4 ms·

I don't have the answer to your question, but I agree that interviewing has gotten really bad. It's not always whiteboard problems: A few days before I moved

I don't have the answer to your question, but I agree that interviewing has gotten really bad. It's not always whiteboard problems: A few days before I moved to Portland, I applied for some iOS coding jobs from San Jose. I scored two interviews, on the day after I arrived, the other a few days later. "iOS" coding, mind you. At that second company, I interviewed for four hours with six people. There were no whiteboard questions, it was all talk. My last interviewer was the president of the company. He asked me what an "activity" was. I had no clue. Quite unwisely, I pulled my answer right out of my ass. I looked it up later: iOS Apps don't have activities, that's an Android concept. I am dead certain that I didn't get that job, because I didn't know about an API that's only used for a platform that I would not be working with.

Estragon 11y ago
Maybe you didn't get it because you lied? What if you'd said you didn't know?
- mattzito 11y ago
  Perhaps - but this is why trick questions are terrible in interviews. They tend to be around trivia, and encourage people to guess at a response. If you want to test someone on whether they can admit they don't know, just ask increasingly tough questions and see how they handle it.
  - MichaelCrawford 11y ago
    Over the summer of 1986, I wrote a large chunk of a Common LISP interpreter. That fall I applied for a software engineering job at Microport, a UNIX SystemV vendor. Chuck Hickey, the president, asked me to write down the fastest possible implementation of strcpy(). Honestly, I had no clue. I wound up with a six dollar per hour telephone technical support job. This despite that at my previous job, I designed then - in one long night - flawlessly implemented the Common LISP symbol scoping rules, as specified in Guy Steele's book of the same name. This leads me to assert that it would be more productive to challenge applicants, during interviews, to write some of the same kind of code that their resumes claim they have previously written. At that LISP job, we were not concerned with performance, rather we were concerned with complying to the Common LISP specification. My resume doesn't make the claim that I studied computer science. It is quite clear that I have a BA in Physics from UC Santa Cruz, that I majored at first in Astronomy then changed to Physics at Caltech, and that I attended grad school in Physics at UCSC. Despite that it is quite common for interviewers to ask me questions that only those with graduate CS degrees would have any clue about. This finally lead me to pointing out, well before the interview, that I regard myself as a Software Engineer and not a Computer Scientist. The two, while conceptually related, in reality are quite different. Consider that a mathematician can derive the catenary curve by solving a differential equation, while a civil engineer is the reason that the Golden Gate Bridge isn't likely to collapse anytime soon.
- MichaelCrawford 11y ago
  In what way was I lying?
  - myko 11y ago
    Not lying per se, but if someone pulls something out of there ass in an interview I'm giving that's a red flag for me. If I am interviewing I don't do that without explaining that I don't know exactly what they mean, and if I have some idea of what they might mean I say that. Otherwise I say I'm sorry I don't know, and list it as something to ask about at the end of the interview (typically when you're given a chance to ask the interviewer some questions).
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
    You tried to bullshit the guy interviewing you, that's how.
zacwest 11y ago
They may have been asking you to talk about UIActivityViewController: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/UIKit/Reference/UIActivityViewController_Class/ https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/UIKit/...
- MichaelCrawford 11y ago
  The UIActivityViewController was introduced in iOS 6. That interview took place during the iOS 4 timeframe.
dredmorbius 11y ago
Rawhide?
- MichaelCrawford 11y ago
  Eh? Sorry I don't follow your question.
  - dredmorbius 11y ago
    No worries.

Estragon 11y ago

Maybe you didn't get it because you lied? What if you'd said you didn't know?

mattzito 11y ago
Perhaps - but this is why trick questions are terrible in interviews. They tend to be around trivia, and encourage people to guess at a response. If you want to test someone on whether they can admit they don't know, just ask increasingly tough questions and see how they handle it.
- MichaelCrawford 11y ago
  Over the summer of 1986, I wrote a large chunk of a Common LISP interpreter. That fall I applied for a software engineering job at Microport, a UNIX SystemV vendor. Chuck Hickey, the president, asked me to write down the fastest possible implementation of strcpy(). Honestly, I had no clue. I wound up with a six dollar per hour telephone technical support job. This despite that at my previous job, I designed then - in one long night - flawlessly implemented the Common LISP symbol scoping rules, as specified in Guy Steele's book of the same name. This leads me to assert that it would be more productive to challenge applicants, during interviews, to write some of the same kind of code that their resumes claim they have previously written. At that LISP job, we were not concerned with performance, rather we were concerned with complying to the Common LISP specification. My resume doesn't make the claim that I studied computer science. It is quite clear that I have a BA in Physics from UC Santa Cruz, that I majored at first in Astronomy then changed to Physics at Caltech, and that I attended grad school in Physics at UCSC. Despite that it is quite common for interviewers to ask me questions that only those with graduate CS degrees would have any clue about. This finally lead me to pointing out, well before the interview, that I regard myself as a Software Engineer and not a Computer Scientist. The two, while conceptually related, in reality are quite different. Consider that a mathematician can derive the catenary curve by solving a differential equation, while a civil engineer is the reason that the Golden Gate Bridge isn't likely to collapse anytime soon.
MichaelCrawford 11y ago
In what way was I lying?
- myko 11y ago
  Not lying per se, but if someone pulls something out of there ass in an interview I'm giving that's a red flag for me. If I am interviewing I don't do that without explaining that I don't know exactly what they mean, and if I have some idea of what they might mean I say that. Otherwise I say I'm sorry I don't know, and list it as something to ask about at the end of the interview (typically when you're given a chance to ask the interviewer some questions).
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
  You tried to bullshit the guy interviewing you, that's how.

zacwest 11y ago

They may have been asking you to talk about UIActivityViewController: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/UIKit/Reference/UIActivityViewController_Class/ https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/UIKit/...

MichaelCrawford 11y ago
The UIActivityViewController was introduced in iOS 6. That interview took place during the iOS 4 timeframe.

dredmorbius 11y ago

Rawhide?

MichaelCrawford 11y ago
Eh? Sorry I don't follow your question.
- dredmorbius 11y ago
  No worries.