7 ms·

I once started an interview process as a senior developer at Goto, the company behind LastPass. The contact was a first phone call where someone simply asked t

by mfcl 4y ago

I once started an interview process as a senior developer at Goto, the company behind LastPass. The contact was a first phone call where someone simply asked the number of experience I had in software development, Java programming, etc. I thought it was weird that basically all they got from the phone call was a bunch of numbers. The weirdest part tho what that they asked how many years of experience I had in... open source? "How many years of experience do you have in open source?" (Probably because the recruiter had a list of tech and skills required and simply went through it.) Anyway, I went with it and eventually got a coding assessment. The docx document told me to implement a little deck of cards in Java using classes and inheritance. This was for a senior position. I did not do that and withdrew my application.

matthewwolfe 4y ago
You laugh at that coding assignment for a senior position but you'd be surprised how many "senior" people interview that would struggle with that and be unable to complete it.
- caminante 4y ago
  FizzBuzz interview questions are fair game[0] , especially if you're not networking in via referrals and are 1/5000 online applicants like the parent. [0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guide-to-interviewing-version-30/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guid...
  - rjbwork 4y ago
    Pretty much. I hold the record for our coding question in my company - 3 minutes and 54 seconds. Granted, I'm one of the two people that put the question together, but still. We've had candidates with "20 years of experience" completely unable to do what amounts to "call a web service, deserialize some json, write a couple for loops and if statements, and post back some json to a web service" in over an hour, or in a take home scenario. It will never cease to amaze me that there are people employed in this field that just. can. not. program.
    - Cthulhu_ 4y ago
      To be fair: it might be they have never done this before. At my previous company, we had a technical assessment - this was about ten years ago now. It boiled down to: read XML, do some math / business logic, and build a REST API to do so. Interestingly, ten years ago, at least half the applicants said they found it interesting because they had never worked with REST or JSON before. A lot were Java developers, so the XML part wasn't a problem, and they would often add some SQL database as a bonus. But 5-10 years later, as development switched to (Node)JS and web, it became the inverse and people said they had never done anything with XML before.
      - usrusr 4y ago
        And far more likely: done before, but never on anything even remotely close to a blank slate. You can spend years doing X, be very good at doing X, but only ever adapt some pre-existing precedent implementation of doing X to a new use case, or to a new underlying library, but never any green-fielding. That "implement X in a vacuum" test will rate many experienced people lower than some who have never ventured beyond textbook examples. It's not impossible that your real tasks have so much green field work in them that those experienced brown-fielders might actually be bad matches, but I suspect that those situations are much less common than the tests that select for green-fielders.
- kamranjon 4y ago
  I have a different perspective. I feel that specific coding task tells me absolutely nothing about the seniority of the person performing the task and tells me very little about their qualifications.
  - Mistletoe 4y ago
    But shouldn't a blacksmith be able to make a nail before he makes me a suit of armor?
    - nordsieck 4y ago
      > But shouldn't a blacksmith be able to make a nail before he makes me a suit of armor? Yes. But I think there's a reasonable upper limit to the amount of time a company can expect someone to spend on a job opportunity. If they're burning an appreciable amount of that time on a trivial coding exercise, that's not great.
      - joe_guy 4y ago
        It's 60 minutes as a very high estimate. You might spend a life time together.
        bboygravity 4y ago
        55 minutes to install the tool-chain and libs and 5 minutes to do the coding?
        hackertyper69 4y ago
        give them a machine to ssh into with env setup already. or a docker container to ssh into on a port other than 22
      - caminante 4y ago
        !!! You're missing the point. The premise is that someone capable can blast through trivial assignments in no time. Either this is the final proficiency challenge or there are subsequent, harder questions. In the former case, why not see the salary/offer and then decide?
- nindalf 4y ago
  No doubt when GP refused to complete the coding assessment the people who designed it thought “aha! Yet another non-coder filtered out by our process!”
  - caminante 4y ago
    Why limit it there? Add "This person doesn't know about my firm's hiring process, aren't willing to do basic tasks, doesn't want to work at my firm," etc.
