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A few months ago I interviewed with Major CDN Company for a front-end dev position. They sent me a take-home React/NextJS project stub with dependencies and suc

by _bxg1 7y ago

A few months ago I interviewed with Major CDN Company for a front-end dev position. They sent me a take-home React/NextJS project stub with dependencies and such already defined, and instructions to finish building out the full app. "Perfect!", I thought. No stage pressure, plenty of opportunities for going an extra mile. They encouraged me to get creative and I did; it met all the requirements and then some. I proudly submitted it. A few days later I got an email saying, "Sorry, we're going to pass. The feedback from the person who reviewed it said that, 'It crashed with res.flat() is not defined when we tried to run it'". "That's weird", I thought. I assumed they were running it in a different browser that lacked Array.flat(). Annoying, but maybe browser compatibility was part of the test (it hadn't been stated as such). So I did some digging just to be sure; I asked what version of NodeJS they were using. Version 10. Turns out that version of Node is somewhat old and doesn't have flat(). Huh. Dug some more. .flat() wasn't even called in my code. The stack trace went down into NextJS itself. They had given me a project with a particular dependency declared and then run it in an environment which was incompatible with that dependency, and then immediately punted it without any further debugging. I tried to engage my contact via email, presenting the proof that it wasn't my fault. I got an icy "Thanks for your feedback, we'll forward it to our hiring team", followed by silence.

