4 ms·
> some programmers who didn't know a thing about my profile asked me to invent some algorithms on a white board for almost four hours. Yep. Did the phone inter
by jff 10y ago
> some programmers who didn't know a thing about my profile asked me to invent some algorithms on a white board for almost four hours.
Yep. Did the phone interview after weeks of back-and-forth, told them what I was interested in, told them I was only interested in working on such-and-such, then they drop me in the standard "write memcpy for us" interview. The last interview was some dude with a weirdly confrontational attitude who wrote some assembly on the board and said "Find the bug. It took us 3 months."
If someone like David Presotto or Rob Pike want to recruit me directly, fine, but after similar experiences with Amazon I've decided the typical mega-startup interview process is for the birds.
- yeukhon 10y agoAssembly, did you apply for some low-level embedded system job? For most software engineering jobs, I would drop my jaws and freak out if someone asks me to look at an assembly bug. I probably will look at it and try to figure the shit out, but oh lord.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago> The last interview was some dude with a weirdly confrontational attitude who wrote some assembly on the board and said "Find the bug. It took us 3 months." Not great, but there is a world of difference between, on the one hand: (1) there is a bug; (2) it's in these 30 lines of code, and on the other hand: something's wrong, and the problem might be somewhere in your two million lines of code.
- astrange 10y ago> The last interview was some dude with a weirdly confrontational attitude who wrote some assembly on the board and said "Find the bug. It took us 3 months." Sounds like he's narrowed it down for you! But if it's in asm, the bug is usually just a typo.