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I've actually used (politely, of course) many of these answers in interviews, whenever I felt the interviewer was trying to show off or read from the script ins
by monodeldiablo 10y ago
I've actually used (politely, of course) many of these answers in interviews, whenever I felt the interviewer was trying to show off or read from the script instead of actually judging my abilities.
"I'd google it. Anything less would be a waste of our time." That cuts through a lot of bullshit. After saying that at my last interview, we got into actual problems (structuring a program, building an API, writing code to approximately simulate real world problems, data structures). Had a good time, got hired, and loved working with those people.
On the other end of the spectrum, I've been torn to shreds in an interview for not being able to write a fast hash table implementation in Java (didn't know Java at the time and the interviewer didn't know Ruby/Python/C) in an hour of trying. That was soul-destroying.
- LordKano 10y agoI used a polite version of "I'd google it" while interviewing with Google. I explained that I didn't think anyone could be reasonably expected to know how to do everything in every language on demand and that virtually every professional programmer I knew consulted Google from time to time. Maybe I was just ahead of the times or they weren't looking for someone to be as honest as I was but I didn't make it past round 3 of their interviews.
- tomjen3 10y agonew java.util.HashMap() In case you ever get such a stupid question again.
- monodeldiablo 10y agoYeah, I'm fairly proficient these days. But even then, I expressed amazement that Java didn't have a built-in or library data structure. "It does." "Then I'd use that." "That wasn't the question." "Oh... kay..."