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"I have no idea" he told me. With an answer like that he would no doubt flunk the modern interviewing process: "We had a guy come in, tons of experience, aced

by vanusa 7y ago

"I have no idea" he told me. With an answer like that he would no doubt flunk the modern interviewing process: "We had a guy come in, tons of experience, aced all of our coding tests... but when we asked him about operator precedence in C, he just shrugged and said 'I have no idea'. So we had a to let him go, for his lack of strong CS fundamentals." Said one 25 year-old SSE to another in the follow-up.

ithkuil 7y ago
Interviewing skills are a thing like everything else. A good candidate should jump to the opportunity to explain why she can't trust even herself to do it right (let alone other people, including her future self!). Brining (or making up plausible) examples from experience, etc. Yes, sometimes it's silly, but there is the harsh reality of how interviewing is executed, especially by those companies who want to base the assessment mostly on the judgement of peers as you said. If you're really senior, in most cases, you can't expect that the majority of people in the company you're applying to is going to be as senior as you. You'll need to do a lot of convincing and explaining of things that might be obvious to you even after you join, on a daily basis. As with everything, the interview can be a good place to show you can do it.
- vanusa 7y ago
  As with everything, the interview can be a good place to show you can do it. Until the moment where you get flushed for some dumb random thing or another. Then the rest all goes down the drain.
- kazinator 7y ago
  Knowing the precedence and knowing it well is necessary so that you can read code quickly and accurately. Not so that you can write code using the minimum number of parentheses. Sometimes, even when you have the power to add parentheses to existing code and merge the commit, you still have to know what the unmodified code is doing: just so that you're sure your readability improvement is not changing the behavior, for one thing! You can be looking up precedence tables all the time, or adding prints to test things empirically run-time.

by vanusa 7y ago

ithkuil 7y ago

Interviewing skills are a thing like everything else. A good candidate should jump to the opportunity to explain why she can't trust even herself to do it right (let alone other people, including her future self!). Brining (or making up plausible) examples from experience, etc. Yes, sometimes it's silly, but there is the harsh reality of how interviewing is executed, especially by those companies who want to base the assessment mostly on the judgement of peers as you said. If you're really senior, in most cases, you can't expect that the majority of people in the company you're applying to is going to be as senior as you. You'll need to do a lot of convincing and explaining of things that might be obvious to you even after you join, on a daily basis. As with everything, the interview can be a good place to show you can do it.

vanusa 7y ago
As with everything, the interview can be a good place to show you can do it. Until the moment where you get flushed for some dumb random thing or another. Then the rest all goes down the drain.
kazinator 7y ago
Knowing the precedence and knowing it well is necessary so that you can read code quickly and accurately. Not so that you can write code using the minimum number of parentheses. Sometimes, even when you have the power to add parentheses to existing code and merge the commit, you still have to know what the unmodified code is doing: just so that you're sure your readability improvement is not changing the behavior, for one thing! You can be looking up precedence tables all the time, or adding prints to test things empirically run-time.