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Slightly off topic, but does anyone know of a resource that has 'most common mistakes' for different languages all in one place? It's certainly possible to goog
by Goosey 12y ago
Slightly off topic, but does anyone know of a resource that has 'most common mistakes' for different languages all in one place? It's certainly possible to google for blog posts and stack overflow questions to assemble such a list, but it would be handy to have them all in one place.
My use case is when interviewing candidates I often ask them to rate themselves on a scale of 1-5 in the languages they know, and then ask them increasingly 'tricky' questions in each language to get a feel for how their "personal" scale aligns to their real knowledge. This works fine if we have an overlap of several languages, but in the case where I know nothing or very little of one of the languages they know I lose that data point.
I find it valuable to know what a "I am a 1 at X" vs "I am a 3 X" vs "I am a 5 at X" means to them, since I've found little correlation between how harshly someone rates themselves and their true ability. Sometimes self-rated 5s are really 5s by my book, sometimes self-rated 3s are really 5s by my book, and sometimes self-rated 5s are really 2s by my book. So I want to know how "my scale" translates to "their scale". If it was more formalized I'd go as far as to get a "confidence quotient" for a person as self-critical and self-confident people can be fantastic engineers or horrible engineers.
Does anyone else do this process when interviewing?
- mark-r 12y agoWhile such a resource would make your job easier, it would make the interviewee's job easier still. They'd just have to memorize all the points in the reference.
- timdierks 12y agoAt which point they will no longer make these mistakes, and thus are more expert. Everyone wins!
- mark-r 12y agoExcept that you're risking hiring people that know all the trivia but still can't program FizzBuzz properly. The test loses its predictive value.
- tripzilch 12y agoWhat are you even trying to say? If such a resource indeed already exists, that is a bad reason not to link us to it. If such a resource does not already exist, what you say is a bad reason to dissuade someone (who might otherwise be inclined to) from building it. It's a pretty bad reason to argue against its existence, all around.
- whatevsbro 12y ago> I've found little correlation between how harshly someone rates themselves and their true ability Are you sure you're actually measuring their true ability by asking them about specific, increasingly obscure gotchas? People can even forget some of the gotchas, even if they've encountered them.
- toddkaufmann 12y agoI have thought about this, but in the context of understanding the root causes of these problems: 1) is it a language design problem, 2) a misunderstanding or misconception on the part of the programmer, 3) due to or related to bad coding/smells (e.g. method body too long), 4) high complexity code (could be related to (3), could reflect the domain), 5) reduced programmer cognitive capacity (distraction, stress, sleep deficit, lack of motivation, etc.). These would be interesting research areas for instrumenting IDEs / other eco-system tools to collect some of this data. (I'm sure there is already some work in some of these areas and would appreciate names or links to high-quality reviews.)