- wildzzz 4y ago
  It's a great way to weed out the junior devs that cheated their way through school (or are too dumb to figure it out via stackoverflow) and the senior devs that haven't actually done any real programming in a long time. An engineer at our competitor got laid off and my PM found out and hired the guy to do FPGA work. My PM knew the guy through some contracts we had with the competitor and assumed he was an expert in the field. Turns out the guy was more of middleman between program management and the engineers so while he could talk about the work, he hadn't really done it in like 10 years. My PM got the hiring expedited and since we don't really do interview tests in our industry, the guy was now on our team before anyone could ask any pertinent questions. Long story short, the FPGA team starts assigning him work but it's taking way too long and he's asking for more documentation and for help on things that he definitely would have worked on in his supposed previous job. Eventually we all figure out that he kinda overstated how fresh his skills are and we transition him to a sort of documentation role so he wasn't burning hours on things he just couldn't handle. While he was perfectly capable of doing that kind of work, it involved a lot of insight to our design so it took him a while to get onboarded to the system and able to properly describe the design. Eventually he was doing good work and got the project to the point where he wasn't needed but he left a bad taste in everyone's mouth. We could have hired two junior engineers to do the work he was doing for the same price and probably gotten it done much faster. After the guy transfered over to another project, we reamed out our PM about his hiring decision and begged him to give us some input next time. Of course, due to the waste of money from the last guy, the functional managers stopped taking hiring inputs from our project and would just assign whoever the fuck they thought we needed despite the kind of roles we actually needed.
  - genewitch 4y ago
    I am one of those people who just won't exaggerate or lie on my CV or during an interview. I say "i'm not sure, i'd google it the first couple times it came up". I'm not a programmer though. I have a weird skillset that doesn't mesh or gel with what recruiters are looking for, so on the rare occasion i get a recruiter on the phone, i tend to get a job offer at the end of the sequence. I've had a few startup jobs, a couple megacorp jobs (not Apple), and a handful of mom and pop and defunct business jobs as well. My least favorite interview questions involve regex or deep internals of BSD or Linux, my favorite interview questions are off the cuff solutions to problems presented, and then backtracking the explanation. I've also been asked to perform job interviews for positions that i probably ought know enough about to interview a candidate for, but I went off my gut feeling about how the person acted in what i consider a stressful situation (a slew of interviewers asking asinine questions). I don't like interviewing, i am not very good at finding candidates that are "in for the long haul" but every time we were tasked with finding someone who can do X before end of Q3, my hired candidate recommendations always nailed it in that time frame. All this is to say, i find the whole process ridiculous. My CV apparently looks like a train wreck. I refuse to wear a tie or get a haircut. I'm eerily relaxed in interview situations. My trick? one time i hung out with a CEO of an IT company from the PNW, and they basically told me everything i thought i knew was trash, my resume was trash, my attitude was trash, and the only thing i was good at was solving problems in a hurry. We did, in fact, get coffee for our meetup. I scrapped every idea of what a resume should look like - what i envisioned a perfect professional resume looked like - and started fresh. I learned to say no to most recruiters in a way that made them ask me about different "opportunities" more aligned with my personal ethics and values in the future. I have 4 FPGAs, and i've never done anything with them, because the bitstream is proprietary on all of them. I wouldn't hesitate to tell an interviewer that i am interested in FPGAs and custom ASICs, because i am. I'm also interested in bacteria, but i won't be applying to a bioscience lab anytime soon. I certainly wouldn't say "yeah i can program an FPGA", or C, or do front end development, or any of that. From my reading of these sorts of comments, in aggregate, most people try to impress the interviewers. I want them to impress me. Does this make me privileged? Probably. <sigh>
- cratermoon 4y ago
  Especially now that the "senior" titled is handed out to people with 3-5 years of experience.
  - selcuka 4y ago
    There was a blog post on HN a few days ago by someone who taught himself programming during covid and landed senior roles (multiple, simultaneously, by lying to the employers).
    - FrenchTouch42 4y ago
      Do you have the link?
      - AkshatJ27 4y ago
