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"I'm interviewing right now, and if you can't tell it's frustrating. I'm not valuable unless I am experienced and capable with a huge list of technologies, and

"I'm interviewing right now, and if you can't tell it's frustrating. I'm not valuable unless I am experienced and capable with a huge list of technologies, and hey, as a reward you the interviewer get to pick anything you want from that huge list and try to trip me up with it! ;)" I totally understand and sympathize with the experience, as a DevOps Engineer with alphabet soup on his CV like you probably do. I experience the same. However, some nuances about your position (and some of the replies about binary search tree questions)... I think good interviewers are going to pick questions based on what you put on your CV. I doubt they're picking from a metaphorical hat questions about redis, flask, Python, java, etc. unless they read them in your resume. Next it's totally fine to use this broad-based category like approach, so long as the interviewer is asking general questions about the technologies. If I put Python on there, I should expect to be able to answer how in general I'd parse a text file with it, or a basic regex example, or when I last used flask and what it was used for. In my personal experience, only amateurs or people who are socially inexperienced ask questions that require an insane memory or having used the technology the day prior as in your example. When I first started my career as a jr guy, and was interviewing someone, I'd commit these same errors. I think the right thing to do is trim some of that soup on the CV, and like someone else says be wary of bad interviewers. And know that sometimes they trip you up just to see how you respond.

crdoconnor 11y ago
IMO good interviewers just ask for you to perform a task that's a close analog to what you will be doing every day. I've had this happen once. Sadly, despite this being straightforward and effective it's incredibly rare. Cargo cult "binary tree search style" problems and technology stack trivia questions are more normal. The level at which dogma and fashion drive this industry is almost embarrassing.
- mancerayder 11y ago
  I have a refrain I like to repeat to myself sometimes, which goes roughly like: in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. It's true that the interviews can be pretty retarded. Most of our roles don't require knowing half the complex stuff they ask to weed people out. If you're just out of college that stuff is reasonable to ask [1], but otherwise as a hiring manager you should ask what you're looking for. For example, if I'm looking for someone who a) doesn't lie about their experience b) has experience in some of the technologies I need a project completed with or ongoing support for on day 1 c) has the ability to learn technologies I'll need help with on day 180, then I'll ask about a project that was listed on the CV, stopping to ask for more detail about how something works. Then I might present a scenario or problem that's theoretical (or really happened) and have the candidate walk through it. That was when I was a hiring manager. I didn't weed out good people by asking them dumb questions about how many marbles would fit from here to the moon, or about the different types of O notation. Of course, this is specific to the roles I was hiring for (DevOps). When I was on the flipside, I was weeded out by overachieving mid 20-somethings who really relished putting me on the hot seat. It felt not dissimilar to a bad date sometimes. I consider it a 'competitive advantage' that the latter style of interviewing is so commonplace, because it's so off-base. It doesn't make me as frustrated anymore, probably because I'm old and cynical, and a lot more independent now. My thinking now is 'how can I use this to get a leg up on the competition' whether that means learning some cursory rote algorithms stuff if I'm interviewing, or just knowing how to ask the RIGHT questions to get the good candidates (something I feel pretty comfortable about) if I'm the interviewer. [1] I think it's reasonable to ask questions of a college grad that he would have learned in a hard-core comp-sci class for the same reason I'd ask in-depth questions about the projects in the last role: because it's the freshest thing in their minds and they 'should' probably it. Please don't bother us old guys with comp-sci fundamentals. Unix and TCP/IP fundamentals, on the other hand ... (Edit: turns out using an asterisk in here causes some weird markup behavior)
  - BatFastard 11y ago
    >Please don't bother us old guys with comp-sci fundamentals No shit, I have been programming C++ for 20 years. Recently someone stuck in a room with a laptop, not connected to internet, and asked me to format C strings to use in a printf (for a C++ job), something I haven't done in 20 years. Maybe it's my fault for abstracting all of the ugliness away with the use of libraries and C++ functions. I could have told them when to use such silliness. Which is when you need to have something that is really performant, that gets called a LOT. After writing game engines, most other performance requirements are trivial.

crdoconnor 11y ago

IMO good interviewers just ask for you to perform a task that's a close analog to what you will be doing every day. I've had this happen once. Sadly, despite this being straightforward and effective it's incredibly rare. Cargo cult "binary tree search style" problems and technology stack trivia questions are more normal. The level at which dogma and fashion drive this industry is almost embarrassing.

mancerayder 11y ago
I have a refrain I like to repeat to myself sometimes, which goes roughly like: in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. It's true that the interviews can be pretty retarded. Most of our roles don't require knowing half the complex stuff they ask to weed people out. If you're just out of college that stuff is reasonable to ask [1], but otherwise as a hiring manager you should ask what you're looking for. For example, if I'm looking for someone who a) doesn't lie about their experience b) has experience in some of the technologies I need a project completed with or ongoing support for on day 1 c) has the ability to learn technologies I'll need help with on day 180, then I'll ask about a project that was listed on the CV, stopping to ask for more detail about how something works. Then I might present a scenario or problem that's theoretical (or really happened) and have the candidate walk through it. That was when I was a hiring manager. I didn't weed out good people by asking them dumb questions about how many marbles would fit from here to the moon, or about the different types of O notation. Of course, this is specific to the roles I was hiring for (DevOps). When I was on the flipside, I was weeded out by overachieving mid 20-somethings who really relished putting me on the hot seat. It felt not dissimilar to a bad date sometimes. I consider it a 'competitive advantage' that the latter style of interviewing is so commonplace, because it's so off-base. It doesn't make me as frustrated anymore, probably because I'm old and cynical, and a lot more independent now. My thinking now is 'how can I use this to get a leg up on the competition' whether that means learning some cursory rote algorithms stuff if I'm interviewing, or just knowing how to ask the RIGHT questions to get the good candidates (something I feel pretty comfortable about) if I'm the interviewer. [1] I think it's reasonable to ask questions of a college grad that he would have learned in a hard-core comp-sci class for the same reason I'd ask in-depth questions about the projects in the last role: because it's the freshest thing in their minds and they 'should' probably it. Please don't bother us old guys with comp-sci fundamentals. Unix and TCP/IP fundamentals, on the other hand ... (Edit: turns out using an asterisk in here causes some weird markup behavior)
- BatFastard 11y ago
  >Please don't bother us old guys with comp-sci fundamentals No shit, I have been programming C++ for 20 years. Recently someone stuck in a room with a laptop, not connected to internet, and asked me to format C strings to use in a printf (for a C++ job), something I haven't done in 20 years. Maybe it's my fault for abstracting all of the ugliness away with the use of libraries and C++ functions. I could have told them when to use such silliness. Which is when you need to have something that is really performant, that gets called a LOT. After writing game engines, most other performance requirements are trivial.