3 ms·

Are you telling me that when you got vim opened, you panicked and could not figure it out in a relatively short timeframe? FWIW I still maintain the belief tha

Are you telling me that when you got vim opened, you panicked and could not figure it out in a relatively short timeframe? FWIW I still maintain the belief that it is usually a decent indicator of whether you have got the experience to work through unfamiliar tools. It is often a good sign, although not a guarantee.

Quarrelsome 7mo ago
When vim auto opened the bloke next to me doing my induction told me I needed to type ":wq" and then made a joke about how unintuitive it is. > FWIW I still maintain the belief that it is usually a decent indicator of whether you have got the experience to work through unfamiliar tools if you just said that in the first place I'd agree, but that's different. Good engineers are brave and able to just dive into some unknown to get the job done. I'm sure there's been plenty of times where we've been thrust into scenarios where we have to use unfamiliar tech to solve an issue or throw up some infra. However, personally I've never _had_ to use vi, so its not come up, but that's probably because my background is very much a windows one, not a linux/unix one.
- johnisgood 7mo ago
  Fair enough. > Good engineers are brave and able to just dive into some unknown to get the job done. I agree. We (I) do it all the time. Just to circle back on the "pop quiz" point: do we agree that asking loosely relevant trivia questions is not the most effective way to assess ability? I would argue it is more meaningful to be given a task and the space to solve it. To be honest, I do not know how to implement heapsort off the top of my head, but I know how to look up its pseudocode and how it works, and from there, I can translate that into working code. > that's probably because my background is very much a windows one, not a linux/unix one. Yes, that explains it. I find no issue with that at all. What matters is the ability to bridge gaps when needed.
  - Quarrelsome 7mo ago
    > do we agree that asking loosely relevant trivia questions is not the most effective way to assess ability? yeah. I been interviewing recently and the best interviews are those most like the job, where you either go in on-site and pair with some toy example, or get given some awful existing code and be given an amount of time to achieve a particular goal within that code. The conversations that fall out of such exercises after they're completed are probably more valuable than the exercise itself.

Quarrelsome 7mo ago

When vim auto opened the bloke next to me doing my induction told me I needed to type ":wq" and then made a joke about how unintuitive it is. > FWIW I still maintain the belief that it is usually a decent indicator of whether you have got the experience to work through unfamiliar tools if you just said that in the first place I'd agree, but that's different. Good engineers are brave and able to just dive into some unknown to get the job done. I'm sure there's been plenty of times where we've been thrust into scenarios where we have to use unfamiliar tech to solve an issue or throw up some infra. However, personally I've never _had_ to use vi, so its not come up, but that's probably because my background is very much a windows one, not a linux/unix one.

johnisgood 7mo ago
Fair enough. > Good engineers are brave and able to just dive into some unknown to get the job done. I agree. We (I) do it all the time. Just to circle back on the "pop quiz" point: do we agree that asking loosely relevant trivia questions is not the most effective way to assess ability? I would argue it is more meaningful to be given a task and the space to solve it. To be honest, I do not know how to implement heapsort off the top of my head, but I know how to look up its pseudocode and how it works, and from there, I can translate that into working code. > that's probably because my background is very much a windows one, not a linux/unix one. Yes, that explains it. I find no issue with that at all. What matters is the ability to bridge gaps when needed.
- Quarrelsome 7mo ago
  > do we agree that asking loosely relevant trivia questions is not the most effective way to assess ability? yeah. I been interviewing recently and the best interviews are those most like the job, where you either go in on-site and pair with some toy example, or get given some awful existing code and be given an amount of time to achieve a particular goal within that code. The conversations that fall out of such exercises after they're completed are probably more valuable than the exercise itself.