Coding Horrors: You can gather all your technical debt into one easy framework!

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Coding Horrors: You can gather all your technical debt into one easy framework!

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RandomBlue: Dec 30, 2012; hay guys!; Biscuit Hider

redleader posted:

This, but unironically.

Even in the heyday of "Turn off Javascript for security you guys!" it was loving stupid. That was more than a decade ago. Give up and move on.

# ? Apr 1, 2017 05:02

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# ? May 15, 2024 04:34

senrath: Nov 4, 2009; Look Professor, a destruct switch!

Hydronium posted:

Found at work today: no code needed, the function name says it all. TrimAndAddSpaceAtEnd

Wait, does that Trim and/or Add Space At the End, or does it Trim...something and then Add Space At the End?

# ? Apr 1, 2017 05:07

Foxfire_: Nov 8, 2010

Hydronium posted:

Found at work today: no code needed, the function name says it all. TrimAndAddSpaceAtEnd

Does it remove all the whitespace from the end of a string, and then add a single space at the end? Cause that's what it sounds like and that's a pretty good name if that's what it does.

# ? Apr 1, 2017 05:15

Carthag Tuek: Oct 15, 2005; Tider skal komme,
tider skal henrulle,
sl�gt skal f�lge sl�gters gang

Vanadium posted:

Maybe people could just stop using cookies on sites that don't need them instead of annoying people with popups!!

oh man that would be sweet

law shouldve been like:
- one cookie per site per visitor.
- no third parties ever
- if you sell any data, your company will be shut down, all your media destroyed, and the rest of your actives will be sold off to cover the expenses.

at least

# ? Apr 1, 2017 05:18

Absurd Alhazred: Mar 27, 2010; by Athanatos

https://twitter.com/jakevdp/status/847859811823767552

# ? Apr 1, 2017 05:20

Carbon dioxide: Oct 9, 2012

So, my friend can be contracted to do job interviews for startups or whatever.

He told me the other day he was interviewing someone for a Java job.

It went like this:

"Can you explain to me what a Set is?"
"Uh... I never encountered one, but it's a type of List, isn't it?"
"Okay... so what is a Map?"
"Ah, I know that one! That's a List optimized for finding values by keys!"

"Alright, let's do a coding example. What does the following code print?"

Java code:

try {
	System.out.println("Hello World");
	System.exit(0);
} finally {
	System.out.println("The end");
}

If you are very familiar with Java, you know that System.exit() overrides the finally block and only "Hello World" gets printed. You'd be forgiven for thinking "The end" is also printed. This guy somehow thought nothing at all was printed. :psyduck:

Needless to say, he wasn't hired.

# ? Apr 1, 2017 09:02

QuarkJets: Sep 8, 2008

Carbon dioxide posted:

So, my friend can be contracted to do job interviews for startups or whatever.

He told me the other day he was interviewing someone for a Java job.

It went like this:

"Can you explain to me what a Set is?"
"Uh... I never encountered one, but it's a type of List, isn't it?"
"Okay... so what is a Map?"
"Ah, I know that one! That's a List optimized for finding values by keys!"

"Alright, let's do a coding example. What does the following code print?"
Java code:
try {
	System.out.println("Hello World");
	System.exit(0);
} finally {
	System.out.println("The end");
} 
If you are very familiar with Java, you know that System.exit() overrides the finally block and only "Hello World" gets printed. You'd be forgiven for thinking "The end" is also printed. This guy somehow thought nothing at all was printed.

Needless to say, he wasn't hired.

It was a trick question; that code hasn't been compiled or run yet. The code isn't sentient, dummy!

# ? Apr 1, 2017 09:42

QuarkJets: Sep 8, 2008

also is the coding interview bar really that low at most places?

# ? Apr 1, 2017 09:43

The Laplace Demon: Jul 23, 2009; "Oh dear! Oh dear! Heisenberg is a douche!"

I'd lead with a question on the level of "Can you explain to me what a Set is?" to level my followup questions with a candidate. It's less the interview bar and more the variable quality of the average candidate.

# ? Apr 1, 2017 09:47

Carthag Tuek: Oct 15, 2005; Tider skal komme,
tider skal henrulle,
sl�gt skal f�lge sl�gters gang

Do you know what a set is? Heh, yeah it's a classic ""interview question"", come here 20 year old male comp sci student, sit by me on the sofa but also do you know what an array is? *hand on thigh* Imagine 10 bottles of booze in a rack, and they're real bottles, and you're gonna take a shot for every mistake until we figure this poo poo out

hehe

# ? Apr 1, 2017 09:58

canis minor: May 4, 2011

QuarkJets posted:

also is the coding interview bar really that low at most places?

