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The interviewing company does seem like a dodged bullet at first glance, but: - the requirements being weird might very well be modeling how weird things often
by Dansvidania 2y ago
The interviewing company does seem like a dodged bullet at first glance, but:
- the requirements being weird might very well be modeling how weird things often get in reality. Rules are often not recorded and not repeated, and very often they seem arbitrary from the POV of the developers.
- the interviewers hinted that the direction was not what they were looking for
- a senior dev needs to apply his own common sense to understand what the truly appropriate solution is given the stated priorities (readability and maintainability were stated)
- not to mention the fact that if the interviewers don't understand your code, things won't go smoothly for you either way
The fact that they said, paraphrasing "..pick any esoteric language.." might investigate whether, given technical freedom (EG: to pick your own stack) you will build an incomprehensible codebase that will be hard for the company to deal with in the future
I think the author is indeed very clever and I learned a few things from reading this write up (thanks for sharing!) but I think the interviewers were right not be impressed.
If I were you, I'd try to dumb it down for your colleagues.
- pinoy420 2y agoAbsolutely. This would be a no from me
- Dansvidania 2y agocould you at least tell me why I am getting downvoted?
- GoToRO 2y agoBlaming the victim?
- cstrahan 2y ago> the interviewers hinted that the direction was not what they were looking for No, they said they couldn’t see the utility in what he was doing, which is very different than being told that his solution is unsatisfactory. I have had countless interviews where I’ve been told that they don’t see where I’m going with something, and when I’m finished they admit (after some time processing) that they are impressed that I came up with such an elegant, simple solution. When asked what they had in mind, it turns out they (initially) thought the optimal solution was some contrived, overly complicated thing. If I let everyone’s interjections derail me, I’d never get through most interviews. Think: have you ever seen a candidate give a crazy, overly complicated solution in an interview? Yes? Well, such interviewees (the ones that write 100+ line Fibonacci functions that look like they might be doing some memoization, but if you squint it turns out they aren’t even using the memo table they constructed) go on to be become interviewers — it shouldn’t be a surprise that many interviewers unintentionally throw candidates curveballs by expressing incredulity in the face of a non-shitty solution. If something is truly a hard “no”, then a “no” must be said — expecting the candidate to guess what’s going through the interviewers head is ridiculous.