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For a lot of the work I do, this is heavily grounded in context and therefore useless to the interviewer. “I undid some hacks that Dave who left two years ago

For a lot of the work I do, this is heavily grounded in context and therefore useless to the interviewer. “I undid some hacks that Dave who left two years ago had put in the test suite because he just really liked stacking Python decorators, and they were getting too complex to figure out when some test broke. I updated some documentation that hadn't been touched in 5 years and was terrifyingly out of date. And then I sat in for two useless meetings because leadership really likes holding them.” is not likely to communicate any positive messages, but it is the reality of what a lot of us do at our jobs instead of solving complex race conditions in elegantly designed distributed systems. Not saying that that might not contribute some kind of signal to a potential interview, but it's very likely to be one that labels me as incompetent :)

the_af 7y ago
You can always talk about a hobby project of yours if your day job is uninteresting or not readily marketable. It's true that for some job interviews, an answer like in your example will make you lose points. However, for other jobs being able to fix and refactor legacy Python code may be just what they are looking after. Your interviewer might ask follow-up questions about code quality and cleanliness, how you made sure your refactor didn't break anything, etc.
- quadrifoliate 7y ago
  Serious question for you, or anyone else for that matter – what is the most memorable answer you have received to this question? [Broad details are fine, assuming you feel comfortable sharing them.]
ragona 7y ago
“When I was working at X on Y, we had a test suite that had become difficult to maintain. Some of this was due to particularly non-idiomatic code using stacked decorators, so I replaced that with more understandable setup and teardown functions. It really improved our ability to keep the tests up to date and to quickly resolve issues, and I’m glad I went out of my way to get it done. I also updated related documentation that hadn’t been touched in a long time to make it easier for people on the team to ramp up on the package.” You had a good interview story on your hands there! Give the interviewer the context of what the situation was, what you did, and why that mattered. But maybe leave our your leadership team’s penchant for never ending meetings. :P
- quadrifoliate 7y ago
  Thanks! I'll try to think about a couple other situations in this way in the future.
CGamesPlay 7y ago
You're right, that's a terrible answer. But not because the content is bad, but because you threw a coworker under the bus and because you didn't mention the impact that any of these changes had. "We had a large module that we were making lots of changes to that used Python decorators to add behavior. This pattern ended up growing to be really difficult to debug as we were changing the code, and when tests would break it would take hours of tracing through the code to figure out the reason. I (rewrote each method to not use decorators | inlined the decorators manually | whatever) to clean up the code. One of the other reasons working with this module was difficult was because the documentation was terrifyingly out of date, so as I was cleaning up the decorators I also updated the documentation." If you can say anything about the quantifiable impact, then do it, but I don't think this example necessarily requires it. The meetings had nothing to do with your problem.
- quadrifoliate 7y ago
  Hey, thanks! That's a good, positive way of restating the issue that I had completely missed. I'll try to think of things more in this way in the future, and state them that way in potential interviews.

the_af 7y ago

You can always talk about a hobby project of yours if your day job is uninteresting or not readily marketable. It's true that for some job interviews, an answer like in your example will make you lose points. However, for other jobs being able to fix and refactor legacy Python code may be just what they are looking after. Your interviewer might ask follow-up questions about code quality and cleanliness, how you made sure your refactor didn't break anything, etc.

quadrifoliate 7y ago
Serious question for you, or anyone else for that matter – what is the most memorable answer you have received to this question? [Broad details are fine, assuming you feel comfortable sharing them.]

ragona 7y ago

“When I was working at X on Y, we had a test suite that had become difficult to maintain. Some of this was due to particularly non-idiomatic code using stacked decorators, so I replaced that with more understandable setup and teardown functions. It really improved our ability to keep the tests up to date and to quickly resolve issues, and I’m glad I went out of my way to get it done. I also updated related documentation that hadn’t been touched in a long time to make it easier for people on the team to ramp up on the package.” You had a good interview story on your hands there! Give the interviewer the context of what the situation was, what you did, and why that mattered. But maybe leave our your leadership team’s penchant for never ending meetings. :P

quadrifoliate 7y ago
Thanks! I'll try to think about a couple other situations in this way in the future.

CGamesPlay 7y ago

You're right, that's a terrible answer. But not because the content is bad, but because you threw a coworker under the bus and because you didn't mention the impact that any of these changes had. "We had a large module that we were making lots of changes to that used Python decorators to add behavior. This pattern ended up growing to be really difficult to debug as we were changing the code, and when tests would break it would take hours of tracing through the code to figure out the reason. I (rewrote each method to not use decorators | inlined the decorators manually | whatever) to clean up the code. One of the other reasons working with this module was difficult was because the documentation was terrifyingly out of date, so as I was cleaning up the decorators I also updated the documentation." If you can say anything about the quantifiable impact, then do it, but I don't think this example necessarily requires it. The meetings had nothing to do with your problem.

quadrifoliate 7y ago
Hey, thanks! That's a good, positive way of restating the issue that I had completely missed. I'll try to think of things more in this way in the future, and state them that way in potential interviews.