In my place, for PHP dev - 1) write a recursive function, 2) do a mysql select query that joins two tables 3) write a class, having method that adds two numbers and stores them within private attribute.

I think there were 5 people so far that weren't able to do this - with a couple of years of experience btw. But I have a sneaky suspicion that salary might not be that great, so I'd rather attribute that, idk

# ? Apr 1, 2017 10:49

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

Powaqoatse posted:

Do you know what a set is? Heh, yeah it's a classic ""interview question"", come here 20 year old male comp sci student, sit by me on the sofa but also do you know what an array is? *hand on thigh* Imagine 10 bottles of booze in a rack, and they're real bottles, and you're gonna take a shot for every mistake until we figure this poo poo out

hehe

Dude, last week I had to explain y=mx+b in a meeting.

# ? Apr 1, 2017 12:24

Carthag Tuek: Oct 15, 2005; Tider skal komme,
tider skal henrulle,
sl�gt skal f�lge sl�gters gang

Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:

Dude, last week I had to explain y=mx+b in a meeting.

but did you grab their thighs

# ? Apr 1, 2017 12:47

Carthag Tuek: Oct 15, 2005; Tider skal komme,
tider skal henrulle,
sl�gt skal f�lge sl�gters gang

i wanna sexually harrass every dude in the silicon valley c-suites

# ? Apr 1, 2017 12:50

B-Nasty: May 25, 2005

QuarkJets posted:

also is the coding interview bar really that low at most places?

Remember, as an interviewee, you're probably coming in nervous as hell, and being asked to code either in your head, on a whiteboard, or (best case) on a computer/setup that you aren't familiar with. My goal in designing interview questions was to find something that somebody should be able to start and finish, cold, in less than an hour. If the problem takes me, fully comfortable and caffeinated, a ton of time to think through, it's probably unfair to ask in an interview situation. If your company (not you specifically, QuarkJets) writes CRUD web apps and pays engineers average salaries, gently caress you for throwing algorithm questions at candidates that probably 90% of your own engineers couldn't pass.

As Carbon dioxide's example showed, you'd be surprised how many "Sr. Software Engineers" can't code something at the level of Fizz Buzz when put in front of a keyboard.

# ? Apr 1, 2017 15:27

Carthag Tuek: Oct 15, 2005; Tider skal komme,
tider skal henrulle,
sl�gt skal f�lge sl�gters gang

cuz i got code reviewers in low places
where the sprints they grounds us & the jira blows my blues away

# ? Apr 1, 2017 16:43

chutwig: May 28, 2001; BURLAP SATCHEL OF CRACKERJACKS

QuarkJets posted:

also is the coding interview bar really that low at most places?

When one of my co-workers suggested we start our screen-share coding sessions off with Fizzbuzz, I scoffed. Who's going to gently caress that up?, I wondered to myself.

Three weeks later, about 75% of our candidates have failed to write it in a language of their choosing, and most of them could not even explain the algorithm in pseudocode. I'm not asking you solve Project Euler matrix problems, just show me you can do a loop and a few if statements.

# ? Apr 1, 2017 18:36

Fergus Mac Roich: Nov 5, 2008; Soiled Meat

chutwig posted:

When one of my co-workers suggested we start our screen-share coding sessions off with Fizzbuzz, I scoffed. Who's going to gently caress that up?, I wondered to myself.

Three weeks later, about 75% of our candidates have failed to write it in a language of their choosing, and most of them could not even explain the algorithm in pseudocode. I'm not asking you solve Project Euler matrix problems, just show me you can do a loop and a few if statements.

When you say failed, what are we talking here? Their implementation prints the number as well as the appropriate string for multiples of 3 and 5, or they can't figure out for loop syntax, or what?

# ? Apr 1, 2017 18:56

chutwig: May 28, 2001; BURLAP SATCHEL OF CRACKERJACKS

Fergus Mac Roich posted:

When you say failed, what are we talking here? Their implementation prints the number as well as the appropriate string for multiples of 3 and 5, or they can't figure out for loop syntax, or what?

The failures usually fell into one of these categories (the default language is Python but they are explicitly told they can write it any language supported by the codepair system, so they can choose e.g. Ruby, Java, C++):

could not do it at all, even in pseudocode
did not write a for loop
wrote a for loop in Python but insisted on using C syntax, which won't work (I always reminded them at this point that they can use another language if they want)
wrote for loops inside every if statement (???)
did not know about % and wrote things like something = i / 3; if something * 3 == i: print "fizz" (technically correct but shows lack of fluency)

Many people could eventually stagger their way to the end, but it would frequently take 20-30 minutes instead of the <5 it should take.