        https://overemployed.com/ https://overemployed.com/ Not parent, but i think they are talking about this blog
      - selcuka 4y ago
        It was this story, but the actual post is gone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33739094 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33739094 It's still archived, though: https://web.archive.org/web/20221119032911/https://overemployee.blog/my-overemployment-story/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221119032911/https://overemplo... and https://web.archive.org/web/20221116023708/https://overemployee.blog/how-much-do-i-make-as-an-overemployee/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221116023708/https://overemplo... Key takeaways: > I started learning to code in 2019 as my new years resolution. > Job #1 Senior front end dev > Job #2 Senior front end engineer > Job #3 Front end engineer (mid-level)
  - sodapopcan 4y ago
    Ya, most people who have been in the game for a year ask for "senior" position. I'm pretty sure this is why there is "staff" now. Well, I'm not sure how long "staff" has been a thing as I've never worked at a company that has that title, just interviewed for them (nb: I interviewed for "senior" positions at said companies).
- ohdannyboy 4y ago
  I'm currently doing interviews for a senior firmware dev position and was stunned by this. Today I talked to a guy who couldn't tell me what an interrupt was in any technical detail. His coding was worse than a first year college students. 5 of the 6 people I've talked to so far bombed the coding portion.
  - AlotOfReading 4y ago
    This isn't intended as a rebuttal, but I've learned to stay away from deeply technical questions in embedded. As long as the interviewee is sufficiently paranoid about C, is recognizably experienced via conversation, and knows the basic concepts I don't press too hard on their specific skillset. There are just too many niches where the knowledge we each consider necessary simply isn't. I had one particularly bad interviewer grill me on how the ARM GIC worked in detail (e.g. interconnect details, differences between versions, etc) because they considered it basic knowledge. I've personally never needed to know anything about it that wasn't in a TRM.
    - ohdannyboy 4y ago
      Im pretty new to interviewing so I appreciate the feedback. I think I'm dong OK with respect to that but I'll make sure not to assume my own expertise are trivial.
    - greyhair 4y ago
      I agree. Why memorize something that is well documented? Do you understand basic interrupt management and the existence of interrupt controllers? Good. Understanding basic concepts matter, but silicon implementations of a concept? No. One question I have found useful in embedded development is asking someone to discuss the difference between a thread and a process, and the difference between thread based OSs and process based OSs. It is a general question, not bound by anything like CPU architecture, but just gives an idea into whether the person is comfortable about general memory domains. I have mentored people, bright programmers that never worked in small embedded systems, that initially tripped all over the thread model, but eventually came to understand it.
- AlfeG 4y ago
  And very low ability to do any improvisation. Without specifying every detail of implementation task will not be completed. Even in areas that don't require very specific solutions, and need to just work.
- dcow 4y ago
  And if you think a suit extends card then you’ve violated LSP.
chadash 4y ago
I have interviewed many “senior” candidates who can’t do simple coding exercises. I think that starting out with a simple exercise like that weeds out a ton of people without putting undue burden on the good developers.
- InvaderFizz 4y ago
  I ask a lot of questions that I preface with: I hope you are slightly insulted by the questions I'm about to ask. They get progressively more complex as we go, but the candidate is fully aware they are filter questions that I hope they clear with zero effort.
  - deepfriedbits 4y ago
    That's a clever approach to the situation.
  - nucleardog 4y ago
    I have a series of questions in various areas designed to be in increasing order of difficulty, but I don't expect them to clear them all0-they ramp up to "deep and esoteric knowledge". When I'm explaining the process I usually preface with these being designed to gauge their skill level, not just make sure they meet some minimum floor, so there are going to be some easy questions and some that are hard and I don't necessarily expect them to answer all of them and not to get discouraged or be afraid to say they don't know. I usually just keep going until they miss a couple in a row. If someone actually doesn't know the job, I'm only asking maybe 5-10 relatively simple questions and thanking them for their time.
  - tomjen3 4y ago
    Why not just start with the questions you consider the minimum level to clear?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - 4y ago
gorgoiler 4y ago
