6 ms·

Unlikely to work. Companies will just invoke the "false negative better than false positive" heuristic.

nostrademons 16y ago
Companies - even ones that use the "false negative is better than false positive" heuristic - would also rather that you ask enough questions and adapt them to the candidates background so that you can rule out "false" anything. This can work if you really are an expert at something but just got a bad interviewer or bad interview question. The tricky part is that you have to be an expert at something. I wasn't really seeing this from the author's blog post - experts typically wouldn't go for a bunch of blog articles and YouTube videos to learn more than a cursory overview, they'd look for the source of existing open-source libraries and implement a couple projects on their own.
- angstrom 16y ago
  There's also something to be said for specifically targeting areas a candidate is not strong with to see how they handle their weakness. If you clam up, get defensive, or try to bullshit your way that's an automatic fail from my perspective. I don't want to spend 8 hrs/day working with any of those 3 personality types.
  - jrockway 16y ago
    I've interviewed a lot of people, but I've never seen one that didn't BS just a little bit. What annoys me is outright lying, like saying on your resume that you worked on some cool-sounding project, but your role was to get coffee for the people doing the actual work. What annoys me more is that when you do the same thing, but with something that doesn't even sound cool, like "converted a database to a CSV file". (I am not making this up. I saw this on someone's resume and thought, "hey, at least they're honest... maybe we can guide them towards being useful". Nope. The candidate had clearly never even typed code into a computer before.) Interview questions I find relevant: * reverse a C string * what do you hate the most about your favorite language * if you could spend a week trying something new, what would it be * what projects are you working on in your own time right now It is amazing how poorly people do at the middle two. Getting the first one wrong, I can understand -- you have to know how to program, and most companies will hire bad programmers if they can BS a little. The last one, fine, you have a three hour commute and eight kids, and you don't even like programming or making things. But really... you can't think of anything you hate about your favorite language. Do you ever write any code? Nothing? Not one single, solitary thing? Nothing annoys you in the slightest, tiniest bit? LIES. And... you can't come up with some BS about what you want to learn? You have no ambition in your life? You care so little about your field that if we gave you money to learn something, you wouldn't do it? You're not curious about "Web stuff"? You have no interested in Scala? Really? Really? Programmers, I've found, are very, very rare.
    - edanm 16y ago
      Out of curiosity, how long does it usually take people to answer the second question? I'm talking about good candidates, not people who don't code. I'm asking because I've actually seen this question mentioned before, and each time, I spend some time thinking about it (as applied to Python). But it honestly takes me some time to think of problems with Python; not because it's perfect, just because I don't spend every day thinking "hey why can't it do this".
      - dalore 16y ago
        Python is easy. Just complain about the GIL like everyone else does :)
        ciupicri 16y ago
        On the other hand GIL is an issue of the CPython interpreter, other interpreters don't necessarily have it, e.g. IronPython.
      - warp 16y ago
        I always miss anonymous functions when coming back to python after a bit of perl or javascript. If you use multiple languages regularly surely there are some things in each language which you think is better in the other ones?
        jmaygarden 16y ago
        Anonymous functions in Python are what immediately popped into my mind. I do embedded work and mostly use C, but a lot of the problems with C actually make since when you have less than 1 kB of RAM. I'd prefer to use Lua for building test applications and the like, but I keep going back to Python because the library support is tremendous in comparison. In any event, I think the question of what problems you have with your favorite language is at least a good conversation starter. It would be nice to know that those kinds of conversations are easy and interesting to a candidate. Although, that isn't necessarily a requirement.
      - 16y ago

Companies - even ones that use the "false negative is better than false positive" heuristic - would also rather that you ask enough questions and adapt them to the candidates background so that you can rule out "false" anything. This can work if you really are an expert at something but just got a bad interviewer or bad interview question. The tricky part is that you have to be an expert at something. I wasn't really seeing this from the author's blog post - experts typically wouldn't go for a bunch of blog articles and YouTube videos to learn more than a cursory overview, they'd look for the source of existing open-source libraries and implement a couple projects on their own.

angstrom 16y ago
There's also something to be said for specifically targeting areas a candidate is not strong with to see how they handle their weakness. If you clam up, get defensive, or try to bullshit your way that's an automatic fail from my perspective. I don't want to spend 8 hrs/day working with any of those 3 personality types.
- jrockway 16y ago
  I've interviewed a lot of people, but I've never seen one that didn't BS just a little bit. What annoys me is outright lying, like saying on your resume that you worked on some cool-sounding project, but your role was to get coffee for the people doing the actual work. What annoys me more is that when you do the same thing, but with something that doesn't even sound cool, like "converted a database to a CSV file". (I am not making this up. I saw this on someone's resume and thought, "hey, at least they're honest... maybe we can guide them towards being useful". Nope. The candidate had clearly never even typed code into a computer before.) Interview questions I find relevant: * reverse a C string * what do you hate the most about your favorite language * if you could spend a week trying something new, what would it be * what projects are you working on in your own time right now It is amazing how poorly people do at the middle two. Getting the first one wrong, I can understand -- you have to know how to program, and most companies will hire bad programmers if they can BS a little. The last one, fine, you have a three hour commute and eight kids, and you don't even like programming or making things. But really... you can't think of anything you hate about your favorite language. Do you ever write any code? Nothing? Not one single, solitary thing? Nothing annoys you in the slightest, tiniest bit? LIES. And... you can't come up with some BS about what you want to learn? You have no ambition in your life? You care so little about your field that if we gave you money to learn something, you wouldn't do it? You're not curious about "Web stuff"? You have no interested in Scala? Really? Really? Programmers, I've found, are very, very rare.
  - edanm 16y ago
    Out of curiosity, how long does it usually take people to answer the second question? I'm talking about good candidates, not people who don't code. I'm asking because I've actually seen this question mentioned before, and each time, I spend some time thinking about it (as applied to Python). But it honestly takes me some time to think of problems with Python; not because it's perfect, just because I don't spend every day thinking "hey why can't it do this".
    - dalore 16y ago
      Python is easy. Just complain about the GIL like everyone else does :)
      - ciupicri 16y ago
        On the other hand GIL is an issue of the CPython interpreter, other interpreters don't necessarily have it, e.g. IronPython.
    - warp 16y ago
      I always miss anonymous functions when coming back to python after a bit of perl or javascript. If you use multiple languages regularly surely there are some things in each language which you think is better in the other ones?
      - jmaygarden 16y ago
        Anonymous functions in Python are what immediately popped into my mind. I do embedded work and mostly use C, but a lot of the problems with C actually make since when you have less than 1 kB of RAM. I'd prefer to use Lua for building test applications and the like, but I keep going back to Python because the library support is tremendous in comparison. In any event, I think the question of what problems you have with your favorite language is at least a good conversation starter. It would be nice to know that those kinds of conversations are easy and interesting to a candidate. Although, that isn't necessarily a requirement.
    - 16y ago