4 ms·

>"You chose to use Perl but don't know what a hash is." Do you have any questions for me? This reminds me of someone who once told me they knew C and were prof

by ben1040 15y ago

>"You chose to use Perl but don't know what a hash is." Do you have any questions for me? This reminds me of someone who once told me they knew C and were proficient at it, but they just "didn't get pointers and I don't use them."

JoeAltmaier 15y ago
Scoff if you like, but I hired that guy. He's a fellow at Adobe now. They bought his startup. We interviewed a Busuness school Finance senior to help on our COMSTOCK satellite feed parsing project.'Do you know C++?" we asked. "Yes" he lied, then "Can I come in over the weekend to get started?" How enthusiastic! Sure! Turns out he spent the weekend studying code, learned to program C++. I didn't see him for a few weeks, then consulting on his code over something I mentioned "This would be better allocated". "Yeah, I wondered what the pointer stuff was about". I was astonished he'd come so far on guts and smarts. I explained malloc, pointers, he was off again.
- DavidWoof 15y ago
  Put another way, you had (have?) astonishingly poor interview techniques but this one time you got lucky?
  - JoeAltmaier 15y ago
    You could pretend that. Or you could say, we valued his intelligence and readily-apparent ability to learn over 'fizz-buzz' nonsense questions and cargo-cult interview style.
- msg 15y ago
  Looking back, were they overqualified or underqualified? If you had tested the second guy's C++ skill (sounds like he couldn't have done Fizzbuzz in your interview), would you have disqualified him? If you didn't think C++ was that important, why ask in the interview? All I'm trying to get at is if you take your experience as a rule. The population of people who lie about their programming skills is unfortunately all too high. The subset who can make up the difference in two days, unfortunately all too small. I think a Google or Amazon has to play the percentages to keep a high bar. The cost of a bad hire reverberates through the organization.
  - JoeAltmaier 15y ago
    Which is why you should learn more about a candidate than their current programming toolset. Like their adaptability, their insight into problems and their convolutions. Not about their facility with the current fad language.

by ben1040 15y ago

JoeAltmaier 15y ago

Scoff if you like, but I hired that guy. He's a fellow at Adobe now. They bought his startup. We interviewed a Busuness school Finance senior to help on our COMSTOCK satellite feed parsing project.'Do you know C++?" we asked. "Yes" he lied, then "Can I come in over the weekend to get started?" How enthusiastic! Sure! Turns out he spent the weekend studying code, learned to program C++. I didn't see him for a few weeks, then consulting on his code over something I mentioned "This would be better allocated". "Yeah, I wondered what the pointer stuff was about". I was astonished he'd come so far on guts and smarts. I explained malloc, pointers, he was off again.

DavidWoof 15y ago
Put another way, you had (have?) astonishingly poor interview techniques but this one time you got lucky?
- JoeAltmaier 15y ago
  You could pretend that. Or you could say, we valued his intelligence and readily-apparent ability to learn over 'fizz-buzz' nonsense questions and cargo-cult interview style.
msg 15y ago
Looking back, were they overqualified or underqualified? If you had tested the second guy's C++ skill (sounds like he couldn't have done Fizzbuzz in your interview), would you have disqualified him? If you didn't think C++ was that important, why ask in the interview? All I'm trying to get at is if you take your experience as a rule. The population of people who lie about their programming skills is unfortunately all too high. The subset who can make up the difference in two days, unfortunately all too small. I think a Google or Amazon has to play the percentages to keep a high bar. The cost of a bad hire reverberates through the organization.
- JoeAltmaier 15y ago
  Which is why you should learn more about a candidate than their current programming toolset. Like their adaptability, their insight into problems and their convolutions. Not about their facility with the current fad language.