5 ms·
I myself have sat in an interview with my mouth agape as I watched a "senior" engineer try to figure out how to find the largest element in a one-dimensional ar
by jcadam 10y ago
I myself have sat in an interview with my mouth agape as I watched a "senior" engineer try to figure out how to find the largest element in a one-dimensional array.
So, anymore I don't have much of a problem with simple coding questions to filter out total non-programmers (fizzbuzz, your calendar problem, etc.).
But the whole stand on one foot and implement a red-black tree in bash script on the whiteboard while I peck at my smartphone and sigh every time you pause to think has got to freaking stop.
- ep103 10y agoI had two people this week, 10+ years "experience", fail at writing a function removing duplicate values from an array.
- badthingfactory 10y agoI have interviewed two "senior web developers" with "10+ years" of experience that were unable to tell me the difference between a 404 and 500 http response code. Of course, they had perfectly memorized answers about JavaScript closures.
- lj3 10y agowho memorizes http response codes?
- ep103 10y agoWho can't tell the difference between a 404 and a 500?
- falsedan 10y agoSomebody who rarely instructs a user agent to make requests to a server.
- 6nf 10y agoThe people in question do in fact use internet browsers on a daily basis.
- falsedan 10y agoThat's good to hear.
- RandomOpinion 10y agoSo, basically, somebody who never uses a web browser? 404 and 500 should be familiar just from browsing the web for more than a few weeks.
- dragonwriter 10y agoModern browsers seem to do quite a bit to insulate users from error status codes in their default configurations.
- badthingfactory 10y agoThis isn't entirely accurate. I told my RN Fiance this story and she said "oh 404, that's like... page not found or something isn't it?" She has zero programming experience.
- jcadam 10y agoProgrammers who want their REST API to return correct http response codes. I have a good many of them memorized by now. :( ...someday I'll find an excuse to return a 418.
- lj3 10y agoBah! Just always return 200 and if there's an error, make your users look for an error property in the json return value that contains a thoroughly unhelpful error message, like "I'm a teapot." ;)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- dragonwriter 10y agoPresumably, programmers who are working with the web should have a passing familiarity with the most common categories; this isn't memorizing all of them, but being able to recognize the significance of 2xx vs 3xx vs 4xx vs 5xx codes isn't an unreasonable expectation.
- watwut 10y agoWeb developers spend most of their time in javascript - coding fronted where closures and functional programming matters a lot. Maintennable modern fronted is done that way. They spend very little time staring at http error codes. Like, none.
- dpark 10y ago> while I peck at my smartphone and sigh every time you pause This is a much bigger deal to me than difficult algorithm questions. Shitty interviewers give shitty interviews, regardless of what kinds of questions they ask. The worst interview I ever had was like this. The guy showed up late, told me he forgot he even had an interview, gave me a strange question with little detail, and told me to start coding. Then ignored me for an hour while he typed on his laptop. Even when I directly asked for feedback to make sure I was solving the problem he asked and not a misunderstanding, he gave me basically no feedback. I've had interviews that I bombed before, but this was the first and only time that I felt like I bombed an interview and it was utterly not my fault. It was also the only time I've had a bad interview that actually ruined the rest of the day for me because it threw me off so much.
- tonyedgecombe 10y agoI think I would just walk out at that, at the end of the day this is someone you are going to have to work with or for.
- dpark 10y agoI wish I had. If something like that ever happens again, I will.
- pklausler 10y ago> implement a red-black tree in bash The only good answer to that is "I can't imagine why I'd ever need to do that, and if I had to anyway, I'd use a 3-2 tree instead because it's almost as good and nobody ever gets red-black trees right the first time."
- sigsergv 10y agoAre you sure it was exact question about largest element in a one-dimensional array and not some highly obfuscated question about bees, trains and traveller bags?