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I once learned a shocking lesson about the influence of my preconceptions when I accidentally took a developer through three rounds of interviews because he pre
by petenixey 16y ago
I once learned a shocking lesson about the influence of my preconceptions when I accidentally took a developer through three rounds of interviews because he previously worked for Pivotal Labs and had a German (aka technical) accent.
It wasn't until the third interview that I asked him to write an algorithm to sort an array and when he couldn't I suggested instead writing an algorithm to see whether the array was already sorted. When he couldn't do that either he told me I was asking the wrong questions and not letting him show off the code he was good at.
To this day I have wondered and never discovered what type of code doesn't involve arrays, loops and comparisons however I do now ask candidates to write code right at the start of the interview loop. I simply never anticipated how many non-programmers would apply for programming positions.
- enjo 16y agoI haven't written code to sort an array in nearly two decades of professional experience:) I've been lucky enough to work on some pretty non-trivial problems as well. If you asked me to do it, I could probably crank out some sort of bubble-sort (maybe). It's not to say I haven't sorted arrays, I certainly have, but whatever standard library I'm using almost always does it for me... and pretty damn well at the same time.
- X9 16y agoWhile it is largely based on the context of the job, I'd think some demonstration of fundamentals, like sorting (even if it's just bubble sort :-)), is important. It's another way to see which mental tools the candidate can use when debugging problems and they're forced to drill down through the layers of abstraction provided.