abledon 7y ago
unlucky! The buddha said we are promised two certain things in life: suffering and death. Everything else is a bonus.
- commandlinefan 7y ago
  Ben Franklin paraphrased: “the only things that are certain are death and taxes”.
  - abledon 7y ago
    I bet hes rolling in his grave at what Amazon pays in taxes
nickitolas 7y ago
That's hilarious
DoreenMichele 7y ago
It's hilarious, but I think you dodged a bullet. Imagine for a minute actually working there.
- alexpetralia 7y ago
  To be honest I never understood this logic. Clearly a firm's skill at interviewing might diverge from their ability to mentor, innovate, have a great engineering culture and so on? Sure - perhaps it's slightly less likely, but it's not at all obvious that interviewing skill and company excellence are 100% convergent.
  - DoreenMichele 7y ago
    My opinion is based more on the final sentence than on the borked exercise. Everyone makes mistakes. Character is revealed in how one handles it when the mistake is pointed out in good faith by a party who has a perfectly legitimate reason to do so.
  - mnm1 7y ago
    No, but their skill at being inconsiderate assholes almost certainly transcends the interview process as well as their engineering process. It likely permeates their whole organization. That's what I think the interviewee is looking at in this case and that's what was found. Unfortunately, fixing inconsiderate asshole syndrome is close to impossible. I wouldn't want to work at a place filled with them as described by this interviewee's experience above.
  - Frost1x 7y ago
    Well, from this example, management side was unwilling to even invest time in exploring or acknowledging the idea that they might be wrong. I don't know about you but I don't want to work with people who you can't have a reasonable conversation with to get to the bottom of a problem and figure out the issues together. Everyone makes mistakes, sorting them out together and achieving mutual goals is what makes this sort of work bearable. If management doesn't understand collaborative working environments, humility, and basic problem solving, I don't (and will not) work with them.
Psychlist 7y ago
Grr! That's how you should be interviewed, but then they fscked it up at the end. How frustrating.
mixmastamyk 7y ago
Nice work, I learned just from your post.
SkyPuncher 7y ago
My company does a takehome project, but are completely understanding if dependencies don't work on different systems. Basically, if the code looks right and you can show it working on your system, we're pretty understanding. The goal of a takehome isn't perfection - it's to demonstrate underlying abilities.
outworlder 7y ago
They definitely did you a favor. You have demonstrated solid debugging skills and stated your case. That's usually harder to find than someone who can churn out code based on simple and well-defined specs. Because that's the easy part.
- mattrp 7y ago
  They probably assumed someone else did the debugging. People assume the worst in these situations because they haven’t bothered to learn about the person.
  - BubRoss 7y ago
    Why would they assume that?
    - mattrp 7y ago
      I’m guess that’s the reason they never got back to him.
      - BubRoss 7y ago
        Right, you said that, but why would they assume some random third person tracked down the dependency?
        mattrp 7y ago
        Good grief man... I’m saying they assumed the candidate phoned a friend for the answer and then fed it back as his own to save his application. I honestly have no idea what happened, no one does... but generally there are no do overs and that kind of sucks given he figured out why they weren’t able to run his code.
        BubRoss 7y ago
        What are you basing that on? It seems like you made it up out of nowhere.
austincheney 7y ago
I failed a hiring code assignment because I didn’t provide a unit test. They didn’t ask for unit tests. I did provide various data samples to provide various end-to-end tests with documentation. Now I abandon any interview that requires a code assignment. I have better things to do than mind reading or dicking around with subjective code style nonsense. If they are taking this seriously they will provide their grading criteria along with the assignment text.
xvilka 7y ago
Haha, this mirrors my experience - once I was asked to write some embedded hardware driver, which required to run it under the RTOS in emulator, which they failed to run. They failed to run a simple qemu! I even provided them a shellscript to copy and run the required stuff. Surprisingly, I was hired nevertheless, because code "made sense", but still. I can imagine it's ubiquitous nowadays. Too many incompetent people decide on how to choose among competent people.
- wolf550e 7y ago
  This sounds like a PM was hiring a dev to implement a feature the PM was responsible for.
adreamingsoul 7y ago
Are you still looking for a FE role in the CDN industry?
b0rsuk 7y ago
I think the situation was unwinnable. You've exposed their incompetence. Rightly or wrongly, most people can't stand being criticized. If there's a solution to that one it's a diplomatic one, not a technical one. Be similarly wary to point out bugs in code reviewer's code. Unless you have a healthy professional atmosphere and multiple reviewers, your best course is to manipulate the reviewer into "coming up" with the idea for the bugfix from your ticket.
- anticensorship 7y ago
  > 'Rightly or wrongly, most people can't stand being criticized.' Wrongly. It's definitely a form of wrongness that idiotic humans are susceptible to. > 'If there's a solution to that one it's a diplomatic one, not a technical one.' Yes. It's called "break off all diplomatic relations with that crazy ass state and start preparing for war. > 'Be similarly wary to point out bugs in code reviewer's code. Unless you have a healthy professional atmosphere and multiple reviewers, your best course is to manipulate the reviewer into "coming up" with the idea for the bugfix from your ticket.' Listen to yourself. Your 'solution' to psychopathy is to become a psychopath yourself? Learn to manipulate and control others? Just accept people's absolute stupidity, selfishness, and arrogance, and just learn to manipulate them? No thanks.
  - b0rsuk 7y ago
    Life is not superhero movie and you have to deal with assholes on a daily basis. You can get away with what you're proposing if you already have an escape plan (another workplace). If they're your coworkers, following your first gut instict is bad.
busterarm 7y ago
I remember once interviewing for a startup my friend was working at because I wanted to work with said friend. It was mainly a PHP/Laravel job, but I didn't care. I had a high opinion of said friend and stacks are just tools to me -- you can do good work in just about anything. Go in for the in-person interview which goes extremely well, but talking to their two most senior engineers it seemed like they had just recently learned what OOP is and "drunk the Kool Aid". I found this extremely odd given that this was well into the 2010s already. They gave me a take-home exercise which was basically to implement some feature with Laravel using established best practices. I turn in something that's clean, documented, with tests, using the documented best practices (like literally from the Laravel docs), and extremely performant (would scale to a high volume of requests). Functional style though, broken out into 1-3 line functions that only do one thing -- similar to what you'd expect from a Rubyist. Rejected and they told my friend that I don't know how to code. My friend knew better and got a new job himself a month later and I went on to much better things.
- blub 7y ago
  " Functional style though, broken out into 1-3 line functions that only do one thing -- similar to what you'd expect from a Rubyist." I'm pretty laid back generally and I'm willing to overlook many things, but I think this is one of those where I'd vote against hiring, since I'd never want to maintain such code. Following the logic of algorithms would be for instance really hard because of having to jump around all the time.
  - fishmaster 7y ago
    I, too, would rather maintain spaghetti code contained in thousands of huge classes all over the code base.
    - blub 7y ago
      Speak for yourself most esteemed master of fish. Plenty of code bases are thankfully neither spaghetti nor ravioli.
  - 7y ago

