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I've been in this spot a couple times, and one thing I found helpful was to ask if I could do the question in a language of my choosing, even if it wasn't in li

by dd82 6y ago

I've been in this spot a couple times, and one thing I found helpful was to ask if I could do the question in a language of my choosing, even if it wasn't in line with their lingua franca. The one that said yes turned out to be a pretty enjoyable interview, because we chatted a bit about how implementation details differ between languages and how X could be done in Y, and vice versa. The one that said no... I think I got a better signal of job suitability from that one question than anything else. >This kind of problem is exacerbated if your interviewers haven't done sufficient prep so, instead of realising that you don't know anything about a particular technology, they take your poor performance in that area as an indication that you overall suck. Absolutely, I've been on the interviewee side of this a couple times, so absolutely try to ensure I have a list of questions for the candidate, including a number of references to their CV and github (or other public code repo). I'm there to get a signal on their suitability for working here, not to stroke my ego.

bartread 6y ago
> I've been in this spot a couple times, and one thing I found helpful was to ask if I could do the question in a language of my choosing This is a great strategy and, as you say, if they say no you've learned something useful. When we interview we always make it clear to the candidate that they can pick a language with which they're familiar. We tend to ask for "C-like" at the application stage but have some flexibility around imperative/OO languages. E.g., Python or Ruby might be OK, as might JavaScript.
- dd82 6y ago
  Same here, but the downside with this is the interviewer might not be too familiar with the candidate's language selection and therefore miss out on nuances about implementation details. It hasn't happened yet to me, but we do have golang here and I'm not familiar with it at all and am picking it up on my spare time.

by dd82 6y ago

bartread 6y ago

> I've been in this spot a couple times, and one thing I found helpful was to ask if I could do the question in a language of my choosing This is a great strategy and, as you say, if they say no you've learned something useful. When we interview we always make it clear to the candidate that they can pick a language with which they're familiar. We tend to ask for "C-like" at the application stage but have some flexibility around imperative/OO languages. E.g., Python or Ruby might be OK, as might JavaScript.

dd82 6y ago
Same here, but the downside with this is the interviewer might not be too familiar with the candidate's language selection and therefore miss out on nuances about implementation details. It hasn't happened yet to me, but we do have golang here and I'm not familiar with it at all and am picking it up on my spare time.