Sounds silly, it’s a shame you didn’t get past the initial screen. It’s a process that has to be humored and you could have added a lot of value just by joining and then patching their hiring process. When I was teaching in high school the deck-modelling thing is one that the kids come up with a lot especially when it came to doing their term project. I love the idea of being asked to implement a deck of cards using Java and inheritance! Here’s my implementation: SUITS = “♠♥♦♣” RANKS = “A23456789XJQK” deck = {(s, r) for s in SUITS for r in RANKS} That’s about all you can commit to. Suits and ranks should probably be enums but we can start from these three lines and see how it goes. Sorting? Depends on the game. Value? Depends on the game, and some games give the same card two values. Inheritance? Shared behavior depends on the game and is orthogonal to the card itself and often is dependent on game state as well as what card you have. Are we even playing a game, or is this just for rendering poker themed wallpaper? Calling it a “deck” is probably wrong. A deck is ordered and may have duplicates… it depends on the game! This is more of a pack than a deck. It’s probably an amazing question for interviewing candidates in person to see how far they dig into the premise. As a take-home question, you could probably spend a minute on the code above and then an hour on implementing three different games. Maybe that was the original docx, but it didn’t sound like it.
- Yhippa 4y ago
  > It’s probably an amazing question for interviewing candidates in person to see how far they dig into the premise. As a take-home question, you could probably spend a minute on the code above and then an hour on implementing three different games. (Maybe that was the original docx, but it didn’t sound like it.) I did a take home for Walmart Labs once and they completely ghosted me. What a complete waste of time.
- bigDinosaur 4y ago
  Unfortunately you have been rejected due to: a 'SyntaxError: invalid character in identifier'. Better luck at your next interview ;-)
  - fredley 4y ago
    This interview is for Goto, not Google I believe.
KingOfCoders 4y ago
Only answer to this one: Don't use inheritance (unless you're building an UI framework, and even then ...)
- plgonzalezrx8 4y ago
  The whole point is probably to weed out people who can't do it or don't understand inheritance. If thats what they are asking for, implement it, programmers and their ego always trying to "LoL, DuM iNtErViEw QuEsTiOn". There is so much to learn from a person by just seeing how they solve a simple problem like this one.
  - KingOfCoders 4y ago
    Well yes, I'm asking String Reverse hundreds of times and learned a lot.
firstSpeaker 4y ago
I did. Interview for AWS principal engineer position and their screening call had a 20 minutes make a code like structure to solve this problem. They did not ask me to write Java or anything compiled but something that shows I can actually turn my idea into some for of code. I think having such kind of question is very much expected and I would wonder if a company does not have it for external/unknown hires.
mosquitobiten 4y ago
This type of self-referencing and self-congratulatory comment is what makes this website worse and worse little by little. You don't add any meaningful information or knowledge and it is something shallow a kid would say to look cool in front of his friends. I am not attacking you, you can do better.
- fullmoon 4y ago
  Reflect on the reasons why you’ve just written this very comment. You might be surprised.
  - temptemptemp111 4y ago
  - 2devnull 4y ago
    I was going to post a comment but I decided it didn’t add much. Maybe if we all refrain from liberal posting it would remove the need to post comments asking for better comments. I’m not sure. I may post too liberally myself.
- DocTomoe 4y ago
  I disagree. The information "Goto has obviously horrible hiring tactics that select Programming-101-graduates for senior positions WHILE operating a security-sensitive product" is meaningful.
  - mosquitobiten 4y ago
    From 3 lines written by someone on some social media site you can infer something is true and a fact? ~Cool!~
    - anonyme-honteux 4y ago
      There are so much bad hiring practices in our industry that I indeed choose to trust the rare companies that do it right over the ones that cargo cult Google brain teaser questions, make you implement quicksort on a whiteboard, give you a take-home project that will take you forever but they will hardly glance at, will stop replying to you because ghosting is good, ... That's the first impression I get from an unknown company and I decided to trust it.
eyho_wins 4y ago
Plot twist, you didn't know how to implement inheritance properly in Java therefore you withdrew your application.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
plgonzalezrx8 4y ago
Bro wat? This comment is basically "I'm too smart to work for this company". Your ego will be your downfall. There is so much I can learn from a developer, junior OR senior by just seeing how they implement something simple like that. I feel like you have a full fledged case of Dunning Kruger effect. Since you don't know what exactly they were looking for, you brush it off to "LeL, LaST pAsS so DuM aSsEsMeNt".