by _bxg1 7y ago

abledon 7y ago

unlucky! The buddha said we are promised two certain things in life: suffering and death. Everything else is a bonus.

commandlinefan 7y ago
Ben Franklin paraphrased: “the only things that are certain are death and taxes”.
- abledon 7y ago
  I bet hes rolling in his grave at what Amazon pays in taxes

nickitolas 7y ago

That's hilarious

DoreenMichele 7y ago

It's hilarious, but I think you dodged a bullet. Imagine for a minute actually working there.

alexpetralia 7y ago
To be honest I never understood this logic. Clearly a firm's skill at interviewing might diverge from their ability to mentor, innovate, have a great engineering culture and so on? Sure - perhaps it's slightly less likely, but it's not at all obvious that interviewing skill and company excellence are 100% convergent.
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  My opinion is based more on the final sentence than on the borked exercise. Everyone makes mistakes. Character is revealed in how one handles it when the mistake is pointed out in good faith by a party who has a perfectly legitimate reason to do so.
- mnm1 7y ago
  No, but their skill at being inconsiderate assholes almost certainly transcends the interview process as well as their engineering process. It likely permeates their whole organization. That's what I think the interviewee is looking at in this case and that's what was found. Unfortunately, fixing inconsiderate asshole syndrome is close to impossible. I wouldn't want to work at a place filled with them as described by this interviewee's experience above.
- Frost1x 7y ago
  Well, from this example, management side was unwilling to even invest time in exploring or acknowledging the idea that they might be wrong. I don't know about you but I don't want to work with people who you can't have a reasonable conversation with to get to the bottom of a problem and figure out the issues together. Everyone makes mistakes, sorting them out together and achieving mutual goals is what makes this sort of work bearable. If management doesn't understand collaborative working environments, humility, and basic problem solving, I don't (and will not) work with them.

Psychlist 7y ago

Grr! That's how you should be interviewed, but then they fscked it up at the end. How frustrating.

mixmastamyk 7y ago

Nice work, I learned just from your post.

SkyPuncher 7y ago

My company does a takehome project, but are completely understanding if dependencies don't work on different systems. Basically, if the code looks right and you can show it working on your system, we're pretty understanding. The goal of a takehome isn't perfection - it's to demonstrate underlying abilities.

outworlder 7y ago

They definitely did you a favor. You have demonstrated solid debugging skills and stated your case. That's usually harder to find than someone who can churn out code based on simple and well-defined specs. Because that's the easy part.

mattrp 7y ago
They probably assumed someone else did the debugging. People assume the worst in these situations because they haven’t bothered to learn about the person.
- BubRoss 7y ago
  Why would they assume that?
  - mattrp 7y ago
    I’m guess that’s the reason they never got back to him.
    - BubRoss 7y ago
      Right, you said that, but why would they assume some random third person tracked down the dependency?
      - mattrp 7y ago
        Good grief man... I’m saying they assumed the candidate phoned a friend for the answer and then fed it back as his own to save his application. I honestly have no idea what happened, no one does... but generally there are no do overs and that kind of sucks given he figured out why they weren’t able to run his code.
        BubRoss 7y ago
        What are you basing that on? It seems like you made it up out of nowhere.

