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i've had similar experiences over the phone. "How would you pull in data from an arbitrarily long -- maybe never-ending -- source of data in Python?" me : "Wh

by serf 5y ago

i've had similar experiences over the phone. "How would you pull in data from an arbitrarily long -- maybe never-ending -- source of data in Python?" me : "What kind of data? What is it used for? How should it be represented afterwards?" Silence on the other end , followed by "Well that's up to you." I then fumble out a few ways to do it (verbally), to a recruiter that doesn't seem to understand anything that i'm saying -- he's probably reading a question from a script and pattern-matching what I say to the supposedly correct answer given to him in the same script. Finally it ends with "Oh, that's interesting. ...We'll get back to you." , and the interviews that go this direction -- they never get back to you; you've already lost. I'm not spouting gibberish, i've been at this for a long time; i'm just not spouting out whatever tech-jargon that their company supports and is needed to conform to his script, and quite honestly the person on the other end of the phone call seems to be universally under-equipped to judge anything remotely CS related. It's a really weird/ephemeral/surreal experience. Imagine a surgeon being appointed to a position at a hospital because the secretary quizzed him on some flash cards (flash cards provided by Acme Sharp Scalpels), and the surgeon -- by chance -- prefers Acme Sharp Scalpels, and so mentions that brand. Instant hire according to the flash cards. That's a lot like what it's like when a technically-accurate developer gets passed over for one that blithely mentions popular software packages (pandas/tensorflow/whatever is popular this week) without any real technical knowledge on how to achieve the goals wanted by the hiring party.

mateo411 5y ago
> "How would you pull in data from an arbitrarily long -- maybe never-ending -- source of data in Python?" The answer to this question is to use a generator. If you don't know this, then both people are going to wish that they had that half hour of their life back. Is this a good question? If you want somebody with a lot of Python expertise, then knowing about generators is a good thing. If I was interviewing a candidate, and they didn't know this, then I would just find a pleasant way to move on after a minute or two. If this is the only interviewing question, then that makes me happy, because this company has a flawed process, and is leaving some great talent for me to hire. It's not a big deal if you didn't know this at the time. You might not have known what a generator was, and the person interviewing probably wasn't very good at interviewing people.
- jph 5y ago
  How about asyncio streams.py?
  - mateo411 5y ago
    That seems like a good answer too. I think that's only applicable if you are reading from a socket. Although I don't know too much about asyncio streams.py, so I'm not going to get a job at this company.
- timr 5y ago
  > > "How would you pull in data from an arbitrarily long -- maybe never-ending - source of data in Python?" > The answer to this question is to use a generator. If you don't know this, then both people are going to wish that they had that half hour of their life back. That's funny...I've implemented more than my share of such things in a long career, and my first intuition for an answer to the question, as phrased, was to implement stream sampling. It never even occurred to me that the answer might be a syntactical feature of the language (and yes, I know what generators are). According to you, I'd be so wrong that I'm a waste of time. Do you see the problem yet? It isn't theoretical. I've hit this kind of situation with so many interviewers that I'm actually more nervous when I'm sitting across from someone who is clearly on their first or second job out of school. They're asking (unclear) questions in the "python syntax" category, and I'm thinking about the engineering consequences of consuming an endless stream of data...
  - mateo411 5y ago
    > According to you, I'd be so wrong that I'm a waste of time. I don't think so, because you actually know about generators. If you were hiring for people who had a lot of Python experience, but didn't know about generators, that would be a bad sign. You would probably want to ask a some other questions, so you would have a more complete picture of what the candidate knows. My main point is that the company's interview process is flawed.
    - timr 5y ago

by serf 5y ago

mateo411 5y ago

> "How would you pull in data from an arbitrarily long -- maybe never-ending -- source of data in Python?" The answer to this question is to use a generator. If you don't know this, then both people are going to wish that they had that half hour of their life back. Is this a good question? If you want somebody with a lot of Python expertise, then knowing about generators is a good thing. If I was interviewing a candidate, and they didn't know this, then I would just find a pleasant way to move on after a minute or two. If this is the only interviewing question, then that makes me happy, because this company has a flawed process, and is leaving some great talent for me to hire. It's not a big deal if you didn't know this at the time. You might not have known what a generator was, and the person interviewing probably wasn't very good at interviewing people.

jph 5y ago
How about asyncio streams.py?
- mateo411 5y ago
  That seems like a good answer too. I think that's only applicable if you are reading from a socket. Although I don't know too much about asyncio streams.py, so I'm not going to get a job at this company.
timr 5y ago
> > "How would you pull in data from an arbitrarily long -- maybe never-ending - source of data in Python?" > The answer to this question is to use a generator. If you don't know this, then both people are going to wish that they had that half hour of their life back. That's funny...I've implemented more than my share of such things in a long career, and my first intuition for an answer to the question, as phrased, was to implement stream sampling. It never even occurred to me that the answer might be a syntactical feature of the language (and yes, I know what generators are). According to you, I'd be so wrong that I'm a waste of time. Do you see the problem yet? It isn't theoretical. I've hit this kind of situation with so many interviewers that I'm actually more nervous when I'm sitting across from someone who is clearly on their first or second job out of school. They're asking (unclear) questions in the "python syntax" category, and I'm thinking about the engineering consequences of consuming an endless stream of data...
- mateo411 5y ago
  > According to you, I'd be so wrong that I'm a waste of time. I don't think so, because you actually know about generators. If you were hiring for people who had a lot of Python experience, but didn't know about generators, that would be a bad sign. You would probably want to ask a some other questions, so you would have a more complete picture of what the candidate knows. My main point is that the company's interview process is flawed.
  - timr 5y ago