# ? Apr 1, 2017 19:33

Dex: May 26, 2006; Quintuple x!!!

Would not escrow again.

VERY MISLEADING!

chutwig posted:

When one of my co-workers suggested we start our screen-share coding sessions off with Fizzbuzz, I scoffed. Who's going to gently caress that up?, I wondered to myself.

Three weeks later, about 75% of our candidates have failed to write it in a language of their choosing, and most of them could not even explain the algorithm in pseudocode. I'm not asking you solve Project Euler matrix problems, just show me you can do a loop and a few if statements.

what if i can't? do you want your solution or a solution?

code:

numbers = list(range(101))
numbers[3::3] = ['Fizz'] * len(numbers[3::3])
numbers[5::5] = ['Buzz'] * len(numbers[5::5])
numbers[15::15] = ['FizzBuzz'] * len(numbers[15::15])
print(numbers[1:])

ask me stuff that shows you how i think and act, if you want coding exercises then send them in advance and leave me google poo poo because i'm going to do that at work anyway

# ? Apr 1, 2017 21:22

smackfu: Jun 7, 2004

I work with some professional programmers who I doubt could explain why you would use a Set instead of a List. Somehow they get by.

# ? Apr 1, 2017 21:48

ExcessBLarg!: Sep 1, 2001

Carbon dioxide posted:

If you are very familiar with Java, you know that System.exit() overrides the finally block and only "Hello World" gets printed.

Maybe. It's pretty clearly a trick question as, if this code ever existed in practice it's at best inconsequential, and quite possibly a bug that the finally block isn't called; particularly if it's intended to clean up an external resource. The fact that finally doesn't execute is the most straight-forward way for the JVM to implement System.exit, but it wouldn't be impossible for a Java-like language to have finally blocks with closure semantics and unwind them as part of the exit sequence.

Similar trick questions are anything involving the deprecated Thread.stop and friends methods, or the double-checked locking anti-pattern. I mean, they can still serve as good discussion points, particularly if you're trying to hire someone with deep systems experience. But I prefer to avoid asking trick questions as there's plenty of other straight-forward questions that do a good job of assessing someone's Java abilities.

QuarkJets posted:

also is the coding interview bar really that low at most places?

No, but you're not going to waste time asking complicated questions when someone doesn't know what a Set is. Good phone screen filter.

# ? Apr 1, 2017 21:49

TooMuchAbstraction: Oct 14, 2012; I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.; Fun Shoe

Dex posted:

what if i can't? do you want your solution or a solution?

ask me stuff that shows you how i think and act, if you want coding exercises then send them in advance and leave me google poo poo because i'm going to do that at work anyway

FizzBuzz is the kind of thing that any programmer worth their salt will be able to write up a pseudocode solution to with no real effort, and certainly no need to resort to Google. So yes, when you ask FizzBuzz you are looking for a solution, because the only point to that question is to determine if the actual hard part of the interview can begin.

# ? Apr 1, 2017 21:50

chutwig: May 28, 2001; BURLAP SATCHEL OF CRACKERJACKS

Dex posted:

what if i can't? do you want your solution or a solution?
code:
numbers = list(range(101))
numbers[3::3] = ['Fizz'] * len(numbers[3::3])
numbers[5::5] = ['Buzz'] * len(numbers[5::5])
numbers[15::15] = ['FizzBuzz'] * len(numbers[15::15])
print(numbers[1:])
ask me stuff that shows you how i think and act, if you want coding exercises then send them in advance and leave me google poo poo because i'm going to do that at work anyway

Slow down there, Captain Confrontation. If they write something that passes the unit tests, that's good enough and we move on to other problems. If somebody provided that as a solution, I would view it as being pretty novel.

That being said, nobody has supplied a novel solution, and if they don't have a pre-canned solution ready basically immediately, it is likely that they will fail all subsequent problems even if they eventually brute force a solution to Fizzbuzz.

# ? Apr 1, 2017 21:53

Dex: May 26, 2006; Quintuple x!!!

Would not escrow again.

VERY MISLEADING!

i'm not trying to be confrontational, i just threw out something that fits on your list of failures but solves the problem :v:

i'm sitting on my couch with a beer, though. ask me to do that in an interview i'm nervous about and god knows what'll happen. show me a project with a few failing tests and ask me how i'd go about investigating would be a lot more comfortable, and would give you a better insight into how i work than a popular puzzle somebody can learn by rote or get blindsided by if they're totally junior and panicking.