by mfcl 4y ago

matthewwolfe 4y ago

You laugh at that coding assignment for a senior position but you'd be surprised how many "senior" people interview that would struggle with that and be unable to complete it.

caminante 4y ago
FizzBuzz interview questions are fair game[0] , especially if you're not networking in via referrals and are 1/5000 online applicants like the parent. [0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guide-to-interviewing-version-30/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guid...
- rjbwork 4y ago
  Pretty much. I hold the record for our coding question in my company - 3 minutes and 54 seconds. Granted, I'm one of the two people that put the question together, but still. We've had candidates with "20 years of experience" completely unable to do what amounts to "call a web service, deserialize some json, write a couple for loops and if statements, and post back some json to a web service" in over an hour, or in a take home scenario. It will never cease to amaze me that there are people employed in this field that just. can. not. program.
  - Cthulhu_ 4y ago
    To be fair: it might be they have never done this before. At my previous company, we had a technical assessment - this was about ten years ago now. It boiled down to: read XML, do some math / business logic, and build a REST API to do so. Interestingly, ten years ago, at least half the applicants said they found it interesting because they had never worked with REST or JSON before. A lot were Java developers, so the XML part wasn't a problem, and they would often add some SQL database as a bonus. But 5-10 years later, as development switched to (Node)JS and web, it became the inverse and people said they had never done anything with XML before.
    - usrusr 4y ago
      And far more likely: done before, but never on anything even remotely close to a blank slate. You can spend years doing X, be very good at doing X, but only ever adapt some pre-existing precedent implementation of doing X to a new use case, or to a new underlying library, but never any green-fielding. That "implement X in a vacuum" test will rate many experienced people lower than some who have never ventured beyond textbook examples. It's not impossible that your real tasks have so much green field work in them that those experienced brown-fielders might actually be bad matches, but I suspect that those situations are much less common than the tests that select for green-fielders.
kamranjon 4y ago
I have a different perspective. I feel that specific coding task tells me absolutely nothing about the seniority of the person performing the task and tells me very little about their qualifications.
- Mistletoe 4y ago
  But shouldn't a blacksmith be able to make a nail before he makes me a suit of armor?
  - nordsieck 4y ago
    > But shouldn't a blacksmith be able to make a nail before he makes me a suit of armor? Yes. But I think there's a reasonable upper limit to the amount of time a company can expect someone to spend on a job opportunity. If they're burning an appreciable amount of that time on a trivial coding exercise, that's not great.
    - joe_guy 4y ago
      It's 60 minutes as a very high estimate. You might spend a life time together.
      - bboygravity 4y ago
        55 minutes to install the tool-chain and libs and 5 minutes to do the coding?
        hackertyper69 4y ago
        give them a machine to ssh into with env setup already. or a docker container to ssh into on a port other than 22
    - caminante 4y ago
      !!! You're missing the point. The premise is that someone capable can blast through trivial assignments in no time. Either this is the final proficiency challenge or there are subsequent, harder questions. In the former case, why not see the salary/offer and then decide?
nindalf 4y ago
No doubt when GP refused to complete the coding assessment the people who designed it thought “aha! Yet another non-coder filtered out by our process!”
- caminante 4y ago
  Why limit it there? Add "This person doesn't know about my firm's hiring process, aren't willing to do basic tasks, doesn't want to work at my firm," etc.
wildzzz 4y ago
