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This is why a more interactive interview is useful. Christine could ask politely, “How would this work if you were given a streaming web service, instead of an
by picks_at_nits 12y ago
This is why a more interactive interview is useful. Christine could ask politely, “How would this work if you were given a streaming web service, instead of an iterator that you could restart? What would you change?”
It would be interesting to see if The Carpenter threw the whole thing out, or simply wrote a memoizing cycle detector in place of the last step. That could lead to a discussion about separation of concerns.
- Udik 12y agoApparently Christine failed to notice that the code doesn't respond to the requirements as they're laid out. She would have at least had a better reason for rejecting the Carpenter: she could have said "writes unreadable code that doesn't even respond to requirements". However, the fact that Christine couldn't even tell that the code was not working reinforces the correctness of her hunch: hypnotized by the unreadable code, neither her or the interviewee could see clearly that it wasn't fit for the intended purpose. And this is clearly a serious issue. I agree that an interview should be more interactive than that, but one could easily blame the Carpenter for having transformed the answer to a simple question into a long monologue that lead nowhere. I can't help but feeling he got what he deserved, although I'm afraid that, in the real world, his confidence and command of technicalities would have gained him the job on the spot.
- picks_at_nits 12y agoLet’s not fall into the common trap of assuming that blame is a zero-sum game. I have no problem blaming all three of the participants for what happened here.