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For a while I had a gig writing HR software, and I read a bunch of books on conducting technical interviews. One particular gem of a book -- the title escapes m

by kabdib 6y ago

For a while I had a gig writing HR software, and I read a bunch of books on conducting technical interviews. One particular gem of a book -- the title escapes me -- had example interview questions for some popular programming languages. I don't know about the COBOL, XML and SQL chapters, but the C and Java chapters were terrible: Q: "How do you get the size of a file?" A: "Call open, and then sizeof." ... is the only one I recall, but they all ranged from "awful" to "not even wrong". Over my years of job hunting I'm slightly disappointed that I've never been given a question from it. :-) This is all fun and games until you run into this kind of code in production. I once had to do an emergency rewrite of some firmware by someone who did not appreciate the benefit of functions. That one was so bad that I stopped looking at the original code for any reason because I was afraid I'd accidentally adopt one of the author's many, many misinterpretations of the hardware, or of base reality.

smabie 6y ago
Was the book intended for people who didn't know how to program but were for some reason interviewing a programmer?
- laumars 6y ago
  It’s not that unusual of a situation. You might have other technical teams but your lead developer(s) leave. These days you can outsource technical tests to online businesses that specialise in that kind of stuff but that wasn’t always an option, particularly if you travel far back enough in time, and hiring contractors to support you during the recruitment process is often seen as too expensive for some businesses.
m-ee 6y ago
I once has to rewrite legacy firmware where the original author didn’t believe in .c files. You can still compile with only header files (but only if it’s all headers, no mixing what he did with normal structure), but I still wonder why he thought that was a good idea. He works for Facebook now.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- 542458 6y ago
  That is a legitimate strategy for libraries so you don’t have to package everything. Not sure why why you’d do it for firmware though. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Header-only https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Header-only Maybe the author was cargo-culting that?
  - avian 6y ago
    Often having everything in one compilation unit results in a smaller and/or faster binary. I’ve seen this happen even when using LTO. It’s a common practice when developing firmware for small micros.
    - ReactiveJelly 6y ago
      At work I do amalgamation builds where I `#include` 10s of files into 4 .cpp files so I can do `make -j 4` and end up with 4 compilation units. It's stupid. It messes up `using`. It doesn't do incremental rebuilds. But it does clean builds fast for the release script, and it saves me from setting up cross-compilation on a faster computer.
      - sfink 6y ago
        It's not just stupid, it breaks the language. Things will be valid when compiled together that are invalid C++ when compiled separately. Your #includes will become more and more wrong over time, and if you ever change the grouping of files all kinds of random unrelated stuff will break. It's also a really great idea, for the reasons you give. This is how the Firefox tree is built, and it gives massive compile and link time speedups. (We call it "unified builds".) Some runtime speedups too. I guess that's from better cross-file inlining?
        saagarjha 6y ago
throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
I've met programmers who didn't understand functions. Pretty well everything was one giant code block. He also didn't understand the need for compiler warnings and switched them all off. Come to think of it, I refactored some code from a guy who didn't understand procs. He just cut & pasted code 'snippets' (a snippet being about a screenful) a couple of hundred times. I find it difficult to understand such people.
- dgellow 6y ago
  During my first few years as a professional I worked on COBOL systems. COBOL doesn’t have functions, only procedures (no parameters, no return values, everything come from the global state). People were writing horrible programs made of one giant procedure that would go for thousands of lines and crazy level of indentation. Everything was done through a small terminal emulator for AS400, 24x80 characters. Every programs were copy pasted from other places. I eventually found a way to transfer the file out via FTP then upload it back that way I could at least use vim and see what I was writing but I was alone doing that. I’ve been reprimanded after documenting my code via comments because I was using some vertical space that should have been instead reserved to code (when you only have 24 lines at a time, people become really petty about things). That was around 2009 :p
- billfruit 6y ago
  I suspect some of these programming habits might have come from working on MATLAB. I think experience with MATLAB could be considered positively harmfull:- and it fosters a mentality of quickly thrashing out a piece of code with hardly any thought of structuring it into a systematic organized manner. Hopefully adoption of python based tooling in many fields could help alleviate this in coming years..
  - eru 6y ago
    In Matlab's defense, it has become a much better language over the years. They even introduced first class functions more than a decade ago.

by kabdib 6y ago

smabie 6y ago

Was the book intended for people who didn't know how to program but were for some reason interviewing a programmer?

laumars 6y ago
It’s not that unusual of a situation. You might have other technical teams but your lead developer(s) leave. These days you can outsource technical tests to online businesses that specialise in that kind of stuff but that wasn’t always an option, particularly if you travel far back enough in time, and hiring contractors to support you during the recruitment process is often seen as too expensive for some businesses.

m-ee 6y ago

I once has to rewrite legacy firmware where the original author didn’t believe in .c files. You can still compile with only header files (but only if it’s all headers, no mixing what he did with normal structure), but I still wonder why he thought that was a good idea. He works for Facebook now.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
542458 6y ago
That is a legitimate strategy for libraries so you don’t have to package everything. Not sure why why you’d do it for firmware though. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Header-only https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Header-only Maybe the author was cargo-culting that?
- avian 6y ago
  Often having everything in one compilation unit results in a smaller and/or faster binary. I’ve seen this happen even when using LTO. It’s a common practice when developing firmware for small micros.
  - ReactiveJelly 6y ago
    At work I do amalgamation builds where I `#include` 10s of files into 4 .cpp files so I can do `make -j 4` and end up with 4 compilation units. It's stupid. It messes up `using`. It doesn't do incremental rebuilds. But it does clean builds fast for the release script, and it saves me from setting up cross-compilation on a faster computer.
    - sfink 6y ago
      It's not just stupid, it breaks the language. Things will be valid when compiled together that are invalid C++ when compiled separately. Your #includes will become more and more wrong over time, and if you ever change the grouping of files all kinds of random unrelated stuff will break. It's also a really great idea, for the reasons you give. This is how the Firefox tree is built, and it gives massive compile and link time speedups. (We call it "unified builds".) Some runtime speedups too. I guess that's from better cross-file inlining?
      - saagarjha 6y ago

throwaway_pdp09 6y ago

I've met programmers who didn't understand functions. Pretty well everything was one giant code block. He also didn't understand the need for compiler warnings and switched them all off. Come to think of it, I refactored some code from a guy who didn't understand procs. He just cut & pasted code 'snippets' (a snippet being about a screenful) a couple of hundred times. I find it difficult to understand such people.

dgellow 6y ago
During my first few years as a professional I worked on COBOL systems. COBOL doesn’t have functions, only procedures (no parameters, no return values, everything come from the global state). People were writing horrible programs made of one giant procedure that would go for thousands of lines and crazy level of indentation. Everything was done through a small terminal emulator for AS400, 24x80 characters. Every programs were copy pasted from other places. I eventually found a way to transfer the file out via FTP then upload it back that way I could at least use vim and see what I was writing but I was alone doing that. I’ve been reprimanded after documenting my code via comments because I was using some vertical space that should have been instead reserved to code (when you only have 24 lines at a time, people become really petty about things). That was around 2009 :p
billfruit 6y ago
I suspect some of these programming habits might have come from working on MATLAB. I think experience with MATLAB could be considered positively harmfull:- and it fosters a mentality of quickly thrashing out a piece of code with hardly any thought of structuring it into a systematic organized manner. Hopefully adoption of python based tooling in many fields could help alleviate this in coming years..
- eru 6y ago
  In Matlab's defense, it has become a much better language over the years. They even introduced first class functions more than a decade ago.