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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 t

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 10y 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 10y 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.

mancerayder 10y 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 10y 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.