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How to talk about yourself in a developer interview

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Re: How to talk about yourself in a developer interview

#81

Post by cletus »

Let's translate shall we?

> What is the hardest technical problem you have run into?

"Tell me an unverifiable story in which you're the hero."

I really hate this question:

> Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

Any post on HN about interviews draws a ton of comments, and they're usually the same comments as every other post on the subject.

Honestly at this point having gone through a reasonably large number of interviews I think it comes down to brushing up on basic CS knowledge and, more importantly, whether or not they like you. As much as we like to make interviews dispassionate assessments of proficiency it really does seem like basic chemistry is the key issue. And honestly that makes a certain amount of sense: most people don't want to work with someone they dislike.

Re: How to talk about yourself in a developer interview

#82

Post by BurningFrog »

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…

When i started out, a lot of things were hard.

Now, I can usually think of three decent ways to do anything. Nothing really feels "hard", it's just a different amount of work.

Another angle is that the way to solve "hard" problems is finding a way to think about it that makes it easy. Once I've done that, I no longer think of the problem as "hard".

I think the real issue here, that I don't fully understand, is what interviewers are really asking with that question? What do they want to hear?

Re: How to talk about yourself in a developer interview

#83

Post by mmjaa »

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…

>> What is the hardest technical problem you have run into?

The hardest technical problems I've run into, have been mostly human; i.e. other people.

But, in the purest sense, I have to say that I have observed, on reflection, that the reason I am a technologically competent, adept, person, making a living by way of dark and serious mystery, is that I long ago decided that nothing would be hard. Just .. un-learned.

You see, it is a key factor of success that you, literally and otherwise, embrace the idea that you can't know everything.

So, know what you need. The hard things become easier the moment you do it, even the first time.

I know this sounds like compound nonsense, but I honestly had to give pause on this question. I'm a systems engineer with decades of experience in a multi-variate set of industrial categories, and relatively successful in my lot. This question made me really think - I couldn't think of the hardest things.

The hardest things, I haven't done yet. {But, on another thread, I'm serious about people being the hardest things about technology..}

Re: How to talk about yourself in a developer interview

#84

Post by ensiferum »

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…

Dealing Usenet header data. The big alt.binaries.* groups can have upwards of 10 billion headers.

Re: How to talk about yourself in a developer interview

#85

Post by pmiller2 »

sweezyjeezy wrote: post #20

> If you give them a resume, expect questions about stuff you worked on at your past jobs. If you gave them a link to your Github profile, expect questions about your projects. If you gave them a link to your Stack Overflow account, expect questions about some of your answers. On my Linkedin (and also resume etc.) I give a link to my blog / github. Every time I've been asked about it in an interview setting, it was a…

What is your field?

Re: How to talk about yourself in a developer interview

#86

Post by cookiecaper »

BurningFrog wrote: post #82
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…

When i started out, a lot of things were hard. Now, I can usually think of three decent ways to do anything. Nothing really feels "hard", it's just a different amount of work. Another angle is that the way to solve "hard" problems is finding a way to think about it that makes it easy. Once I've done that, I no longer think of the problem as "hard". I think the real issue here, that I don't fully understand, is what i…

I've had the same problem. I used to have what I thought were OK answers to those questions, but now it's hard to choose. It's especially hard if they scope it down, e.g., what's something you're proud of that you've done in the past 3 months. What would be worth being proud of after 3 months? It'd have to be an exceptional project to warrant that. Otherwise, little bugfixes are routine, and even if they're clever, they're hard to talk about both because the details get discarded and because it's hard to provide the necessary context.

Interviewers are being lazy with that question, essentially. They're saying "Wow me so that I can know you're the most impressive."

This is a problem if you don't think of interviews as a competition over who's the most sparkly (also, who's the best storyteller and/or who had the best script).

My experience is that people are shockingly bad at interviewing. They throw all the work onto the candidate and expect to get good hires that way, which is rarely successful.

Re: How to talk about yourself in a developer interview

#87

Post by braveo »

scient wrote: post #65
TheCowboy wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Makes me more wonder" is a euphemism for "makes me doubt their qualifications and abilities". Some people are humble about their work and abilities. They will never exhibit open pride. Or they don't want to bullshit people and blow smoke up someone's rear. Some may want to switch jobs because they are forced to do poor work and know they shouldn't feel proud about that. This is probably a 'flaw' I have, but I'm awar…

I don't see this as being humble, I see this as a lack of confidence in their skills and abilities and achievements. These same people, for the same reasons, are adverse to avoid making decisions and second guess their work, which causes delays and communication problems. Instead of trying to make this into an excuse of being humble, it should be acknowledged as a lack of a certain important trait.