# ? Apr 1, 2017 22:11

Hughlander: May 11, 2005

Powaqoatse posted:

Yeah, most of the time it seems like the intent of it comes from a good place. For instance, warn people that their personal info is being gathered, but the implementation is just so often completely destroyed by a combination of industry lobbyists and technically illiterate legislators.

Obviously every person has a slightly different idea of "too much", but imo "Right to be Forgotten" is totally fine. The intent of the law was pretty clear that it's like if you search for an otherwise private person, not a politician or anything, and there's a news article from the early 2000s about him putting his dick in an exhaust pipe or something, he has a right to get that specific result, for that specific query annulled. It doesn't count if it was a criminal or civil offense, you can't block those.

Google intentionally interprets the law in the broadest and annoyingest way possible; it often feels like pretty much any combination of given name + surname will result in a bunch of worthless results (no newspapers) + the disclaimer "some results may have been removen due to blah blah blah", which was specificially not what the whole thing was about.

P sure they're doing this on purpose to undermine the law. Obv I cant speak to the wording, but they're very much subverting the intent to bridge the idea of "right to be forgotten" = "annoying law" in people's minds.

e: whoa sorry for ranting

Considering the penalty is up to 4% of your yearly revenue maybe it's in their best interest to interpret it as broadly as possible regardless of the feeling of the end user.

# ? Apr 1, 2017 22:57

CPColin: Sep 9, 2003; Big ol' smile.

ExcessBLarg! posted:

the double-checked locking anti-pattern.

It's been a normal pattern since like Java 6, as long as you use volatile. An unfortunate consequence of the "write once, show up in Google forever" nature of blog posts.

# ? Apr 1, 2017 23:28

chutwig: May 28, 2001; BURLAP SATCHEL OF CRACKERJACKS

Dex posted:

i'm not trying to be confrontational, i just threw out something that fits on your list of failures but solves the problem

I was listing out things that people had done wrong. The function prototype is fizzbuzz(n), where n is the end of the range. A few people wrote if/elif/else stuff but didn't have any sort of loop construct or other way of processing a range of numbers, and then they'd stumble around for several minutes not seeing that that was why the unit tests kept failing.

I was not trying to suggest that I'm just looking for a for loop and some ifs and will fail people if they don't have those things - I'm not trying to be prescriptive about their solutions. I do note if they're doing something unidiomatic for the language they're working in, but everyone has to learn somewhere, and the positions I'm interviewing for are not pure dev positions (more like SRE-type stuff), so there's more leeway than if I were interviewing somebody for a senior dev position. That being said, if you can't solve Fizzbuzz, I might be a little scared of the kind of Ansible playbooks you'd write.

# ? Apr 1, 2017 23:32

ExcessBLarg!: Sep 1, 2001

CPColin posted:

It's been a normal pattern since like Java 6, as long as you use volatile. An unfortunate consequence of the "write once, show up in Google forever" nature of blog posts.

Sure, they fixed volatile semantics in the JVM so that one variant of the double-checked locking implementation actually works, but it's still not a great answer for most applications.

It's a performance optimization for the perceived slowness of the synchronized block, but I doubt that it actually has a measurable performance impact in most applications where it's implemented, at least not sufficiently so to warrant the code complexity, potential for mistake, or future/alternative JVM bugs. I'm fine with its use internally to implement higher-level abstractions like singletons, but I'm generally suspicious of it in applications code.

# ? Apr 2, 2017 00:38

Colonel J: Jan 3, 2008

int main()
{
printf("1 \n 2 \n Fizz \n 4 \n Buzz \n Fizz 7 \n 8 \n Fizz \n Buzz \n " // and so on.
}

When do I start?

# ? Apr 2, 2017 01:38

TooMuchAbstraction: Oct 14, 2012; I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.; Fun Shoe

Colonel J posted:

int main()
{
printf("1 \n 2 \n Fizz \n 4 \n Buzz \n Fizz 7 \n 8 \n Fizz \n Buzz \n " // and so on.
}

When do I start?

As soon as you finish writing out main(). :v:

# ? Apr 2, 2017 01:41

ExcessBLarg!: Sep 1, 2001

My favorite part of FizzBuzz is when people write a broken implementation then go off and write a lengthy blog post defending their mistakes and look for deeper meaning of it.

Guys, it's FizzBuzz, it doesn't have to be fancy it just has to do the job correctly.

