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After doing a lot of interviewing, particularly when asking the same question over and over again, I've noticed the quality of what an interviewee decides to Go
by d23 10y ago
After doing a lot of interviewing, particularly when asking the same question over and over again, I've noticed the quality of what an interviewee decides to Google varies greatly and can give a lot of insight that just solving the problem alone can't. I've been amazed by some of the incomprehensible things people Google, even among those with the supposed same credentials, skillsets, and backgrounds.
Aside from whether or not they can do the actual problem, it seems to be a good proxy for skill. You can quickly distinguish between those that copy-paste their way to a solution and those that thoughtfully attempt to solve the underlying problem. Seeing what they choose to research, and sometimes having to step in and after a while and say "it seems like this is talking about X, which doesn't have much to do with this problem," speaks volumes about the candidate.
- ahmedbaracat 10y agoWould love to know more about what you noticed from seeing the choice of what to search for. Care to share some examples?
- d23 10y agoI saw a candidate, when working on a problem involving writing a simple TCP server, Google the phrase "osx port 11211". He was wondering why his tcp server was getting a connection refused message when he tried to start it. Turns out, he had copied and pasted client code from an example rather than server code. I saw another candidate Google "socket get command line arguments" and then stare at a stack overflow answer for a few minutes that had absolutely nothing to do with the problem. What they were attempting to do was just read data from a socket. Some people just seem to throw things at the wall to see what sticks.