Developer Applicant Suitability

fasty

I wouldn't walk out of an interview like that, at least not in Ireland. It's a small enough industry and pretty unprofessional to be honest.

Lots of companies as classical computer science style questions. Microsoft, Google, Facebook. It's not like a test where you're just expected to regurgitate and answer, they're being asked to see how you approach and solve a problem and the problems need to be things that can be solved in minutes, not hours.

I would be more inclined to wrap up an interview quickly if I was expected to talk tech buzzwords and they didn't ask me to write code.

srsly78

In fairness, I only walked out of an interview once (as detailed in earlier post), and I was very polite about it. But at this stage in my career I regard questions like that as wasting my time.

The place I walked out of (a certain company that produces software that can recognise music) gave me an extremely bad impression the second I walked into the door. I had never seen so many developers packed into a room, elbow-to-elbow at the desk.

Another example of interview (with massssive well known megacorp) for a core database engine programming role: This was a job where you deffo WOULD need to know about sorting algorithms etc. But the 2 engineers that interviewed were completely cool and did not expect me to remember stuff from lectures in the 90s. They were fine with my terrible hand-waving solutions, because they knew I would just look up the specifics on the net. That's how we actually do things in reality. Didn't take that job in the end because I didn't want to go permanent.

oeb

komodosp wrote: »

Aha, but now you have a problem. Given that you are writing it out and handing it to the interviewer and not discussing it, you have to trust the interviewer to know the difference.

It's probably more to do with my phrasing of the question from memory, but the intention was to disallow any math functions, not operators. That's how the question read to me when I first saw it.

For example, in php you would not be aloud to use the pow() function.

Procasinator

oeb wrote: »

It's probably more to do with my phrasing of the question from memory, but the intention was to disallow any math functions, not operators. That's how the question read to me when I first saw it.

For example, in php you would not be aloud to use the pow() function.

Who knows. It is possible to do with no mathematical operators though. Pretty much the same as last code, but not using the += operator or - to, so using a add method.

function add(x, y) {
	var sum, carry;
	do {
		carry = x & y;
		sum = x ^ y;
		x = carry << 1;
		y = sum;
	} while(carry)
	return sum;
}

function square(x)
{
	var r = 0;
	if (x < 0) x = add(~x, 1);
	var y = x;
	for(;y!=0;x=x<<1,y=y>>1) {
		if (y&1) {
			r = add(r, x);
		}
	}
	return r;
}

johnny_rambo

My attempt at the square function.....

function Square(number) {
    var sum = 0;
    for(var i=number; i>0; i--) {
        sum += i + (number != i ? i : 0);
    }

    return sum;
}

Evil Phil

Trojan wrote: »

Super. Something I always recommend to people after reading this book years ago: do the job in the interview. Won't work for everyone, but if you've enough experience and confidence to steer the interview to that, it will pay off hugely.

Yeah I agree. An approach that works for me is when they ask "Do you have any questions?" ask them for to explain a current issue they're working on and try and bash out a solution with them. Gives them a good idea of what it will be like to work with you.

Not so easy to do with an HR person mind you.

Naikon

HR people piss me off.

Evil Phil

Naikon wrote: »

HR people piss me off.

There job is basically to make sure the company doesn't get sued first, second to market how happy everybody is to work for the company. It reminds of the simpsons ad: Duff beer for me, duff beer for you, I'd like a duff, you'd like one too.

cornbb

Naikon wrote: »

HR people piss me off.

They do play a useful enough role:

1) Screening CVs so managers/engineers don't have to wade through the junk that people send in.

2) Watching for legal pitfalls

3) Performing salary negotiations, checking references, preparing paperwork etc

Though if a company is sending HR people to perform technical interviews or to actually have the last word on whether someone is hired, that's pretty dumb.

BostonB

srsly78 wrote: »

....Questions were stuff like "write heapsort" and so on. I last studied that stuff in the 90s.... No I cannot remember heapsort!! Yeah you gotta make a "heapify" function lalala. Anyway, I just got up and said "Thank you for your time", and left. This is not how you interview a developer with 10+ years of experience -.-

Contrast to next interview (for financial consultancy). Phone interview first, guys described the specific problem they wanted to hire someone to solve. I flew over for face-to-face interview, brought laptop with demo of a rough solution to what they wanted. Wallop -> instantly employed. No HR drones in sight.

I'm curious about these kinda tests. As I have no formal qualifications in CS, my degree is in something entirely different, so I'll hold my hand up and say I'm not a programmer, but jack of all trades etc. But I've a similar experience when contracting. I'd offer to develop a proof of concept demo, and take them through it. Thats been enough to get contracts and pass code reviews with programmer leads/mangers etc. But it doesn't get me past, HR filtering or HR interviews or classic interview questions like this heapify example. As I'd not have covered that stuff in college or need it in the work I've done over the years. Another such question was the use of property bags for VB which I'd never heard of.

srsly78

I have no IT qualifications either :pac:

It's just luck of the draw really. I happened to be the right guy, with right skillset, in the right place at the right time. Was starting to go crazy last summer, 4 months of job hunting before I landed new contract. I avoid large companies now if possible. Place I work in now is all techies (<10 employees) and no hr drones. Standard procedure is that everyone interviews new candidates.