4 ms·

Language Fatigue

I went back to college several years ago and am about to finish my B.S. in EE & CS. I am beginning to prepare for interviews and lately I'm continually updating my resume. While I was doing a resume update, I noticed that I listed several "languages known" and thought "Hmm, they'll probably ask me some detailed questions about these languages to see that I'm not full of shit." However, the past 5 years of college has been a blur of languages used in classes, on my own time, and in freelance jobs. Despite being, 5 years ago, what I would consider very good in several languages, today I probably couldn't demonstrate that very well. I would probably need to Google things that I knew of the top of my head 5 years ago. (I'm sure some details of each language have also changed.) Even for the languages I've used recently, despite buying several books about each and really diving into them at the time, six months or a year later the details get fuzzy. How should I deal with this sort of thing in an interview and on my resume? I'm sure given a month or so of dedicated time on one of the languages I've used I'd be able to get back to approximately where I was, and all the instincts and habits are still with me, but that doesn't help me much in a code interview. Obviously I'll be reviewing at least one language and doing some practice code in it before interviews, but this isn't practical for all the languages I've had exposure to. At the same time, I don't want to completely leave off languages from my resume that I've developed some good familiarity with, because won't that make me look less well rounded or take something away from my overall experience? What advice can you give me? Thanks.

ggchappell 15y ago
Why not just communicate all this on your resume? More concisely, of course. Proficient in: A, B, C. Also have programming experience in: D, E, F. Disclaimer: I've never been on either side of a resume-based programmer hiring process. Not speaking from experience.
bmm6o 15y ago
It probably doesn't matter too much unless the company is looking for proficiency in a particular language, and in that case you would know it going in to the interview. When we give a coding problem, we let the candidate choose between C++ and C#, and the problems are such that the language doesn't really make much of a difference; other than minor IO and collections, there aren't any library calls. I prefer not having to explain why a reference to "cout" raises a compiler error (it's in a namespace), but the correctness of the algorithm is way more important.
S4M 15y ago
I would suggest spending a bit of time writing code in the languages you got rusty at. It doesnt have to be much, just some euler project problems, a small web interface, whatever. It will probably help you to prepare your interviews, and you could show your pieces of code to the employers, saying something like "I put this couple of lines on my github repository, feel free to check it."

Language Fatigue

ggchappell 15y ago

Why not just communicate all this on your resume? More concisely, of course. Proficient in: A, B, C. Also have programming experience in: D, E, F. Disclaimer: I've never been on either side of a resume-based programmer hiring process. Not speaking from experience.

bmm6o 15y ago

It probably doesn't matter too much unless the company is looking for proficiency in a particular language, and in that case you would know it going in to the interview. When we give a coding problem, we let the candidate choose between C++ and C#, and the problems are such that the language doesn't really make much of a difference; other than minor IO and collections, there aren't any library calls. I prefer not having to explain why a reference to "cout" raises a compiler error (it's in a namespace), but the correctness of the algorithm is way more important.

S4M 15y ago

I would suggest spending a bit of time writing code in the languages you got rusty at. It doesnt have to be much, just some euler project problems, a small web interface, whatever. It will probably help you to prepare your interviews, and you could show your pieces of code to the employers, saying something like "I put this couple of lines on my github repository, feel free to check it."