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> The first round started with introductions, followed by a coding exercise — write a maze solving algorithm. What the fuck?! Seriously? Mind you, this was an i

by ebg13 8y ago

> The first round started with introductions, followed by a coding exercise — write a maze solving algorithm. What the fuck?! Seriously? Mind you, this was an interview for a front-end developer position and I am not a recent college graduate anymore. If you balk at breaking down a relatively simple and straightforward problem into approachable steps that a computer can interpret, then what exactly do you think that programming is? You don't need to _know_ the algorithm. You need to be able to think like a problem solver. And if you can't do that, then what exactly are you doing? > Anyway, that did not go too well, obviously, because it has been a long time since I took an Artificial Intelligence course in college You should be able to do this even if you've never done it before. You have a start, you have an end, and you have decisions to make to get from the start to the end. That's the literal definition of programming. The only people I know who think that basic pathfinding is some voodoo dark magic artificial intelligence problem and not just a simple straightforward algorithmic process that you should be able to do in your sleep for the rest of your life immediately after the first week of Intro CS 100 are not software engineers.

deleted 8y ago
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lkbm 8y ago
> If you balk at breaking down a relatively simple and straightforward problem into approachable steps that a computer can interpret, then what exactly do you think that programming is? Programmers tend to be good at putting their head down and solving a problem. They tend to be very bad at live coding for someone whose job is to judge you. A hiring process that measures you on the latter rather than the former is broken. It's like interviewing a novelist by asking them to extemporize a speech for you. It's very annoying that every attempt to make the case against the latter is met with people equating it with the former. They're very different skills. Maybe for some people evaluating performance in live coding is a good proxy for evaluating their programming ability in general, but it's pretty obvious that there are a ton of excellent programmers for which it's a terrible proxy.
- ebg13 8y ago
  > Programmers tend to... Please don't generalize about people this way. It's not useful, and it's almost certainly a bad idea to hand-wave away not being able to think through something trivial with an audience. If someone asks you to identify whether a bird in a photo is having a good day or a bad day, then it's reasonable for you to say "Wait, what?" Because that's a research problem that covers a whole host of different subjects (bird psychology, for one) and doesn't have a solution. If someone asks you to implement efficient image segmentation, something that you probably don't know how to do unless you have a PhD in computer vision, then it's reasonable for you to say "I don't know how to do that but I can go home and research how to do it". But OP wasn't asked to solve a hard problem. OP was asked to solve an incredibly simple problem and got angry about it. > It's like interviewing a novelist by asking them to extemporize a speech for you. OPs given scenario is more like interviewing a novelist by asking them to put a handful of words in an order that constructs a grammatically sound sentence. If you can't do that, then they don't want your novel.

by ebg13 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

lkbm 8y ago

> If you balk at breaking down a relatively simple and straightforward problem into approachable steps that a computer can interpret, then what exactly do you think that programming is? Programmers tend to be good at putting their head down and solving a problem. They tend to be very bad at live coding for someone whose job is to judge you. A hiring process that measures you on the latter rather than the former is broken. It's like interviewing a novelist by asking them to extemporize a speech for you. It's very annoying that every attempt to make the case against the latter is met with people equating it with the former. They're very different skills. Maybe for some people evaluating performance in live coding is a good proxy for evaluating their programming ability in general, but it's pretty obvious that there are a ton of excellent programmers for which it's a terrible proxy.

ebg13 8y ago
> Programmers tend to... Please don't generalize about people this way. It's not useful, and it's almost certainly a bad idea to hand-wave away not being able to think through something trivial with an audience. If someone asks you to identify whether a bird in a photo is having a good day or a bad day, then it's reasonable for you to say "Wait, what?" Because that's a research problem that covers a whole host of different subjects (bird psychology, for one) and doesn't have a solution. If someone asks you to implement efficient image segmentation, something that you probably don't know how to do unless you have a PhD in computer vision, then it's reasonable for you to say "I don't know how to do that but I can go home and research how to do it". But OP wasn't asked to solve a hard problem. OP was asked to solve an incredibly simple problem and got angry about it. > It's like interviewing a novelist by asking them to extemporize a speech for you. OPs given scenario is more like interviewing a novelist by asking them to put a handful of words in an order that constructs a grammatically sound sentence. If you can't do that, then they don't want your novel.