3 ms·

I'm coming at this from the perspective of someone with a pretty good memory for things like this, but those particular "nano questions" seem pretty damn fair t

by burke 15y ago

I'm coming at this from the perspective of someone with a pretty good memory for things like this, but those particular "nano questions" seem pretty damn fair to me. They're fundamental enough that it's not really relying on random trivia; they're testing things that you need to know 90% of the time to write a program, no?

kevingadd 15y ago
You don't need to 'know' them because you can literally find them out in 500 milliseconds. There's no value whatsoever in memorizing it. It's a useless factoid. I use C# almost every day and if you quizzed me about what namespaces certain types are in, I'd probably get it wrong. That's not because I haven't been using it regularly for years (I have), it's because that shit isn't worth wasting brain cells on. Even worse, though, the modern programmer ends up using a lot of languages. I have, in the past few years, had cause to write C#, Python, C++, C, Perl, JavaScript, ActionScript, PHP, SQL, Lua, Objective C, and Ruby. All for work. Each one has its own syntax, semantic quirks, standard library, etc. Out of all of the important things for someone to understand about a language - why would you care about something as unimportant as the exact namespace/package path of a particular type? Does that matter? Would you rather know whether I know the exact namespace Adobe's JSON parser lives in, or would you like to find out whether I'm familiar with the ins and outs of the ActionScript runtime? Honestly, if you think the kind of minutiae this article mentions is a good interview question, there's no way I'd want to work for you, because you don't care about things that matter - culture, candidates' desire and ability to learn, candidates' willingness to teach others, etc.
funkah 15y ago
I just don't know what I would stand to gain by learning that the candidate can recall from memory which package the Java List class is in. It seems pointless to ask.

by burke 15y ago

kevingadd 15y ago

You don't need to 'know' them because you can literally find them out in 500 milliseconds. There's no value whatsoever in memorizing it. It's a useless factoid. I use C# almost every day and if you quizzed me about what namespaces certain types are in, I'd probably get it wrong. That's not because I haven't been using it regularly for years (I have), it's because that shit isn't worth wasting brain cells on. Even worse, though, the modern programmer ends up using a lot of languages. I have, in the past few years, had cause to write C#, Python, C++, C, Perl, JavaScript, ActionScript, PHP, SQL, Lua, Objective C, and Ruby. All for work. Each one has its own syntax, semantic quirks, standard library, etc. Out of all of the important things for someone to understand about a language - why would you care about something as unimportant as the exact namespace/package path of a particular type? Does that matter? Would you rather know whether I know the exact namespace Adobe's JSON parser lives in, or would you like to find out whether I'm familiar with the ins and outs of the ActionScript runtime? Honestly, if you think the kind of minutiae this article mentions is a good interview question, there's no way I'd want to work for you, because you don't care about things that matter - culture, candidates' desire and ability to learn, candidates' willingness to teach others, etc.

funkah 15y ago

I just don't know what I would stand to gain by learning that the candidate can recall from memory which package the Java List class is in. It seems pointless to ask.