It's a great way to weed out the junior devs that cheated their way through school (or are too dumb to figure it out via stackoverflow) and the senior devs that haven't actually done any real programming in a long time. An engineer at our competitor got laid off and my PM found out and hired the guy to do FPGA work. My PM knew the guy through some contracts we had with the competitor and assumed he was an expert in the field. Turns out the guy was more of middleman between program management and the engineers so while he could talk about the work, he hadn't really done it in like 10 years. My PM got the hiring expedited and since we don't really do interview tests in our industry, the guy was now on our team before anyone could ask any pertinent questions. Long story short, the FPGA team starts assigning him work but it's taking way too long and he's asking for more documentation and for help on things that he definitely would have worked on in his supposed previous job. Eventually we all figure out that he kinda overstated how fresh his skills are and we transition him to a sort of documentation role so he wasn't burning hours on things he just couldn't handle. While he was perfectly capable of doing that kind of work, it involved a lot of insight to our design so it took him a while to get onboarded to the system and able to properly describe the design. Eventually he was doing good work and got the project to the point where he wasn't needed but he left a bad taste in everyone's mouth. We could have hired two junior engineers to do the work he was doing for the same price and probably gotten it done much faster. After the guy transfered over to another project, we reamed out our PM about his hiring decision and begged him to give us some input next time. Of course, due to the waste of money from the last guy, the functional managers stopped taking hiring inputs from our project and would just assign whoever the fuck they thought we needed despite the kind of roles we actually needed.
- genewitch 4y ago
  I am one of those people who just won't exaggerate or lie on my CV or during an interview. I say "i'm not sure, i'd google it the first couple times it came up". I'm not a programmer though. I have a weird skillset that doesn't mesh or gel with what recruiters are looking for, so on the rare occasion i get a recruiter on the phone, i tend to get a job offer at the end of the sequence. I've had a few startup jobs, a couple megacorp jobs (not Apple), and a handful of mom and pop and defunct business jobs as well. My least favorite interview questions involve regex or deep internals of BSD or Linux, my favorite interview questions are off the cuff solutions to problems presented, and then backtracking the explanation. I've also been asked to perform job interviews for positions that i probably ought know enough about to interview a candidate for, but I went off my gut feeling about how the person acted in what i consider a stressful situation (a slew of interviewers asking asinine questions). I don't like interviewing, i am not very good at finding candidates that are "in for the long haul" but every time we were tasked with finding someone who can do X before end of Q3, my hired candidate recommendations always nailed it in that time frame. All this is to say, i find the whole process ridiculous. My CV apparently looks like a train wreck. I refuse to wear a tie or get a haircut. I'm eerily relaxed in interview situations. My trick? one time i hung out with a CEO of an IT company from the PNW, and they basically told me everything i thought i knew was trash, my resume was trash, my attitude was trash, and the only thing i was good at was solving problems in a hurry. We did, in fact, get coffee for our meetup. I scrapped every idea of what a resume should look like - what i envisioned a perfect professional resume looked like - and started fresh. I learned to say no to most recruiters in a way that made them ask me about different "opportunities" more aligned with my personal ethics and values in the future. I have 4 FPGAs, and i've never done anything with them, because the bitstream is proprietary on all of them. I wouldn't hesitate to tell an interviewer that i am interested in FPGAs and custom ASICs, because i am. I'm also interested in bacteria, but i won't be applying to a bioscience lab anytime soon. I certainly wouldn't say "yeah i can program an FPGA", or C, or do front end development, or any of that. From my reading of these sorts of comments, in aggregate, most people try to impress the interviewers. I want them to impress me. Does this make me privileged? Probably. <sigh>
