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Would you rather work with this person: Interviewer: Okay now what if you couldn’t use the standard library? Imagine it’s a 200GB file and you have to do it al
by lacker 8y ago
Would you rather work with this person:
Interviewer: Okay now what if you couldn’t use the standard library? Imagine it’s a 200GB file and you have to do it all in memory in Ruby.
Me: Why the fuck would I do that?
Or with this person:
Interviewer: Okay now what if you couldn’t use the standard library? Imagine it’s a 200GB file and you have to do it all in memory in Ruby.
Me: Ah what an unusual situation, to be using Ruby without the standard library. Well, I would do it like this: <writes 20 lines of code, there's a bug, they fix it themselves without prompting>
While interviewing you might think a question is silly. But perhaps the interviewer has asked this question to 100 people and found it to lead to intelligent discussions that reveal a lot about job candidates. Don't assume that a process is a bad process just because it rejected you.
In particular, this sort of assumption seems designed to test your understanding of the linear stream processing type of programming. You probably wrote something that operated on an entire array, and the interviewer was curious to see if you were flexible enough to change that into an iterative algorithm. Perhaps you used a sort when you could have been slightly more efficient and used a single linear pass. A good programmer will be able to handle this, even if the specifics like "200GB file processed using Ruby with no standard library" are silly.
- pjm331 8y agoi'd much rather work with the first person
- ng12 8y agoI don't believe that. What's going to be their response when you ask them to do something on the job that they don't want to do?
- mmt 8y ago> that they don't want to do This seems like a strawman. If your point is that the author presented an interview vignette where the "Me", interviewee, character reacted to an unpleasant situation with less grace and courtesy than ideal, I doubt anyone would disagree. It was likely also just for emphasis and not to be taken literally, as it wasn't core to the point of the article. It's not that the interviewee merely didn't want to perform the exercise. It's that he questioned (or rejected) the premise of needing to do it that way. In the context of the interview, what would it show? There are plenty of people who very much want to work with someone who will question and even push back on "going off the reservation" (as a comment up-thread put it).
- ng12 8y agoIt shows a willful stubbornness that is incredibly difficult to work with. Obviously I'm not asking you the question because I'm a masochist -- I'm asking it because I'm trying to glean something about your abilities. The fact that the author would rather flaunt their ego as a "real developer" than suspend disbelief for a few minutes marks them as unnecessarily argumentative in my mind.
- mmt 8y agoSo what you're saying is that you don't believe the GP because you come to a particular conclusion as to the signal that such a reaction in the interview sends about the character of the candidate? Are you asserting it's impossible (for reasonable person) to come to any different conclusion as to the signal that it sends? As compared with the author's suggested alternative, do you feel that asking such a question is a better way of determining both this signal and the something about the candidate's abilities you were hoping to discover?
- ng12 8y agoI'm not asserting anything. I'm asking the above poster to think about what kind of person responds in the first manner.
- basseq 8y agoIdeally, you want both. That's a perfectly reasonable question for the candidate to ask. Why would you want to do that? You'd want a damn good reason to go "off the reservation" and build something like that. Plus, the reason and detail for wanting something like that a) might be the wrong approach or b) might have an impact on the final solution. Either way, it should lead to an intelligent discussion.
- NTDF9 8y agoWhile I would love to work with person B, would I completely eliminate person A? Hell no! In fact, there's a good chance that Person A is good at something that Person B doesn't even know. Why should the knowledge of what Person B knows be superior to what Person A knows?