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Wow, that is quite an article. I think it manages the rare feat of being completely wrong. Usually people write enough words that they stumble into saying som
by aero142 15y ago
Wow, that is quite an article. I think it manages the rare feat of being completely wrong. Usually people write enough words that they stumble into saying something useful.
Personally, I love asking esoteric questions in interviews, but not because I care about that particular question. I am trying to figure out if you are the kind of programmer who looks beneath the covers to figure out what is really going on. Do I expect every programming to know how b-trees relate to database indexes, and what their lookup times are, no. But if you have written a lot of SQL and never bothered to figure that out, you are probably a slave to the SQL interface and aren't the type of person who will ever really understand how to optimize queries. The point is to figure out they type of person they are.
Secondarily, I like working with nice people. It's important. But I have worked with nice and smart people who wrote horrible unmaintainable code, and I ended up loathing working with them. Plus, the better the programmers, the less of them you need. Turns out this is terribly important in software.
- jff 15y agoI think, though, that it's wrong to decide "this person is not intellectually curious" merely because he has never investigated the particular esoteric bit you picked to test "intellectual curiosity". I could ask you if you know the x86 calling conventions--what, you don't know? But you use x86 machines every day, and write code to run on x86! You're obviously a slave to Ruby/C++/<insert-language-here> and just aren't the type of guy to go learn things.
- aero142 15y agoLike I said, I'm not trying to find out if you know a particular thing, I'm trying to figure out if you ever learn things that are deeper than the surface. So, if you don't know x86 calling conventions, fine. But if I ask several more questions in that domain, and you don't know any of them, then I check your resume and you having been writing C level code for years, I'm concerned.
- wbienek 15y agoA lot of people don't like people who do the bll sht tech questions because like me they don't have a college degree and it rubs em (me) wrong when you bounce them out of an interview when they're able to make 2-3-5x more money than the interviewer!... Not that I ever applied anywhere but once... I tried, but didn't get hired for a crap 26k a year job at a college about 6 yrs ago. They didn't hire me. Now I make almost 400k a year and absolutely lothe the "college" educated who weren't smart enough to hire me in the first place. I wasn't smart enough/worth a stupid 26k yr IT job at a small private university as an admin but 2 yrs later I was making 129k a yr and now I make almost 400k w/ no employees. College ilk can die on the street homeless as they would have left me all those years ago if they would have had it their way. No pity for them and their loans. No pity at all. They would have left me to die if they had it their way. They can suck a big one.. If your not part of their club, too bad. Well let them for in their loan debt.