# ? Apr 2, 2017 02:02

Fergus Mac Roich: Nov 5, 2008; Soiled Meat

ExcessBLarg! posted:

Guys, it's software, it doesn't have to be fancy it just has to do the job correctly.

# ? Apr 2, 2017 02:09

Kazinsal: Dec 13, 2011

The real question is, has anyone written FizzBuzz in Malbolge?

# ? Apr 2, 2017 02:10

vOv: Feb 8, 2014

I think you could use Fizzbuzz as a 'how well does this person know how to maintain code' test if you keep adding more requirements like 'bazz if it's divisible by 7, fizzbazz if it's divisible by 21, blarg if it's divisible by 35' and see how long it takes for them to stop using an if-else and come up with some kind of 'rule engine'.

# ? Apr 2, 2017 02:13

ExcessBLarg!: Sep 1, 2001

vOv posted:

I think you could use Fizzbuzz as a 'how well does this person know how to maintain code' test if you keep adding more requirements

Yeah, that works to some extent. Part of being an experienced programmer though is having enough intuition around the problem to anticipate where the requirements are likely to change (and thus, write that portion with sufficient flexibility that it doesn't require a major refactor every time a requirement comes in), but also to avoid over complicating the design.

I don't know how well that really scales down to FizzBuzz though. It's a toy problem with a trivial solution. Even if you have to completely start over on a slightly-different toy problem, there's no real consequence to it.

# ? Apr 2, 2017 02:23

Xerophyte: Mar 17, 2008; This space intentionally left blank

Kazinsal posted:

The real question is, has anyone written FizzBuzz in Malbolge?

Apparently so. Not mine, I'm not crazy enough for Malbolge. Also not sure if it's actually iterative; it's hard to tell with Malbolge.

E: Unbreaking tables...

Xerophyte fucked around with this message at 02:53 on Apr 2, 2017

# ? Apr 2, 2017 02:51

Dr. Stab: Sep 12, 2010; 👨🏻‍⚕️🩺🔪🙀😱🙀

ExcessBLarg! posted:

My favorite part of FizzBuzz is when people write a broken implementation then go off and write a lengthy blog post defending their mistakes and look for deeper meaning of it.

Guys, it's FizzBuzz, it doesn't have to be fancy it just has to do the job correctly.

Dang this is a bad blog post. Nobody cares about your scalable fizzbuzz solution. Like, you're right that software should be written in a certain way, but if the requirements change on a three line function, it's less work for me to delete those lines and write new ones than to figure out how to modify the old code.

Besides, this solution scales and performs terribly. Here's my much better solution that loads divisor/word pairs from a database and checks their divisibility via a compute shader.

# ? Apr 2, 2017 03:40

NihilCredo: Jun 6, 2011; iram omni possibili modo preme:
plus una illa te diffamabit, quam multæ virtutes commendabunt

Dr. Stab posted:

Dang this is a bad blog post. Nobody cares about your scalable fizzbuzz solution. Like, you're right that software should be written in a certain way, but if the requirements change on a three line function, it's less work for me to delete those lines and write new ones than to figure out how to modify the old code.

Besides, this solution scales and performs terribly. Here's my much better solution that loads divisor/word pairs from a database and checks their divisibility via a compute shader.

I think this stuff stems from a fairly reasonable misundertanding of what FizzBuzz is about.

Jeff Atwood popularized it ten years ago as "Write this trivial function, I want to see that you can code at all."

But if the interviewers aren't crystal clear about that, it's not unreasonable to suspect that they're actually asking "Write this trivial function, I want to see your coding style" and are looking to see if and how you approach commenting, maintainability, testability, etc.

Heck, I would bet there's more than a few companies out there who didn't get the meme and who do (mis)use FizzBuzz for that purpose.

# ? Apr 2, 2017 09:32

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# ? May 15, 2024 04:34

Doom Mathematic: Sep 2, 2008

ExcessBLarg! posted:

Yeah, that works to some extent. Part of being an experienced programmer though is having enough intuition around the problem to anticipate where the requirements are likely to change (and thus, write that portion with sufficient flexibility that it doesn't require a major refactor every time a requirement comes in), but also to avoid over complicating the design.

I don't know how well that really scales down to FizzBuzz though. It's a toy problem with a trivial solution. Even if you have to completely start over on a slightly-different toy problem, there's no real consequence to it.

Plus, because it's a toy problem, it's difficult to anticipate the possible toy additional requirements which might be introduced later on.

# ? Apr 2, 2017 11:00

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Coding Horrors: You can gather all your technical debt into one easy framework!

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