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This rule alone would make me walk out: "New rules will be revealed one by one. The candidate should note them as there won’t be shown again" This feels more
by whstl 2y ago
This rule alone would make me walk out:
"New rules will be revealed one by one. The candidate should note them as there won’t be shown again"
This feels more like a Squid Game parody than an interview.
I interview people from all walks of life. I would definitely not have hired some of the best engineers I worked with if I was trying to be too clever and quirky when giving out requirements.
- skeeter2020 2y ago> if I was trying to be too clever and quirky... You buried your lede IMO. The interviewers had this cute game and when the developer didn't play by the planned rules (build up a monsterous collections of branching on top of a for loop) they were screwed. Issues: * rules revealed one by one. Spec changes and is always incomplete, but you never even hear about changing spec that your existing solution already handles. * artificially handicaping developers. This is the opposite you want; it's a bad smell if developers are not offloading to rock solid libraries and language features * punishing creativity. You're getting a great view into how this person works and thinks; isn't that a primary purpose of all interviews? * anti-lookup / matrix. Some of the most efficient solutions use this aprooach, or an inherient property of the desired state/input (data as code). This is super-common in game development; John Carmack would have failed this interview too.
- whstl 2y agoYeah, this was definitely a case of the interviewer looking for its soulmate. It is frustrating but it's not personal, it's just someone bad at their job. This only happened once to me: I got a feedback of "jumped straight into a cloud-based solution". The funny part is that it was a company that made tooling for cloud services. Naturally they went bust.
- James_K 2y agoIt's meant to be a test of creativity. You will while programming encounter limitations, so the interview tests your ability to handle that. Any limitation in the interview will be artificial because it's a test rather than an actual job.
- sgarland 2y ago> artificially handicapping developers > punishing creativity A similar thing happened to me once in an interview. They said use any language, but were a TS shop. I went with Python, which is hardly esoteric. The interviewers were seemingly unaware of the breadth and depth of Python’s stdlib, and so I demolished their questions in short order. I don’t remember specifics, only that I used heapq for something, and itertools for something else. The reply afterwards was along the lines of, “while you clearly have a solid grasp on Python, we didn’t get good signals from the interview.” It’s very much worth noting that this was for an infra role, DBs specifically. The most advanced algorithm I’ve ever had (and “had” is a stretch) to use is Levenshtein.
- DidYaWipe 2y agoGoogle pulled this on a friend of mine. "Solve this in any language you want." Friend solves it in Objective-C. "Oh, except that one." I have shunned every Google recruiter since.
- jaymzjulian 2y agoI had a similar experience at a different big tech company when I went to use Ruby. The interviewer suggested that Ruby was allowed, but I would be unlikely to get the job if I didn't use python. I did get the job, and with almost entirely in Ruby and PowerShell, so....
- DidYaWipe 2y agoGood for you!
- shric 2y agoThe fact that one interviewer decided someone can't use Objective C shouldn't really give you any confidence that interviewers there are generally unreasonable. I have no affiliation with Google.
- DidYaWipe 2y ago
- roland35 2y agoIt’s downright disrespectful! It would make for an interesting game show maybe, but certainly not an interview
- BearOso 2y agoPersonally, I think it's literally unbelievable. It reads like fiction.
- whstl 2y agoThere's someone else in this thread who did the same problem 4 days ago and the story seems to match.
- ChosenEnd 2y ago> I was never asked to write a fizzbuzz until last week. > A month has passed and I got no response, no feedback, nothing… It reads like fiction because it is.
- mark-r 2y agoA more generous interpretation is that they started writing this a week after the event, while it was still fresh, but didn't finish it until a month had passed. Or perhaps it was a week ago when they realized they had been ghosted. Timelines needn't be linear.
- ChosenEnd 2y agoI think my interpretation was more generous, despite the time incoherence I deem it a good piece of fiction.
- DidYaWipe 2y agoHaven't interviewed lately?
- amluto 2y agoI think this one is pretty outrageous: > Mutating array operations are forbidden. Arrays cannot have content appended or removed after initialization. In a language like C, one could interpret this rule as making arrays containing anything other than 0 or a fixed-length list of expression be forbidden. And, in any case, who comes up with what are essentially style rules that are the same regardless of language?
- sdenton4 2y agoEh, this strikes me as reasonable - essentially declaring const inputs, working in a functional paradigm.
- thrance 2y agoI think it's the opposite actually, Squid Game is a parody of this, with employers making you jump through hoops for their amusement so you can earn your keep.
- whstl 2y agoDamn, you're totally right.