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But can he solve an obscure dynamic programming problem from the interviewer's PhD thesis in 20 minutes on the whiteboard, with a marker that's almost spent? Th
by m0zg 5y ago
But can he solve an obscure dynamic programming problem from the interviewer's PhD thesis in 20 minutes on the whiteboard, with a marker that's almost spent? That's a completely different skill than actual software engineering, that the companies (including Microsoft) continue to inexplicably screen for.
- actually_a_dog 5y agoI bought my own markers recently, just so I would never have to deal with "this marker is almost out, and this one is too light to be able to read, and this one...." bullshit.
- jnwatson 5y agoI recently interviewed with AWS. I still remember one of the questions. It boiled down to: please implement Aho-Corasick in 10 minutes on a virtual whiteboard. Perhaps there are folks in programming competitions that can do that, but not moi.
- danielvf 5y agoThanks for the nerd sniping I'm going to be running down for the next few hours.
- digitalsushi 5y agoIt blows my mind how tricky some of the technical interviews I have been through, and even passed, and even been offered roles for, but this morning I spent thirty minutes failing to update the s3 tags on a bucket literally named 'example-bucket'.
- m0zg 5y agoI kind of wonder if there actually was a systematic study of some sort aimed at quantifying how much time people are wasting on unnecessarily manual wrangling of cloud infrastructure. I know I waste a lot of time on that, even though I try to automate everything I reasonably can, and I don't use three dozen different services. Unbelievably obtuse docs even for the simplest things, dozens of manual yak shaving steps which could be done by a shell script, nobody seems to give a slightest shit - people think that's how it ought to be.