41–48 of 48 posts
This is the perfect example of the whole hipster culture making it's way into web and software development. I literally expect to see people like this writing about how they're experimenting with punch card input any day now.
I'm not sure how I feel about the sort question being a super simple "fizzbuzz" type command line question in an interview. The problem with some of the CLI stuff is that its really a simple yes/no "do you remember that command name" type thing. For something like grep that makes sense. But as somebody who also lives in the terminal, I have mixed feelings about expecting things like wc, sort, xargs, etc out of a pote…
(I probably agree with you more than I disagree, and I'd rate "can read a man page" more important than "remembers -n for sort", I just thought the particular objection somewhat humorous)
Although, forgoing the web browser might do more for your productivity than anything else...
/me closes HN
If you know the name of the command you need, read the man page. If you don't, search for the man page using apropos. If you don't know how to use apropos, read its man page.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Heh, I got rejected once, a long time ago, for almost exactly this. I was asked to whiteboard a C function to convert an ascii character to an integer, and I wrote one that just returned the result of atoi(). I thought it showed knowledge of the best way to get the job done, but I guess they disagreed.
How does a rejection like that work in practice? Was that the question the interview hinged on? A reasonable interviewer could just say "Alright, now can you do it without using the standard library?".
Meh. It's useful, but the "no true scotsman" argument is just wrong. Coding solutions is usually better in the long-term. It's why Perl was invented. Command-line is all about learning thousands of arcane details that anyone can just google the answer to.
>Many candidates will immediately start writing a program in Java or Python, if they get it right, then they will start optimizing the algorithm > and in most cases programmers who are comfortable with the command line version are also the ones who are better at writing code These two statements indicate to me that you are ineffective at communicating what skills you are looking for in a programmer. The reason they a…
Hi OP here, I am sorry! I should have added more context to the post. I have never rejected candidates solely on this basis. Its just that I appreciate programmers who think of simpler solutions first.
You should probably reword your question and give a hint that a candidate can use any available tool. If it's a programming interview my first instinct would be writing a code, if it's a sysadm interview I would use available tools in the system.Context is important...
This is the perfect example of the whole hipster culture making it's way into web and software development. I literally expect to see people like this writing about how they're experimenting with punch card input any day now.