think Github has figured out a way. They've been around 5 years and haven't fired anybody and nobody has quit. Most firings are due to a job / job skill mismatch. At Github, they do a week long paid interview so both sides re…

What make you think GitHub haven't fired anybody? I don't know that they have, but it seems very unlikely.

Ya, I got my info from Holman. My info's old.

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#216

Post by nilkn »

lynchdt wrote: post #214
nilkn wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I love the idea of a paid working trial of some length How long of a trial are you thinking of? If it's a significant amount of time, I think this could be hard to do from the perspective of the candidate. If I'm currently employed, there's probably no way I'm going to quit my job for a month-long paid trial period somewhere else. If it didn't work out, I'd find myself without a job and would be forced to take a ho…

I've seen six months work - that's time enough to ramp up somewhat and deliver. In that regard, it's plenty of time to assess the traits that we're looking for in strong developers.

Do you get back to them with the decision well before the end of the period, though, or do you just leave them without an income at the end of it if you decide you don't want to hire them?

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#218

Post by nickfox »

I am NOT a bad developer. I have a resume that just kills. 15 years of experience. But, I am 52 years old now and basically have been thrown out with the garbage. Why hire me when you can hire a 25 year old that can crank out code way faster and is willing to work much longer hours than I am. All I can say to the hiring managers I've interviewed with recently is fuck you.

I'm not going to cry about it. I am writing my own software now for myself and making money. Should have started this earlier but I didn't have the wherewithal to do so. But now I do and I'm not looking back...

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#219

Post by L0j1k »

antoniuschan99 wrote: post #204
L0j1k wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess people aren't too happy that I dislike thinly veiled attempts at trolling for a job on HN, wherein the author has failed to plan properly for a four month vacation ("sabbatical") and thus requires validation from complete strangers. It's pretty clear here that OP wasn't affected at all by the recent recession if he's complaining about not being able to find a job after only a month and a half. OP clearly need…

Regardless of OP's actual intent it definitely is a first world problem. I'm sure OP is smart and a capable programmer but I also wonder, he did say he's 10 years into programming. If it's not that he's a bad programmer, or that his social skills are not lacking, maybe ageism could be an issue?

Interesting observation, about ageism.

That of course could be the case, but I've built a vision of this guy in my mind after reading his diatribe (against himself). He's clearly just incredibly insecure, frustrated, and possibly self-loathing because of it. It's possible he had/has an axe to grind and nowhere to grind it so he just comes off like an ass. When people get like that, it's almost as if they put off an aura of failure as soon as they open their mouths. After reading his post, it's no surprise this guy doesn't do well interviewing. If your friends -- who are developers -- are telling you in no uncertain terms that you're not a bad developer, and you don't believe them such that your next step is to then seek the validation of complete strangers on the internet, there's obviously something much bigger working against you (in concert with lack of confidence). Perhaps he has very poor hygiene -- or, as you mentioned, poor social skills -- or something else that makes a horrible first impression. First impressions are everything, and this guy clearly isn't making a good one. Then again, maybe it really is the case that he's a bad developer with shitty friends.

Having faced seemingly insurmountable obstacles that involved my nearly getting killed for years on end (and a divorce, and death of friends, and what amounts to enormously difficult daily hard labor), I have ZERO sympathy for this kind of crap. Can't find a job after your little vacation? Boo hoo. At least you have all your limbs, can go to the market without getting shot at, and your wife and daughter haven't been executed.

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#220

Post by informatimago »

lynchdt wrote: post #214
nilkn wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I love the idea of a paid working trial of some length How long of a trial are you thinking of? If it's a significant amount of time, I think this could be hard to do from the perspective of the candidate. If I'm currently employed, there's probably no way I'm going to quit my job for a month-long paid trial period somewhere else. If it didn't work out, I'd find myself without a job and would be forced to take a ho…

I've seen six months work - that's time enough to ramp up somewhat and deliver. In that regard, it's plenty of time to assess the traits that we're looking for in strong developers.

That is the usual practice in countries like France, where new hires are on a trial basis for a period of one to six months (all other things being equal, the trial period only means that both the employee and the employer may terminate the contract at the end of the period with minimal administrative fuss).
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