cratermoon 4y ago
Especially now that the "senior" titled is handed out to people with 3-5 years of experience.
- selcuka 4y ago
  There was a blog post on HN a few days ago by someone who taught himself programming during covid and landed senior roles (multiple, simultaneously, by lying to the employers).
  - FrenchTouch42 4y ago
    Do you have the link?
    - AkshatJ27 4y ago
      https://overemployed.com/ https://overemployed.com/ Not parent, but i think they are talking about this blog
    - selcuka 4y ago
      It was this story, but the actual post is gone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33739094 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33739094 It's still archived, though: https://web.archive.org/web/20221119032911/https://overemployee.blog/my-overemployment-story/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221119032911/https://overemplo... and https://web.archive.org/web/20221116023708/https://overemployee.blog/how-much-do-i-make-as-an-overemployee/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221116023708/https://overemplo... Key takeaways: > I started learning to code in 2019 as my new years resolution. > Job #1 Senior front end dev > Job #2 Senior front end engineer > Job #3 Front end engineer (mid-level)
- sodapopcan 4y ago
  Ya, most people who have been in the game for a year ask for "senior" position. I'm pretty sure this is why there is "staff" now. Well, I'm not sure how long "staff" has been a thing as I've never worked at a company that has that title, just interviewed for them (nb: I interviewed for "senior" positions at said companies).
ohdannyboy 4y ago
I'm currently doing interviews for a senior firmware dev position and was stunned by this. Today I talked to a guy who couldn't tell me what an interrupt was in any technical detail. His coding was worse than a first year college students. 5 of the 6 people I've talked to so far bombed the coding portion.
- AlotOfReading 4y ago
  This isn't intended as a rebuttal, but I've learned to stay away from deeply technical questions in embedded. As long as the interviewee is sufficiently paranoid about C, is recognizably experienced via conversation, and knows the basic concepts I don't press too hard on their specific skillset. There are just too many niches where the knowledge we each consider necessary simply isn't. I had one particularly bad interviewer grill me on how the ARM GIC worked in detail (e.g. interconnect details, differences between versions, etc) because they considered it basic knowledge. I've personally never needed to know anything about it that wasn't in a TRM.
  - ohdannyboy 4y ago
    Im pretty new to interviewing so I appreciate the feedback. I think I'm dong OK with respect to that but I'll make sure not to assume my own expertise are trivial.
  - greyhair 4y ago
    I agree. Why memorize something that is well documented? Do you understand basic interrupt management and the existence of interrupt controllers? Good. Understanding basic concepts matter, but silicon implementations of a concept? No. One question I have found useful in embedded development is asking someone to discuss the difference between a thread and a process, and the difference between thread based OSs and process based OSs. It is a general question, not bound by anything like CPU architecture, but just gives an idea into whether the person is comfortable about general memory domains. I have mentored people, bright programmers that never worked in small embedded systems, that initially tripped all over the thread model, but eventually came to understand it.
AlfeG 4y ago
And very low ability to do any improvisation. Without specifying every detail of implementation task will not be completed. Even in areas that don't require very specific solutions, and need to just work.
dcow 4y ago
And if you think a suit extends card then you’ve violated LSP.

