7 ms·

If you're an emacs user there's nothing worse than doing an on-site interview where someone wants you to pair program using their editor. Nothing works right an

If you're an emacs user there's nothing worse than doing an on-site interview where someone wants you to pair program using their editor. Nothing works right and you spend half the time flipper-handing it over the keys trying to remember how normal editors work. Then again, it's rare that I interview anymore. I've done maybe two of those kinds of (pair programming, someone else's rig) interviews in the last ten years and neither was for a job that I really wanted after spending time with the devs conducting the interviews. You want me to consult with you? Let me talk to your biz people to see if I'm the right person to solve your problems, and let the technical folk go over code I've written and we can deep dive on that if there is any question about my chops. Otherwise, fuck off. I'm too old to play "dance monkey".

psynapse 9y ago
"Let me talk to your biz people to see if I'm the right person to solve your problems, and let the technical folk go over code I've written and we can deep dive on that if there is any question about my chops." I feel you here. With becoming longer of tooth (in the trade) comes an understanding of how to contribute value via the multitude of avenues that are not just grinding out lines at the keyboard. I am surprised over and over at the incandescently bright young people who can wax lyrical about monad transformers, but to whom it does not occur to model a domain properly before cutting code, or who lack basic schema design and/or SQL knowledge. I am also in the boat of having vanishingly few technical interviews in recent years, but on a good deal of those occasions it has been obvious that the interviewer is just so not the person I should be talking to.
- quickthrower2 9y ago
  Modelling a domain is very underrated by companies as well as individuals and it's a shame because we end up with code bases full of mixed purposes language and confused naming that makes it harder to work on legacy. Monad Transformers FWIW are bread and butter in Haskell. So it a bit like going on about dependency injection. Not necessarily a sign of being stuck up or head in the clouds.
  - heartbreak 9y ago
    In some circles writing Haskell in the first place is a sign of having one’s head in the clouds.
    - quickthrower2 9y ago
      Feels that way in the c# world sometimes. Ironic given the love for Linq, Rx, Generics, Lambdas etc.
      - jeremiep 9y ago
        Where do you think these ideas come from? :) Microsoft has Haskell in R&D pushing ideas to F# which in turn pushes them to C#.
    - btilly 9y ago
      https://aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the-technical-interview https://aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the-technical-interview comes to mind about now...
eagsalazar2 9y ago
I sort of hear you. Having said that as someone who has done a lot of hiring in the past we'd pass on someone like you immediately unless you came very highly recommended. We need a consistent process to have any basis for comparison over time. Also your "fuck you, I'm not a monkey" attitude almost always shines through during initial screening call and is the last thing we want to bring in. I do feel for you. Maybe we're about the same age and level of experience? It sucks to be put through some one size fits all hiring process and it sucks to constantly feel like more jr people are reinventing process and best practices every few years. But what are you going to do if you are a consultant? you have to be the boss or you have to play ball. While teams do need leaders with experience they also need collaborative (vs combative) team players who can ride out the details and help improve hiring and work process in a positive and constructive way. I think more experienced devs get jaded. It is a trap IMO and probably contributes to a lot of the ageism that is perceived and that really exists in the industry.
- ardit33 9y ago
  The OP has a point. Pair programming into somebody's else code, with no context of the overall functionality, and having to use somebody's else system (different shortcuts, editor layout/environment), is a very poor experience. I have been in two of them, and they were not a pleasant experience overall. Most senior engineers take some time to understand what's going before diving into somebody's else code and making changes left and right. We all have that experience where fixing a bug, the right way, starts causing/surfaces other problems in the system. I am talking as a dev that has shipped multiple apps, and some of them very successful. In anyway, if it works for you, keep on doing it, but it will absolutely turn off the more experienced folks from your company.
  - jeremiep 9y ago
    That has been my own experience as well. I noticed that companies with rigid hiring processes usually also have rigid development processes and those are indeed highly toxic to experienced engineers. I've seen my share of companies whose senior engineers were quite below average, but since they have no other engineers to compare to they come out as rock stars! This is in stark contrast to companies whose hiring processes are tuned towards more experienced folks.
kafkaesq 9y ago
Otherwise, fuck off. I'm too old to play "dance monkey". Good strategy. The "game" has gone on for so long, now -- and become such absurd caricature of itself (apparently without the participants being aware of this fact) -- that it brings to mind the closing line from WarGames: "Strange game. The only winning move is not to play."
- dsacco 9y ago
  > "Strange game. The only winning move is not to play." That's demonstrably false. If you're willing to put up with whiteboard tech interviews you have access to companies that enforce them but will pay very highly, regardless of what you consider their merit to be to hiring in general.
  - kafkaesq 9y ago
    If you're willing to put up with whiteboard tech interviews you have access to companies that enforce them but will pay very highly, Unfortunately one does not, in general, get a job simply by being "willing to put up with" a whiteboarding session or two.
    - confounded 9y ago
      It is a necessary but not sufficient criteria.
      - mlevental 9y ago
        criterion
      - kafkaesq 9y ago
        Whether they're necessary (or even useful) or not is one of those things you'll find a variety of viewpoints on, to say the least. Leaving aside the whole issue of whether actually done properly (or even reasonably).
        9y ago
TrickyRick 9y ago
You do realize it works the same the other way around, right? If I'm forced to pair with an emacs user I will spend half the time flipper-handing the keys and figuring out what weird hotkey I'm supposed to use just to get into edit mode. ;)
- emodendroket 9y ago
  It's not a modal editor.
  - bcoates 9y ago
    cough C-x cough
  - minikomi 9y ago
    But it can be!
quickthrower2 9y ago
How old is old? I'm 37 and being working as a coder since 21. I still need to apply to job ads and go through the tests. Not all have whiteboard but most have a puzzle. I don't begrudge 2 hours which is the usual time, but I'd probably reject whole day tests. I don't tend to stay friends with people for the sake of "having connections" but usually just to be friends. That means I don't have a big network to draw upon. There are so many advertised opportunities I'd miss out on if I said only get jobs through a network.
- weeksie 9y ago
  I'm 40. Some of my work I get through my network, for sure. But I'm picky about what I work on which means that I will often do business development for myself and actively cold call/hustle to scare up work in the area I prefer to be in. Strange for a dev, I know, but it's definitely been worth it for me. I also like to take a lot of time off between contracts to give myself time to pursue non-dev activities and finding the right balance is hard without actively developing my clients. For instance I'm finishing up a contract right now that was a green field build-out of a brand new product using Elixir. The only way to find that stuff (unless you're lucky) is to go out and dig it up.
  - quickthrower2 9y ago
    I like your approach and I'm slowly going to head in that direction. My first step is to blog decent content and interact online in the right places. I presume with such an approach there is increased $/day meaning the breaks can be taken without any financial sacrifice as compared to the 9-5?
    - weeksie 9y ago
      The pay is definitely better, more than makes up for 9-5. Can't recommend it enough :)
thomastjeffery 9y ago
Try being one of the few people who actually bothered to learn a keyboard layout other than qwerty. To make matters worse, my layout isn't installed by default in any OS other than GNU/Linux/BSD (it does come with Xorg now).
- ajsalminen 9y ago
  Having a keyboard with open firmware so you can carry the layout with you could help with this.
  - thomastjeffery 9y ago
    That's a viable workaround most of the time. Unfortunately, it causes another problem: You can't use a keycode-based (as opposed to keysym) configuration without switching your keyboard back to qwerty.

