IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.
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Guest, did you like the last podcast notification?? Well here's the second one, and for the third podcast! Yep. This Thursday 8-8-24 at 7pm Central
Go here to check out his podcast thread for info on topics and links!Go into the FoH discord and find the Happy Time Fun Hour channel and give it a listen!
Asshat wormie
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Make sure you tell him its the dumb bubble sort, not the optimized one. That will show them.
My favorite sort is quantum computing monkey sort. Theoretically the fastest available sort .... once quantum computing exists ya know.
Noodleface
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Asking me my favorite sorting algorithm is like when I went on this one interview and a guy asked me to (and I'm quoting here) "write your most impressive linux command."
The guy already pissed me off so I wrote "ls -l" with a straight face. Guy was a huge dick the entire interview.
The guy already pissed me off so I wrote "ls -l" with a straight face. Guy was a huge dick the entire interview.
Noodleface
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The guy really pissed me off. The job description was for some hard drive engineering position and he was asking strange questions about linux and Windows and topics I didn't understand. I can't remember it very clearly, but he was definitely far away from what the job description said - and I soon found out the listing was wrong. He kept making large audible sighs like he was clearly displeased with me and then said something insulting about my education before asking the awesome linux question.
Right after the interview I emailed the coordinator and told them to withdraw my application, I was so pissed. The worst part is it was an internal EMC interview, so someone who really should've been on my side but he treated me like shit.
Noodleface
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Certainly, but what he was asking was retarded. He also got really butt hurt that I had never used windbg, even though I told him we did real time debugging with hardware emulators instead.
Asshat wormie
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How else can you weed out some of the people who, on paper, have skills but in reality have none? Sure occasionally you have shit like this happen:
Max Howell on Twitter:
But on average i am sure it works to weed out the real stinkers.
I actually think Google published that they've tried many different hiring strategies and they all yield the same basic results. If you talk with someone and if they can really describe the project they were on, the challenges the project faced and the eventual solutions chances are they were pretty hands-on with doing it. If someone just says they worked on a project that utilized Flume hydrating a Hive data store to be queried by Impala and you ask them literally anything about any of those technologies they should be able to answer them to a satisfactory level that they know what is going on. If they fumble, contradict and just give you absolute BS chances are they either didn't actually work with these technologies or were carried on the project. But asking someone to do mostly worthless algorithm world problems that have very little relevance in their day-to-day doesn't mean they know how to actually develop enterprise level software. Perhaps it has just become second nature to me so I don't realize I'm solving semi-complex issues but most of my day-to-day is figuring out how to interact with an API or using the native Java API to do most of the heavy lifting for me. Some people may be lower level and have to actually deal with sort efficiency but that is for a more specialized role. Me? I just call Arrays.sort and call it a day.
Asshat wormie
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Dont get me wrong. I am not arguing for or against the merits of such practices. I am taking what I consider a reasonable stance on the necessity of some sort of screening and feel that problem solving is a good way to approach it.
Asshat wormie
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I think that on average, its better to hire people between "holy shit CS god" and "holy shit have you ever seen a keyboard?" than to strive for the edge cases.
Noodleface
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We had a holy shit CS (computer engineering) god here that went right to Google after his 2 years here, I would assume most of those guys don't stick around long. I look at some of the work he did in his time here and I can't even compete.
Stupid question - for interviews suit or no suit? I've done both, but I don't know what's preferred.
Stupid question - for interviews suit or no suit? I've done both, but I don't know what's preferred.
Khane
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Depends on the culture but generally I think for a developer job a suit is a tad overkill. I just shirt and tie it.
Asshat wormie
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I dont work in the industry. I have mentioned that fact in this thread before. Frankly I find the day to day development boring as balls and any job that I would want to do in the industry requires having a PHD which I do not yet have. My exposure to software developers is limited to the meetups I attend a month and the sea of undergrad/grad students that surrounds me almost every day.
Because I give a lecture or two a semester in front of the CS club and am involved in one of the more esoteric research projects at the department, most students seem to think I know wtf I am talking about so they approach me with all kinds of shit. Being in the industry already, I am not sure if some of you guys realize how bad a lot of the people that are attempting to get into the development field really are, despite their pedigrees. I have seen undergrads with departmental honors and perfect GPAs who lose their shit at a mention of a pointer. I have seen grad students failing to traverse trees or not being able to build simple data structures (there are a lot of these guys). On top of this, some meetups I attend are flooded with bootcamp grads and self taught people who learned to build some simple CRUD or some silly scheduling app and think they are ready to run entire departments.
The people that lack skills are coming out of everywhere right now (and its going to get worse, colleges are now getting into the bootcamp business; see Rutgers coding bootcamp) and to not screen candidates well enough is silly. Yes some superstars get missed in the process, but a lot more terrible "programmers" that should not be allowed to touch a keyboard will get tossed out as well.
Also assuming that the hiring process will yield a department/group with above average performance ignores reality. Average is the best anyone will ever get. Worrying about outliers on one end, will just lead to hiring more outliers on the other. And since the distribution is skewed quiet a bit towards the end where all the shitty programmers are, its safer to make sure you avoid all such edge cases and just hire from the "meh" middle since "meh" will always be the end result.