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Asking for a code snippet seems to break the question--I can't imagine anything you paste making much sense without context. My honest answer would be to quick

by b1twise 16y ago

Asking for a code snippet seems to break the question--I can't imagine anything you paste making much sense without context. My honest answer would be to quickly mention that you're not able to paste the exact code because of confidentiality with the previous employer, and then to begin talking about the code and why you're proud of it. I ask a question very similar to this when I interview, and I'm looking for applicants truly interested in the work they do and computer science. The occasion to apply an obscure algorithm, refactoring code to improve it dramatically, unusual elegance in a solution...

_corbett 16y ago
> mention that you're not able to paste the exact code because of confidentiality with the previous employer as an interviewer I'd be skeptical if the interviewee not only was secretive about his/her code, but had no pet projects or toy scripts lying about. I think it's a great question because not only do you get a quick sense for how people code, but the response choice itself gives you some insight in to how people think and what gets them excited about hacking.
- Retric 16y ago
  I have pet projects, but I am not impressed by them. The type of code I write for a one off project for myself is vary different than code I would write as part of a larger project. EX: I thought the twitter people where idiots so I codded up an outline for a solution that would fix their basic problem. I quickly got to single threaded code that was significantly faster than what they used and reasonable memory efficient so I stopped. However, it's not exactly a hard problem and it's not production worthy so I feel no reason to share it with other people.
  - arghnoname 16y ago
    This is the problem I have. I have a strong sense of professionalism, so when I code professionally, I put in more effort to meet a personal standard that far exceeds what I do for personal projects. One simple example, if I'm writing a utility to be used by me alone, I probably don't verify input. I don't do very good error handling (if it crashes who cares), etc, but if I were hiring the lack of any of these would be a serious red flag to me in any submitted code sample. Of course there are larger personal projects were a little more care is taken, but it is a whole other level of polish that I put into professional work. I would be embarrassed to share my personal projects. That's probably actually a good sign because at least I know it should be better.

by b1twise 16y ago

_corbett 16y ago

> mention that you're not able to paste the exact code because of confidentiality with the previous employer as an interviewer I'd be skeptical if the interviewee not only was secretive about his/her code, but had no pet projects or toy scripts lying about. I think it's a great question because not only do you get a quick sense for how people code, but the response choice itself gives you some insight in to how people think and what gets them excited about hacking.

Retric 16y ago
I have pet projects, but I am not impressed by them. The type of code I write for a one off project for myself is vary different than code I would write as part of a larger project. EX: I thought the twitter people where idiots so I codded up an outline for a solution that would fix their basic problem. I quickly got to single threaded code that was significantly faster than what they used and reasonable memory efficient so I stopped. However, it's not exactly a hard problem and it's not production worthy so I feel no reason to share it with other people.
- arghnoname 16y ago
  This is the problem I have. I have a strong sense of professionalism, so when I code professionally, I put in more effort to meet a personal standard that far exceeds what I do for personal projects. One simple example, if I'm writing a utility to be used by me alone, I probably don't verify input. I don't do very good error handling (if it crashes who cares), etc, but if I were hiring the lack of any of these would be a serious red flag to me in any submitted code sample. Of course there are larger personal projects were a little more care is taken, but it is a whole other level of polish that I put into professional work. I would be embarrassed to share my personal projects. That's probably actually a good sign because at least I know it should be better.