psynapse 9y ago

"Let me talk to your biz people to see if I'm the right person to solve your problems, and let the technical folk go over code I've written and we can deep dive on that if there is any question about my chops." I feel you here. With becoming longer of tooth (in the trade) comes an understanding of how to contribute value via the multitude of avenues that are not just grinding out lines at the keyboard. I am surprised over and over at the incandescently bright young people who can wax lyrical about monad transformers, but to whom it does not occur to model a domain properly before cutting code, or who lack basic schema design and/or SQL knowledge. I am also in the boat of having vanishingly few technical interviews in recent years, but on a good deal of those occasions it has been obvious that the interviewer is just so not the person I should be talking to.

quickthrower2 9y ago
Modelling a domain is very underrated by companies as well as individuals and it's a shame because we end up with code bases full of mixed purposes language and confused naming that makes it harder to work on legacy. Monad Transformers FWIW are bread and butter in Haskell. So it a bit like going on about dependency injection. Not necessarily a sign of being stuck up or head in the clouds.
- heartbreak 9y ago
  In some circles writing Haskell in the first place is a sign of having one’s head in the clouds.
  - quickthrower2 9y ago
    Feels that way in the c# world sometimes. Ironic given the love for Linq, Rx, Generics, Lambdas etc.
    - jeremiep 9y ago
      Where do you think these ideas come from? :) Microsoft has Haskell in R&D pushing ideas to F# which in turn pushes them to C#.
  - btilly 9y ago
    https://aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the-technical-interview https://aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the-technical-interview comes to mind about now...

eagsalazar2 9y ago

I sort of hear you. Having said that as someone who has done a lot of hiring in the past we'd pass on someone like you immediately unless you came very highly recommended. We need a consistent process to have any basis for comparison over time. Also your "fuck you, I'm not a monkey" attitude almost always shines through during initial screening call and is the last thing we want to bring in. I do feel for you. Maybe we're about the same age and level of experience? It sucks to be put through some one size fits all hiring process and it sucks to constantly feel like more jr people are reinventing process and best practices every few years. But what are you going to do if you are a consultant? you have to be the boss or you have to play ball. While teams do need leaders with experience they also need collaborative (vs combative) team players who can ride out the details and help improve hiring and work process in a positive and constructive way. I think more experienced devs get jaded. It is a trap IMO and probably contributes to a lot of the ageism that is perceived and that really exists in the industry.