austincheney 7y ago

I failed a hiring code assignment because I didn’t provide a unit test. They didn’t ask for unit tests. I did provide various data samples to provide various end-to-end tests with documentation. Now I abandon any interview that requires a code assignment. I have better things to do than mind reading or dicking around with subjective code style nonsense. If they are taking this seriously they will provide their grading criteria along with the assignment text.

xvilka 7y ago

Haha, this mirrors my experience - once I was asked to write some embedded hardware driver, which required to run it under the RTOS in emulator, which they failed to run. They failed to run a simple qemu! I even provided them a shellscript to copy and run the required stuff. Surprisingly, I was hired nevertheless, because code "made sense", but still. I can imagine it's ubiquitous nowadays. Too many incompetent people decide on how to choose among competent people.

wolf550e 7y ago
This sounds like a PM was hiring a dev to implement a feature the PM was responsible for.

adreamingsoul 7y ago

Are you still looking for a FE role in the CDN industry?

b0rsuk 7y ago

I think the situation was unwinnable. You've exposed their incompetence. Rightly or wrongly, most people can't stand being criticized. If there's a solution to that one it's a diplomatic one, not a technical one. Be similarly wary to point out bugs in code reviewer's code. Unless you have a healthy professional atmosphere and multiple reviewers, your best course is to manipulate the reviewer into "coming up" with the idea for the bugfix from your ticket.

anticensorship 7y ago
> 'Rightly or wrongly, most people can't stand being criticized.' Wrongly. It's definitely a form of wrongness that idiotic humans are susceptible to. > 'If there's a solution to that one it's a diplomatic one, not a technical one.' Yes. It's called "break off all diplomatic relations with that crazy ass state and start preparing for war. > 'Be similarly wary to point out bugs in code reviewer's code. Unless you have a healthy professional atmosphere and multiple reviewers, your best course is to manipulate the reviewer into "coming up" with the idea for the bugfix from your ticket.' Listen to yourself. Your 'solution' to psychopathy is to become a psychopath yourself? Learn to manipulate and control others? Just accept people's absolute stupidity, selfishness, and arrogance, and just learn to manipulate them? No thanks.
- b0rsuk 7y ago
  Life is not superhero movie and you have to deal with assholes on a daily basis. You can get away with what you're proposing if you already have an escape plan (another workplace). If they're your coworkers, following your first gut instict is bad.

busterarm 7y ago

I remember once interviewing for a startup my friend was working at because I wanted to work with said friend. It was mainly a PHP/Laravel job, but I didn't care. I had a high opinion of said friend and stacks are just tools to me -- you can do good work in just about anything. Go in for the in-person interview which goes extremely well, but talking to their two most senior engineers it seemed like they had just recently learned what OOP is and "drunk the Kool Aid". I found this extremely odd given that this was well into the 2010s already. They gave me a take-home exercise which was basically to implement some feature with Laravel using established best practices. I turn in something that's clean, documented, with tests, using the documented best practices (like literally from the Laravel docs), and extremely performant (would scale to a high volume of requests). Functional style though, broken out into 1-3 line functions that only do one thing -- similar to what you'd expect from a Rubyist. Rejected and they told my friend that I don't know how to code. My friend knew better and got a new job himself a month later and I went on to much better things.

blub 7y ago
" Functional style though, broken out into 1-3 line functions that only do one thing -- similar to what you'd expect from a Rubyist." I'm pretty laid back generally and I'm willing to overlook many things, but I think this is one of those where I'd vote against hiring, since I'd never want to maintain such code. Following the logic of algorithms would be for instance really hard because of having to jump around all the time.
- fishmaster 7y ago
  I, too, would rather maintain spaghetti code contained in thousands of huge classes all over the code base.
  - blub 7y ago
    Speak for yourself most esteemed master of fish. Plenty of code bases are thankfully neither spaghetti nor ravioli.
- 7y ago