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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
by 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.