ardit33 9y ago
The OP has a point. Pair programming into somebody's else code, with no context of the overall functionality, and having to use somebody's else system (different shortcuts, editor layout/environment), is a very poor experience. I have been in two of them, and they were not a pleasant experience overall. Most senior engineers take some time to understand what's going before diving into somebody's else code and making changes left and right. We all have that experience where fixing a bug, the right way, starts causing/surfaces other problems in the system. I am talking as a dev that has shipped multiple apps, and some of them very successful. In anyway, if it works for you, keep on doing it, but it will absolutely turn off the more experienced folks from your company.
- jeremiep 9y ago
  That has been my own experience as well. I noticed that companies with rigid hiring processes usually also have rigid development processes and those are indeed highly toxic to experienced engineers. I've seen my share of companies whose senior engineers were quite below average, but since they have no other engineers to compare to they come out as rock stars! This is in stark contrast to companies whose hiring processes are tuned towards more experienced folks.

kafkaesq 9y ago

Otherwise, fuck off. I'm too old to play "dance monkey". Good strategy. The "game" has gone on for so long, now -- and become such absurd caricature of itself (apparently without the participants being aware of this fact) -- that it brings to mind the closing line from WarGames: "Strange game. The only winning move is not to play."

dsacco 9y ago
> "Strange game. The only winning move is not to play." That's demonstrably false. If you're willing to put up with whiteboard tech interviews you have access to companies that enforce them but will pay very highly, regardless of what you consider their merit to be to hiring in general.
- kafkaesq 9y ago
  If you're willing to put up with whiteboard tech interviews you have access to companies that enforce them but will pay very highly, Unfortunately one does not, in general, get a job simply by being "willing to put up with" a whiteboarding session or two.
  - confounded 9y ago
    It is a necessary but not sufficient criteria.
    - mlevental 9y ago
      criterion
    - kafkaesq 9y ago
      Whether they're necessary (or even useful) or not is one of those things you'll find a variety of viewpoints on, to say the least. Leaving aside the whole issue of whether actually done properly (or even reasonably).
      - 9y ago

TrickyRick 9y ago

You do realize it works the same the other way around, right? If I'm forced to pair with an emacs user I will spend half the time flipper-handing the keys and figuring out what weird hotkey I'm supposed to use just to get into edit mode. ;)

emodendroket 9y ago
It's not a modal editor.
- bcoates 9y ago
  cough C-x cough
- minikomi 9y ago
  But it can be!

quickthrower2 9y ago

How old is old? I'm 37 and being working as a coder since 21. I still need to apply to job ads and go through the tests. Not all have whiteboard but most have a puzzle. I don't begrudge 2 hours which is the usual time, but I'd probably reject whole day tests. I don't tend to stay friends with people for the sake of "having connections" but usually just to be friends. That means I don't have a big network to draw upon. There are so many advertised opportunities I'd miss out on if I said only get jobs through a network.

weeksie 9y ago
I'm 40. Some of my work I get through my network, for sure. But I'm picky about what I work on which means that I will often do business development for myself and actively cold call/hustle to scare up work in the area I prefer to be in. Strange for a dev, I know, but it's definitely been worth it for me. I also like to take a lot of time off between contracts to give myself time to pursue non-dev activities and finding the right balance is hard without actively developing my clients. For instance I'm finishing up a contract right now that was a green field build-out of a brand new product using Elixir. The only way to find that stuff (unless you're lucky) is to go out and dig it up.
- quickthrower2 9y ago
  I like your approach and I'm slowly going to head in that direction. My first step is to blog decent content and interact online in the right places. I presume with such an approach there is increased $/day meaning the breaks can be taken without any financial sacrifice as compared to the 9-5?
  - weeksie 9y ago
    The pay is definitely better, more than makes up for 9-5. Can't recommend it enough :)

thomastjeffery 9y ago

Try being one of the few people who actually bothered to learn a keyboard layout other than qwerty. To make matters worse, my layout isn't installed by default in any OS other than GNU/Linux/BSD (it does come with Xorg now).

ajsalminen 9y ago
Having a keyboard with open firmware so you can carry the layout with you could help with this.
- thomastjeffery 9y ago
  That's a viable workaround most of the time. Unfortunately, it causes another problem: You can't use a keycode-based (as opposed to keysym) configuration without switching your keyboard back to qwerty.