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One of the companies I interviewed at had me do this exercise at the end of the interview and to be frank, I bombed it quite badly. One issue was the syntax was

by colmvp 6y ago

One of the companies I interviewed at had me do this exercise at the end of the interview and to be frank, I bombed it quite badly. One issue was the syntax was so weird compared to the type of code I'm used to writing and reading from others in library code that it was hard for me to comprehend the logic without the benefit of looking it up. I was filled with anxiety working under the time pressure to understand a document of code which I had very little context of, and no previous relationship with the reviewer so I kept thinking to myself whether or not the question that came into my mind was stupid obvious. In contrast, when I had take-home tests, I scored exceptionally high on all of them, leading to offers. I recognize that a lot of people here hate them because of the time involved and it's akin to spec work, but IMO it felt much more like my usual day-to-day life as a developer. One of the take home tests had existing code to work from but again, working at my own pace and having access to online resources to read docs was much less anxiety provoking.

samat 6y ago
You can work on that anxiety, just like you ace programming tests with enough time & effort. Therapy, especially group therapy might be really helpful.
thewebcount 6y ago
These sound like very valid issues. It might not be good for every candidate, but having a conversation about the code seems less stressful to me than having the interviewer bring out a whiteboard and essentially say, "Please perform for me!" You say: > One issue was the syntax was so weird compared to the type of code I'm used to writing and reading from others in library code that it was hard for me to comprehend the logic without the benefit of looking it up. From the point of view of an interviewer, that's feedback I'd be interested in. One problem I've seen in some of our code is an engineer using a completely valid but very obscure method of doing something, and then the rest of us having difficulty maintaining it. I would want to hear, "this looks hard to maintain." But I understand that in an interview, it can be difficult to assess what the interviewer wants to hear and that can be nerve-racking. I personally think take-homes are a reasonable compromise, but not everyone does.
winrid 6y ago
It sounds like you listed a lot of ways to improve yourself! ;)

by colmvp 6y ago

samat 6y ago

You can work on that anxiety, just like you ace programming tests with enough time & effort. Therapy, especially group therapy might be really helpful.

thewebcount 6y ago

These sound like very valid issues. It might not be good for every candidate, but having a conversation about the code seems less stressful to me than having the interviewer bring out a whiteboard and essentially say, "Please perform for me!" You say: > One issue was the syntax was so weird compared to the type of code I'm used to writing and reading from others in library code that it was hard for me to comprehend the logic without the benefit of looking it up. From the point of view of an interviewer, that's feedback I'd be interested in. One problem I've seen in some of our code is an engineer using a completely valid but very obscure method of doing something, and then the rest of us having difficulty maintaining it. I would want to hear, "this looks hard to maintain." But I understand that in an interview, it can be difficult to assess what the interviewer wants to hear and that can be nerve-racking. I personally think take-homes are a reasonable compromise, but not everyone does.

winrid 6y ago

It sounds like you listed a lot of ways to improve yourself! ;)