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I believe Any senior engineer worth his salt should be able to do lint style verification of someone else's code quickly. When I am expecting someone to be a se

by gbvb 15y ago

I believe Any senior engineer worth his salt should be able to do lint style verification of someone else's code quickly. When I am expecting someone to be a senior enough engineer, they should be able to look at someone's code during Code reviews and find the issues in it that can lead to problems without resorting to IDE/debugging. I do agree that nano-questions are not useful except in situations where you get a resume with keyword bonanza: You know the kind, ones with every language,OS in the first page listed so that they will pass through the corporate recruiter filter. For those, nano-questions trip up but that will give me an indication to dig a little deeper into their IDE usage pattern. If they show some proficiency in it, (for e.g., tell me the command in Eclipse to find all the references to a particular method, if the answer is search in files, .. :)).

wladimir 15y ago
If you want to someone to do lint, why not just run lint and save on an expensive hire? Code reviews are there to find problems with the code that are not found by trivial static verifiers and/or IDEs. This requires a level of understanding of the language and experience in reading (instead of writing) code, but has nothing to do with regurgitating keyword definitions. Better in that case to just give a code fragment and make them spot the (algorithmic, logic, security, not spelling) errors.
- gbvb 15y ago
  Ok. I was making a point but I guess you are right about lint. I was trying to point out that it is easy have developers write code that can easily be O(n2) vs O(n log n) because this did not use the right kind of the maps when they were initially building the code. Or I can see developers using HashTables vs HashMaps interchangeably and not see the threading impact. In these cases, some basic questions about their understanding of the classes seem to be a good indicator. Would you consider that a nano-question? I was..

by gbvb 15y ago

wladimir 15y ago

If you want to someone to do lint, why not just run lint and save on an expensive hire? Code reviews are there to find problems with the code that are not found by trivial static verifiers and/or IDEs. This requires a level of understanding of the language and experience in reading (instead of writing) code, but has nothing to do with regurgitating keyword definitions. Better in that case to just give a code fragment and make them spot the (algorithmic, logic, security, not spelling) errors.

gbvb 15y ago
Ok. I was making a point but I guess you are right about lint. I was trying to point out that it is easy have developers write code that can easily be O(n2) vs O(n log n) because this did not use the right kind of the maps when they were initially building the code. Or I can see developers using HashTables vs HashMaps interchangeably and not see the threading impact. In these cases, some basic questions about their understanding of the classes seem to be a good indicator. Would you consider that a nano-question? I was..