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This article reminds me to ask a pointless mind-bending riddle to each applicant just to weed out prima donna programmer types who can't handle a little mental

by crusso 14y ago

This article reminds me to ask a pointless mind-bending riddle to each applicant just to weed out prima donna programmer types who can't handle a little mental poking and prodding during the course of an interview designed to see if he/she will be a good fit for spending a good part of his/her waking day with me every day. If you're too "good" to shift contexts beyond regurgitating your work experiences or coding a for loop for a few minutes -- then I don't want to be stuck in a room with you when there's a lot of pressure to meet a customer commitment that could mean our livelihood.

hermannj314 14y ago
I interviewed a candidate that had quite an alphabet soup and buzzword compliant resume. He was pretty much convinced he was the world's greatest programmer. I asked him if he could talk through how he would write a function that showed if an unsorted-array contained consecutive integers with no gaps and no duplicates. He said he never claimed he was a math major and that such a problem was unfair to ask. In other words, he had no idea what to do. But what was interesting was that this same guy could answer questions about the O(n) complexity of algorithms and explain how to write quicksort. Apparently, his pre-interview preparation involved memorizing that in hopes we would be dumb enough to mistake that for competence. If you are hiring a baseball player, you don't hire someone that that can rattle off baseball statistics or that talks about how they read about baseball for 4 years at college, you hire someone that can play baseball. Well, I am hiring a programmer. I don't care if memorized the names of design patterns; I care whether you can you actually use them.
- jaimebuelta 14y ago
  Great comment. There are a lot of those questions that are repeated over and over and over...
edwardunknown 14y ago
You should make them pee in a cup while solving a riddle to be absolutely sure whoever you hire has no dignity.
- crusso 14y ago
  You know, now that you mention it; I have done hiring at a couple of small startups where we had to share a little-bitty bathroom. When you're adding people to the team one person at a time, it's really easy to tell at which point you introduced the one who can't lift the seat when taking a whizz and leaves splatter on the seat for the next person to deal with. Your proposal could help weed out trouble makers.

by crusso 14y ago

hermannj314 14y ago

I interviewed a candidate that had quite an alphabet soup and buzzword compliant resume. He was pretty much convinced he was the world's greatest programmer. I asked him if he could talk through how he would write a function that showed if an unsorted-array contained consecutive integers with no gaps and no duplicates. He said he never claimed he was a math major and that such a problem was unfair to ask. In other words, he had no idea what to do. But what was interesting was that this same guy could answer questions about the O(n) complexity of algorithms and explain how to write quicksort. Apparently, his pre-interview preparation involved memorizing that in hopes we would be dumb enough to mistake that for competence. If you are hiring a baseball player, you don't hire someone that that can rattle off baseball statistics or that talks about how they read about baseball for 4 years at college, you hire someone that can play baseball. Well, I am hiring a programmer. I don't care if memorized the names of design patterns; I care whether you can you actually use them.

jaimebuelta 14y ago
Great comment. There are a lot of those questions that are repeated over and over and over...

edwardunknown 14y ago

You should make them pee in a cup while solving a riddle to be absolutely sure whoever you hire has no dignity.

crusso 14y ago
You know, now that you mention it; I have done hiring at a couple of small startups where we had to share a little-bitty bathroom. When you're adding people to the team one person at a time, it's really easy to tell at which point you introduced the one who can't lift the seat when taking a whizz and leaves splatter on the seat for the next person to deal with. Your proposal could help weed out trouble makers.