81–90 of 426 posts
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I have been doing mysql database type things for 15 years solid. Once during a job interview at digg.com, someone [ok ok doxx removed] asked: "what is a having statement in sql?". I jumped in explained how you can filter aggregated sets performed by a 'group by' and rambled on and on. He stopped me and said, "You can use a having statement without a group by, are you sure you know how they work." I have never seen th…
[No longer applicable]
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Isn't a lot of the job of software engineering to quickly and concisely communicate complicated concepts? Might this actually be an accurate work sample? How else might you measure something like this? Also the next few lines kinda address what you are saying: > It also might be that they know them inside-and-out but aren’t used to answering questions on the fly, or that our question didn’t use the vocabulary they’re…
>Isn't a lot of the job of software engineering to quickly and concisely communicate complicated concepts? No, I write code daily but I might have to distill down technical concepts once a week or so (usually not even that much) and even then if I happen to be the only one who can distill it down. If your devs are often explaining basic stuff like 'what is a relational database?', you need to hire someone specificall…
One time I interviewed for a position that I wanted badly. I studied and prepped for the interview, then during the interview I nailed every question. I waited a week but never heard back. After a few weeks of silence and giving up hope, I searched the company on LinkedIn, and found the person they hired for the position. It turns out he had more backend experience, which is what they were looking for. It was a painful truth, but them sending me a rejection email telling me this wouldn't have helped me at all.
Article author - I'm on the writing team at Triplebyte. Most of what we do is summarize candidates' technical performance for their introduction to companies, but we also send feedback to everyone who takes our two-hour interview. I took this responsibility over from our first engineer, who built a bunch of software to make the process faster - it lets me quickly autogenerate emails by clicking all the resources I wa…
When someone can’t answer an interview question about relational databases, it might be that they don’t know anything about relational databases. I thought you all were better than this. Why are you asking questions about relational databases? Why not just have candidates accomplish the thing you're assessing with an actual relational database ? I know you're work-sample-literate! But if your feedback emphasizes comm…
Why wouldn't you ask questions about relational databases? I would expect any decent dev to know the fundamentals of relational databases.
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>Isn't a lot of the job of software engineering to quickly and concisely communicate complicated concepts? No, I write code daily but I might have to distill down technical concepts once a week or so (usually not even that much) and even then if I happen to be the only one who can distill it down. If your devs are often explaining basic stuff like 'what is a relational database?', you need to hire someone specificall…
If your devs are often explaining basic stuff like 'what is a relational database?', you need to hire someone specifically to do that. It's not a good use of time especially when they can go google/wikipedia those concepts and figure it out themselves. If you can’t communicate ideas and basic concepts to non technical people, you will both limit your career opportunities and not be able to get your ideas implemented…
At some point, we need to start demanding basic technical competence from the people around software developers.
Otherwise, people will just be interrupting you all day and how much have we collectively written about that problem?
When someone can’t answer an interview question about relational databases, it might be that they don’t know anything about relational databases. I thought you all were better than this. Why are you asking questions about relational databases? Why not just have candidates accomplish the thing you're assessing with an actual relational database ? I know you're work-sample-literate! But if your feedback emphasizes comm…
Imagine a junior developer asking your senior developer a question about how a relational database does something. There you go, now it's a work-sample for your senior developer.
I’ve been trying to do something about that when it’s my turn to ask interview questions. For instance, too many front end people struggle with basic data manipulation workflows. I want to virtue signal that it’s better to move this kind of logic to the backend, but I need to test them anyway.
So I create a plausible scenario, maybe this is a POC to see if it’s worth sort or grouping functionality to the backend.
When someone can’t answer an interview question about relational databases, it might be that they don’t know anything about relational databases. I thought you all were better than this. Why are you asking questions about relational databases? Why not just have candidates accomplish the thing you're assessing with an actual relational database ? I know you're work-sample-literate! But if your feedback emphasizes comm…
> Why are you asking questions about relational databases? Why wouldn't you ask questions about relational databases? I would expect any decent dev to know the fundamentals of relational databases.
I'm going to go against the grain and say that interview feedback is overrated (at least for senior people). If you got offered the job, then there's your feedback. If not, the interviewing company isn't going to tell you any more than you could already discern yourself by playing back your answers and conversations with the interviewers. If you honestly feel you aced the interview, then other factors are in play - p…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Isn't a lot of the job of software engineering to quickly and concisely communicate complicated concepts? No, I write code daily but I might have to distill down technical concepts once a week or so (usually not even that much) and even then if I happen to be the only one who can distill it down. If your devs are often explaining basic stuff like 'what is a relational database?', you need to hire someone specificall…
If you can't concisely communicate complicated concepts, you're creating technical debt every time you hand off a project.