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In an interview, they gave me access to their codebase and asked me to fix an actual (small) bug. The interviewer showed me where the codebase was, how to repli
by akudha 5y ago
In an interview, they gave me access to their codebase and asked me to fix an actual (small) bug. The interviewer showed me where the codebase was, how to replicate the bug, all of that took less than 10 mins. Then he left, told me to give a shout once I am done. Took me about half hour to do it, another 10 mins to explain what I did to fix the bug.
There were no other questions - no white board stuff, no algorithm questions, no stupid questions like "where do you see yourself in 5 years?" etc. I still remember the interview nearly a decade later.
Obviously this won't work for all jobs, but this will work surprisingly well for a large number of jobs, because most jobs are ordinary. One doesn't need to know complex algorithms to do these
- Davidbrcz 5y agoAnd it rises legal issues in several countries
- goto11 5y agoWhat legal issues?
- LamboJ 5y agoI'm not OP, but I imagine the concern is doing work for the company (i.e. fixing a bug in their codebase) without getting paid at least minimum wage for it.
- goto11 5y agoAh, I assumed it was just a realistic looking exercise. If they actually used code written by the applicant, I can definitely see all kinds of problems!
- lolinder 5y agoIf I were designing this question I would probably use a real bug that we recently fixed. We'd already have a sense for how hard of a problem it was, and there's no worry about unpaid work.
- ramraj07 5y agoI did something similar and loved it but a friend pointed out That he will fall over with an anxiety attack in such a situation. I always thought the best case would be to offer a choice to the candidate among 2 or 3 different ways to do the interview.
- meowface 5y ago>I did something similar and loved it but a friend pointed out That he will fall over with an anxiety attack in such a situation. I might, too, but I frankly might do the same to an even more extreme degree for a particularly challenging real-time 1-on-1 interview question from someone staring at me. All things considered, I think I'd prefer being left alone in a room where I don't feel them over my shoulder while constantly wondering what they might be thinking with each passing second. I can take a few minutes to relax a little, look over the code, and try to figure it out.
- akudha 5y agoI don't understand why this would give someone anxiety attack - it would suck if the interviewer sat next to me and watched my every keystroke, it wasn't that in my case. He just set me up and left to do his job. I was on my own, until I finished and called him over to show the bugfix. I have anxiety issues when an interviewer asks me some obscure syntax option for grep command or some b-tree stuff that I learned in college decade ago (and never used in real life).
- tchalla 5y ago> I don't understand why this would give someone anxiety attack What can you do to understand why this happens?
- confidantlake 5y agoI don't understand why that grep stuff would give you anxiety. It is a dumb trivia question, just say you don't know. But I don't understand because I am not you. Different things give different people anxiety. Anxiety isn't something you reason your way into or out of.
- jandrewrogers 5y agoMy entire "interview" at Netflix was me helping their top database people solve a severe performance problem in their operational systems. In the two hours I was there, I diagnosed the root cause and showed them how to fix it doing something they did not know was possible. Best and easiest job interview I've ever had. They tested it after I left (a >100x improvement apparently) and called me the next day to ask when I could start.
- therealdrag0 5y agoHow did you get into that position tho?