chadash 4y ago

I have interviewed many “senior” candidates who can’t do simple coding exercises. I think that starting out with a simple exercise like that weeds out a ton of people without putting undue burden on the good developers.

InvaderFizz 4y ago
I ask a lot of questions that I preface with: I hope you are slightly insulted by the questions I'm about to ask. They get progressively more complex as we go, but the candidate is fully aware they are filter questions that I hope they clear with zero effort.
- deepfriedbits 4y ago
  That's a clever approach to the situation.
- nucleardog 4y ago
  I have a series of questions in various areas designed to be in increasing order of difficulty, but I don't expect them to clear them all0-they ramp up to "deep and esoteric knowledge". When I'm explaining the process I usually preface with these being designed to gauge their skill level, not just make sure they meet some minimum floor, so there are going to be some easy questions and some that are hard and I don't necessarily expect them to answer all of them and not to get discouraged or be afraid to say they don't know. I usually just keep going until they miss a couple in a row. If someone actually doesn't know the job, I'm only asking maybe 5-10 relatively simple questions and thanking them for their time.
- tomjen3 4y ago
  Why not just start with the questions you consider the minimum level to clear?
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gorgoiler 4y ago

Sounds silly, it’s a shame you didn’t get past the initial screen. It’s a process that has to be humored and you could have added a lot of value just by joining and then patching their hiring process. When I was teaching in high school the deck-modelling thing is one that the kids come up with a lot especially when it came to doing their term project. I love the idea of being asked to implement a deck of cards using Java and inheritance! Here’s my implementation: SUITS = “♠♥♦♣” RANKS = “A23456789XJQK” deck = {(s, r) for s in SUITS for r in RANKS} That’s about all you can commit to. Suits and ranks should probably be enums but we can start from these three lines and see how it goes. Sorting? Depends on the game. Value? Depends on the game, and some games give the same card two values. Inheritance? Shared behavior depends on the game and is orthogonal to the card itself and often is dependent on game state as well as what card you have. Are we even playing a game, or is this just for rendering poker themed wallpaper? Calling it a “deck” is probably wrong. A deck is ordered and may have duplicates… it depends on the game! This is more of a pack than a deck. It’s probably an amazing question for interviewing candidates in person to see how far they dig into the premise. As a take-home question, you could probably spend a minute on the code above and then an hour on implementing three different games. Maybe that was the original docx, but it didn’t sound like it.

Yhippa 4y ago
> It’s probably an amazing question for interviewing candidates in person to see how far they dig into the premise. As a take-home question, you could probably spend a minute on the code above and then an hour on implementing three different games. (Maybe that was the original docx, but it didn’t sound like it.) I did a take home for Walmart Labs once and they completely ghosted me. What a complete waste of time.
bigDinosaur 4y ago
Unfortunately you have been rejected due to: a 'SyntaxError: invalid character in identifier'. Better luck at your next interview ;-)
- fredley 4y ago
  This interview is for Goto, not Google I believe.

KingOfCoders 4y ago

Only answer to this one: Don't use inheritance (unless you're building an UI framework, and even then ...)

plgonzalezrx8 4y ago
The whole point is probably to weed out people who can't do it or don't understand inheritance. If thats what they are asking for, implement it, programmers and their ego always trying to "LoL, DuM iNtErViEw QuEsTiOn". There is so much to learn from a person by just seeing how they solve a simple problem like this one.
- KingOfCoders 4y ago
  Well yes, I'm asking String Reverse hundreds of times and learned a lot.

firstSpeaker 4y ago

I did. Interview for AWS principal engineer position and their screening call had a 20 minutes make a code like structure to solve this problem. They did not ask me to write Java or anything compiled but something that shows I can actually turn my idea into some for of code. I think having such kind of question is very much expected and I would wonder if a company does not have it for external/unknown hires.

mosquitobiten 4y ago

This type of self-referencing and self-congratulatory comment is what makes this website worse and worse little by little. You don't add any meaningful information or knowledge and it is something shallow a kid would say to look cool in front of his friends. I am not attacking you, you can do better.

fullmoon 4y ago
Reflect on the reasons why you’ve just written this very comment. You might be surprised.
- temptemptemp111 4y ago
- 2devnull 4y ago
  I was going to post a comment but I decided it didn’t add much. Maybe if we all refrain from liberal posting it would remove the need to post comments asking for better comments. I’m not sure. I may post too liberally myself.
DocTomoe 4y ago
I disagree. The information "Goto has obviously horrible hiring tactics that select Programming-101-graduates for senior positions WHILE operating a security-sensitive product" is meaningful.
- mosquitobiten 4y ago
  From 3 lines written by someone on some social media site you can infer something is true and a fact? ~Cool!~
  - anonyme-honteux 4y ago
    There are so much bad hiring practices in our industry that I indeed choose to trust the rare companies that do it right over the ones that cargo cult Google brain teaser questions, make you implement quicksort on a whiteboard, give you a take-home project that will take you forever but they will hardly glance at, will stop replying to you because ghosting is good, ... That's the first impression I get from an unknown company and I decided to trust it.

eyho_wins 4y ago

Plot twist, you didn't know how to implement inheritance properly in Java therefore you withdrew your application.

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plgonzalezrx8 4y ago

Bro wat? This comment is basically "I'm too smart to work for this company". Your ego will be your downfall. There is so much I can learn from a developer, junior OR senior by just seeing how they implement something simple like that. I feel like you have a full fledged case of Dunning Kruger effect. Since you don't know what exactly they were looking for, you brush it off to "LeL, LaST pAsS so DuM aSsEsMeNt".