No, they're honest.

It's amazing to watch you bend over backwards to try and vilify a person who simply strives for accuracy.

Re: How to talk about yourself in a developer interview

#88

Post by dahart »

ensignavenger wrote: post #67
dahart wrote: post #25

I see some criticism on this point, but for me this passage is a gem. > In general, real stories are told chronologically backwards. This is why we start off with a punchline. In contrast, practiced stories are told chronologically forwards. It’s a solid indication as the interviewer that the person is reciting something they have committed to memory if they tell the story forwards, and in turn it’s significantly mor…

I can understand putting the headline first (Let me tell you about the time I re-wrote the widget code for Acme.), but I don't think I ever tell the story backwards... maybe I am just strange in that I appreciate a good (concise) story?

Not strange at all, there's a reason movies are they way they are. It depends on context, there are times to put the punchline first, there are times tell the story backward.

For that matter, there are classic examples of movies that tell the story backward, or give away the ending first.

There's some difference between headline first and punchline first, but either way the real point being made was turn it into a conversation by giving the shortest possible answer first, and letting the other person request the backstory as needed. Make sure they're doing some of the talking and driving the direction of the story. Make sure they're interested and controlling the direction and amount of your narrative.

OTOH, if you're in a setting where it's expected that you'll take ten or forty five minutes to tell a good story, then a narrative arc that increases tension for a while is probably a really good idea.

Re: How to talk about yourself in a developer interview

#89

Post by jakewins »

codingdave wrote: post #38

>In all likelihood, the interviewer doesn’t know what they are looking for with these questions, and they are just being used to fill time. Wait a sec -- just because the author of the article doesn't know how to get value from those questions doesn't mean that those questions hold no value. It is true that they won't give you information to help you in a tech screen, or to gauge the value of where to initially place…

It's ironic actually. The author touts told stories of prior work as key, and degrades attempts at measuring candidate conscientiousness. Meanwhile, strongest known measures of job performance are an actual work sample (r=.26), rather than ability to describe a prior project, and measures of conscientiousness (r=.15).

On conscientiousness:

Barrick, Murray R., and Michael K. Mount. "The big five personality dimensions and job performance: a meta‐analysis." Personnel psychology 44.1 (1991): 1-26.

On work samples:

Roth, Philip L., Philip Bobko, and L. Y. N. N. McFARLAND. "A meta‐analysis of work sample test validity: Updating and integrating some classic literature." Personnel Psychology 58.4 (2005): 1009-1037.

Re: How to talk about yourself in a developer interview

#90

Post by kernelbandwidth »

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…

Strictly technical? Determining the existence of metastable states for the T-cell receptor protein in solution (PhD Dissertation topic). Sort of difficult science, though it seems quite easy in retrospect now; the project wasn't so much hard, as it just cut across a lot of disciplines. Poor developer interview answer though, as it didn't involve a lot of software development (lots of TCL scripting for data extraction and ML with Python instead).

The answer I used to use was a problem I had working as an R&D intern: determine when the speed limits posted on a street have changed from measurements of driver behavior. Interesting and fairly tricky ML problem (weather is a big confounder). Ended up writing a lot of C to get high enough performance to make the solution reasonable which was educational (I didn't know a lot of C at the time), but almost certainly not the right approach to the performance problem. Still more science than development, so it depends on who's asking.

Probably the hardest business-type technical problem I've encountered is database restructuring. We moved (a subset of our data) from a NoSQL database to SQL as part of larger architectural changes, and mapping, migrating, and maintaining compatibility has been non-trivial.

The hardest problem I've encountered has been helping to rescue a project with a severely dysfunctional development history. Much more project management and people than technical (it was just a CRUD app) but I came into a project that had been in development for a year or so and stalled out. The development was outsourced and I fell into a position as a liaison between the internal folks at the university that wanted the product and the dev team that had been hired to build it. Sort of a classic issue where the dev team and the stakeholders would talk right past one another. It drove me crazy at the time, but an excellent experience in retrospect. And it has a happy ending; the project went on to be successful after that, at least when I last heard.

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