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This is supposedly a NodeJS / NestJS / backend position. If they seem like a good team fit then I would hire someone this good with TS types in a heartbeat. Es

by pas 2y ago

This is supposedly a NodeJS / NestJS / backend position. If they seem like a good team fit then I would hire someone this good with TS types in a heartbeat. Especially that this is a small company, so if I'm some kind of mid-level decision maker there then having someone versatile is a big advantage for this company. If this would be a huge boring enterprise recruiting for the maintenance of their legacy COBOL.TS backend? Then probably the orthodox candidate.

James_K 2y ago
I don't think you'd really like to see any code like that in production. The point of an interview is to demonstrate your talents as they relate to the job. While fiddling with types is fun, it is not really relevant and is the exact opposite of what you should be doing in a real codebase. The person in this interview chose to do something silly to show off. They could have demonstrated their actual TS knowledge but instead they chose to write something totally unreadable after the interviewer asked them not to once, then made a specific rule which is basically telling them to drop the silly type stuff and just write normal code. If you really wanted the job, would you behave like that in the interview?
- koito17 2y ago
  The libraries your "production code" depends on have types just as complex as the one in TFA if not even more. Based on this judgement, I'm willing to bet the author has more "actual knowledge" of TypeScript than you. Try reading the types in popular libraries like zod, openapi-ts, tanstack router, etc.
- pas 2y ago
  It's a DSL like regex, for these constraints it makes sense to me. To me it's more TS than what you imply, which is JS. I believe that if the candidate is able to whip this up in 30-60 minutes they know their shit around some math and TS. I think most problems are not this low-level and I think the questions about data management (DB, data structures in memory and on disk), API design, integration with services and other higher-level skills are more important. So compared to the baseline "JS" at least this candidate effectively showed off one extra interesting and hard skill, while solving the problem flawlessly, and not folding under pressure, and so on. In the text the candidate explicitly asked for permission to go with types. And if the interviewer wanted to revoke that permission they could have, but they did not, they gave some ambiguous advice. > If you really wanted the job, would you behave like that in the interview? Yes. I don't want to work for a company where creativity is a liability.

by pas 2y ago

James_K 2y ago

I don't think you'd really like to see any code like that in production. The point of an interview is to demonstrate your talents as they relate to the job. While fiddling with types is fun, it is not really relevant and is the exact opposite of what you should be doing in a real codebase. The person in this interview chose to do something silly to show off. They could have demonstrated their actual TS knowledge but instead they chose to write something totally unreadable after the interviewer asked them not to once, then made a specific rule which is basically telling them to drop the silly type stuff and just write normal code. If you really wanted the job, would you behave like that in the interview?

koito17 2y ago
The libraries your "production code" depends on have types just as complex as the one in TFA if not even more. Based on this judgement, I'm willing to bet the author has more "actual knowledge" of TypeScript than you. Try reading the types in popular libraries like zod, openapi-ts, tanstack router, etc.
pas 2y ago
It's a DSL like regex, for these constraints it makes sense to me. To me it's more TS than what you imply, which is JS. I believe that if the candidate is able to whip this up in 30-60 minutes they know their shit around some math and TS. I think most problems are not this low-level and I think the questions about data management (DB, data structures in memory and on disk), API design, integration with services and other higher-level skills are more important. So compared to the baseline "JS" at least this candidate effectively showed off one extra interesting and hard skill, while solving the problem flawlessly, and not folding under pressure, and so on. In the text the candidate explicitly asked for permission to go with types. And if the interviewer wanted to revoke that permission they could have, but they did not, they gave some ambiguous advice. > If you really wanted the job, would you behave like that in the interview? Yes. I don't want to work for a company where creativity is a liability.