5 ms·

I've been trying to weed out a lot of these problems from my team's interviewing set- they filter for CS students, not practical development knowledge. I can ho

I've been trying to weed out a lot of these problems from my team's interviewing set- they filter for CS students, not practical development knowledge. I can honestly say I've never used a linked list in 15 years of being paid to develop software. I've been pushing interviewers to come up with a problem based on code they've actually written in the past and use that for their interview question. I'm starting to think I might have better luck having a pre-built some code with some poor practices and asking a candidate to refactor and improve it- evaluating their ability to at least know what clean code is supposed to look like. That being said, I'm not willing to give up my whiteboard code interviews yet- they are too useful a filter. I still get candidates that sound fine talking about their previous experience and then say things like "oh man, its been a while since I've used arrays" when asked to code.

topkai22 8y ago
I will add on- no, I didn't find out how its possible to professionally program for 5 years and not use arrays. But the poor guys response showed he hadn't.
- jon_richards 8y ago
  >I didn't find out how its possible to professionally program for 5 years and not use arrays Python maybe?
- Aozora7 8y ago
  Probably depends on what you mean by "arrays". If you use high-level languages like Java, you probably don't use arrays often, if at all, in almost all cases you use collections that provide you with convenient abstractions for everything, even if they are still arrays underneath.
W-_-D 8y ago
I was really impressed with one of the interview rounds I was given at Microsoft - I was shown a mock code review and asked to comment on bugs (ranging from easy to spot like null reference exceptions, to harder like race conditions and edge cases) and code quality. It felt like good fair test of someone's day to day ability, isn't really something you can grind for, and presumably also gives quite a good quantitative measure of a candidate if you assign a weight to each bug/quality suggestion.

topkai22 8y ago

I will add on- no, I didn't find out how its possible to professionally program for 5 years and not use arrays. But the poor guys response showed he hadn't.

jon_richards 8y ago
>I didn't find out how its possible to professionally program for 5 years and not use arrays Python maybe?
Aozora7 8y ago
Probably depends on what you mean by "arrays". If you use high-level languages like Java, you probably don't use arrays often, if at all, in almost all cases you use collections that provide you with convenient abstractions for everything, even if they are still arrays underneath.

W-_-D 8y ago

I was really impressed with one of the interview rounds I was given at Microsoft - I was shown a mock code review and asked to comment on bugs (ranging from easy to spot like null reference exceptions, to harder like race conditions and edge cases) and code quality. It felt like good fair test of someone's day to day ability, isn't really something you can grind for, and presumably also gives quite a good quantitative measure of a candidate if you assign a weight to each bug/quality suggestion.