Better analogy would be shipping company hiring a truck driver and asking him those questions. And also requiring experience piloting Formula One cars for at least three years, knowledge of how to operate large construction equipment and ability to replace the tire on a truck with bare hands.
What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?
41–50 of 177 posts
Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?
#42I became unreasonably angry while reading this. I guess it struck a nerve with me for some reason.
During my interviews, I was very charismatic, confident in my skills, was asked technical question that were things I would need day in day out. I landed the job on 100% of those interviews.
There was this one time were the guy kept asking me crap I would never EVER need while working for his company.
Binary tree's, linked lists, pointer arithmatic. "What the fuck?", I thought to myself. This was for a C# developer position for a small 20 person company. Anyways, I thanked him for his time and left. He called me with an offer two weeks later, and I declined. Not going to waste my time with that crap.
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99% of us will never work for Google, or Amazon, or Twitter - but for your run of the mill software shops. And that's ok.
Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?
#43Now, maybe I've gotten lucky, and I've only interviewed at a few companies (well-known ones include: Google, Amazon, Facebook), but I've never had an experience as bad as that painted by this analogy.
In general, the interview questions I've gotten are designed to test general CS knowledge and the ability to translate an algorithm into code. This is important, and as an interviewer myself, a lot of candidates fail at the translating to code step.
Design questions are (at a high level) maybe even closer to "how would you do your job?" than coding questions.
I have yet to see a company ask for specific experience with VB.net 2012 edition and exclude candidates like myself who are only familiar with C/Python/Java. If they do, I'd recommend straight out lying (for languages). You can pick languages up really quickly. For platforms, maybe you really should know it and it is actually relevant to your potential job.
Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?
#44This analogy is backwards... Hiring a programmer is an exchange of company money (or equity, benefits, etc) for a service (programming skills). Renting a car is an exchange of one's own money for a service (use of the car). In this case, the person renting the car would be "interviewing" the car rental company to determine if their service is worth their money.
Maybe this is me having spent too much time thinking about econ, but I don't get why the analogy is backwards here. What is special about the person spending money? A car rental company is filling a large number of slots, and the renter would like to fill one. Why is that not as natural an analogy point for you?
Instead of "whoever is giving up money should do the due diligence," I would suggest you consider "both sides should do increasing due diligence as the importance of a decision increases."
From this perspective, the article is pointing out the dumbness of some due diligence methods currently being used at software companies.
Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?
#45This analogy is backwards... Hiring a programmer is an exchange of company money (or equity, benefits, etc) for a service (programming skills). Renting a car is an exchange of one's own money for a service (use of the car). In this case, the person renting the car would be "interviewing" the car rental company to determine if their service is worth their money.
>> In this case, the person renting the car would be "interviewing" the car rental company to determine if their service is worth their money.
It goes both ways... the rental car agency interviews the person to make sure she is trustworthy of driving the car. The author is asking you to think about the relationship a little more abstractly than simply who is giving money to whom.
Having said, that, I think this is a poor analogy because I don't find it particularly illuminating and the situations just don't seem very... analogous.
Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?
#46Now, maybe I've gotten lucky, and I've only interviewed at a few companies (well-known ones include: Google, Amazon, Facebook), but I've never had an experience as bad as that painted by this analogy. In general, the interview questions I've gotten are designed to test general CS knowledge and the ability to translate an algorithm into code. This is important, and as an interviewer myself, a lot of candidates fail at…
If a company asks for specific experience with a technology and exclude candidates familiar with other technologies, I recommend getting out of there.
Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?
#47Why no one asks questions that show deep understanding of the work and not technical details that can be googled in a second. Like - can you land Curiosity with off the shelf java and JVM? Why or why not?
"Land it? Yes. Successfully? Not so much..."
Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?
#48I've given enough interviews to know it's all relative.
To cherry pick one example: "What color has the middle wire feeding into the distributer cap?" implies interviewers ask ridiculously specific questions that you could "look up if and when you needed to know."
The problem is for some applicants that question could be "how would you implement Google's PageRank" and for other applicants it can be something as simple as "what's the difference between an interface and an abstract class." Think what you want but if you don't think you need to be able to answer the latter, it's probably not going to work out between us.
To be honest, of the few interviews where I've been the applicant, the questions have always been fair and I've never been treated with the level of disrespect that was demonstrated in this scenario. That said, I'm completely willing to believe I've just been lucky so far.
Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?
#49This analogy is backwards... Hiring a programmer is an exchange of company money (or equity, benefits, etc) for a service (programming skills). Renting a car is an exchange of one's own money for a service (use of the car). In this case, the person renting the car would be "interviewing" the car rental company to determine if their service is worth their money.
>> In this case, the person renting the car would be "interviewing" the car rental company to determine if their service is worth their money. It goes both ways... the rental car agency interviews the person to make sure she is trustworthy of driving the car. The author is asking you to think about the relationship a little more abstractly than simply who is giving money to whom. Having said, that, I think this is a…
Something like "if interviewing carpenters was like interviewing programmers" would work, with various questions regarding trivia about the Mightyman Bansaw 3000, specific experience using square-faced carbon tipped reverse-threaded screws and comparisons between building red versus white cabinets.
Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?
#50Now, maybe I've gotten lucky, and I've only interviewed at a few companies (well-known ones include: Google, Amazon, Facebook), but I've never had an experience as bad as that painted by this analogy. In general, the interview questions I've gotten are designed to test general CS knowledge and the ability to translate an algorithm into code. This is important, and as an interviewer myself, a lot of candidates fail at…
If a company asks for specific experience with a technology and exclude candidates familiar with other technologies, I recommend getting out of there.
If the job you are applying for is to work on a rails site or develop a mobile app, I would argue that it is pretty important that you are already familiar with those technologies (and their pitfalls)…
I wouldn't exclude someone unfamiliar with a specific framework, but as an employer you understand that ramping them up to speed is going to take a significant amount of time.