6 ms·

This was an interesting quiz, but perhaps not the way the authors intended. The second half was straightforward first-year computer science, but the first half

This was an interesting quiz, but perhaps not the way the authors intended. The second half was straightforward first-year computer science, but the first half challenged me to speculate about the syntax of a novel scripting language.

lj3 9y ago
Oh good, I wasn't the only one. The second question had me wondering if it was testing my knowledge of tree searches or python queues. I don't know python at all.
- iamNumber4 9y ago
  I can attest that you are not the only one. Don't know python either, Nor should you need too. "There should be a warning label on this thing!!!"
- fgonzag 9y ago
  Exactly, I know what a breadth first search is. I don't know the specifics of how queues work in python.
arohner 9y ago
Agreed. I've been a professional developer for nearly 20 years. I've shipped kernel C, windows C++, java,python, ruby, clojure to production, but the last time I wrote python was nearly a decade ago. Since then, I've been firmly in the Clojure community, with no intention of leaving. I know I'm a good programmer, and I got nearly every python-specific question wrong. I understand closures and call-by-reference tyvm, but I don't remember or care about the quirks of python. Triplebyte in particular seems to not care about the difference between "good at programming" and "good at programming in python". The skillset needed for C, python, clojure and JS are wildly different. They do a disservice to their users by pretending otherwise.
- ammon 9y ago
  For what it's worth, we run our interviews in the language of the engineer's choosing (including clojure), and get people jobs at Clojure and Haskel and C++ companies. We went with Python for this (toy) quiz because it's the most common language we see among applicants. I tried to add comments to explain anything python specific, and make the question about the underlying logic. But it seems it's still easier for Python folks.
  - kefka 9y ago
    Sorry, not buying it. I caught 3 "Whoops sorry you missed a weird bug in a specific programming language that you weren't explicitly being tested on". Sure, if I was doing a Python3 quiz, I'd expect those. But this wasn't what the quiz claimed to be. Turns out, the "fill in the blank" code was easy, got all of them. Along with all the 1st year theory questions.
    - horsawlarway 9y ago
      I agree. Coming in with a LOT of experience in JS and a good damn chunk in c++, but none in python... this is really bad test. You ask dev about aspects of the language that are essentially memorization: Does matrix.append(x) in python append by reference or by value? Both are equally likely without knowing anything about the language. the question is also pretty easy to answer correct IF I know that, but I have no reason to know that. You're not testing skill in any sense of the word. You're purely testing familiarity with this specific language (and worse, this language's standard library) That's bad.
      - kbp 9y ago
        > Does matrix.append(x) in python append by reference or by value? Both are equally likely without knowing anything about the language. I don't think they're equally likely. The question would have the same answer in Javascript, Ruby, Lisp, Perl 6, Java, and many other languages. You can see from the code samples that Python is a high level, dynamic, imperative language, so I think it's fair to assume you would expect that behaviour from it. There's a bit of guessing, but you can make an educated guess.
dm3 9y ago
Interesting. As a datapoint - I've never programmed in Python (mostly Java/Clojure) but had no trouble answering the questions.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  Java turns out to be a solid reference point for this. JavaScript might be even better. But there are still issues - not only would this be hard for a C++ programmer, it's hard for a Java programmer who overthinks the thing. Sure, I know how Java handles pass by reference, but unless I know that Python works the same way I'm still guessing.

lj3 9y ago

Oh good, I wasn't the only one. The second question had me wondering if it was testing my knowledge of tree searches or python queues. I don't know python at all.

iamNumber4 9y ago
I can attest that you are not the only one. Don't know python either, Nor should you need too. "There should be a warning label on this thing!!!"
fgonzag 9y ago
Exactly, I know what a breadth first search is. I don't know the specifics of how queues work in python.

arohner 9y ago

Agreed. I've been a professional developer for nearly 20 years. I've shipped kernel C, windows C++, java,python, ruby, clojure to production, but the last time I wrote python was nearly a decade ago. Since then, I've been firmly in the Clojure community, with no intention of leaving. I know I'm a good programmer, and I got nearly every python-specific question wrong. I understand closures and call-by-reference tyvm, but I don't remember or care about the quirks of python. Triplebyte in particular seems to not care about the difference between "good at programming" and "good at programming in python". The skillset needed for C, python, clojure and JS are wildly different. They do a disservice to their users by pretending otherwise.

ammon 9y ago
For what it's worth, we run our interviews in the language of the engineer's choosing (including clojure), and get people jobs at Clojure and Haskel and C++ companies. We went with Python for this (toy) quiz because it's the most common language we see among applicants. I tried to add comments to explain anything python specific, and make the question about the underlying logic. But it seems it's still easier for Python folks.
- kefka 9y ago
  Sorry, not buying it. I caught 3 "Whoops sorry you missed a weird bug in a specific programming language that you weren't explicitly being tested on". Sure, if I was doing a Python3 quiz, I'd expect those. But this wasn't what the quiz claimed to be. Turns out, the "fill in the blank" code was easy, got all of them. Along with all the 1st year theory questions.
  - horsawlarway 9y ago
    I agree. Coming in with a LOT of experience in JS and a good damn chunk in c++, but none in python... this is really bad test. You ask dev about aspects of the language that are essentially memorization: Does matrix.append(x) in python append by reference or by value? Both are equally likely without knowing anything about the language. the question is also pretty easy to answer correct IF I know that, but I have no reason to know that. You're not testing skill in any sense of the word. You're purely testing familiarity with this specific language (and worse, this language's standard library) That's bad.
    - kbp 9y ago
      > Does matrix.append(x) in python append by reference or by value? Both are equally likely without knowing anything about the language. I don't think they're equally likely. The question would have the same answer in Javascript, Ruby, Lisp, Perl 6, Java, and many other languages. You can see from the code samples that Python is a high level, dynamic, imperative language, so I think it's fair to assume you would expect that behaviour from it. There's a bit of guessing, but you can make an educated guess.

dm3 9y ago

Interesting. As a datapoint - I've never programmed in Python (mostly Java/Clojure) but had no trouble answering the questions.

Bartweiss 9y ago
Java turns out to be a solid reference point for this. JavaScript might be even better. But there are still issues - not only would this be hard for a C++ programmer, it's hard for a Java programmer who overthinks the thing. Sure, I know how Java handles pass by reference, but unless I know that Python works the same way I'm still guessing.