Newbie Programming Interviews/Get a Job Megathread: Fake it 'til you make it

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Newbie Programming Interviews/Get a Job Megathread: Fake it 'til you make it

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Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Computer science is not engineering.

# ¿ Jan 13, 2011 20:50

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 00:47

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

having certs means that you're a bad developer because a good developer wouldn't need to get them

# ¿ Jun 15, 2011 23:06

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Ithaqua posted:

I hope you're being sarcastic, because that's bullshit and it's a bullshit attitude. I've known fantastic developers with and without certs.

Not entirely serious but I've certainly met people who believe exactly that. Personally I don't really see certs as a positive but unless you're applying to a 2-man startup or something having some cruft that impresses HR and managers but not programmers is pretty standard.

# ¿ Jun 16, 2011 18:02

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

shrughes posted:

Or they just don't feel like working.

"gets bored and quits when they have enough money to live for a while" generally isn't considered a positive

# ¿ Aug 11, 2011 19:20

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Anything that you don't plan to delete in the near future should be at least sparsely commented, even if you never intend for anyone else to see it. Just because you understand all the details of the code now doesn't mean you will in six months.

# ¿ Aug 17, 2011 00:38

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

shrughes posted:

The rectangle union area problem is completely insane, only good for seeing how awesome an extremely awesome candidate can get, and the first half of the randomly-selecting-key-from-btree question attacks the same data structures abilities, without being completely insane, so I don't use it the union area problem anymore.

Am I missing something about the rectangle question? It seems fairly trivial if you're willing to accept an O(n^2) solution - just sum the areas and subtract the areas of the intersections.

# ¿ Sep 13, 2011 15:39

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

That still sounds pretty awful, but if you really can't find anything better it's probably better than sitting around unemployed.

# ¿ Sep 27, 2011 17:45

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

brainwrinkle posted:

They started by asking why I was interested in the position I had indicated on the interest form

Note that "I'm not, HR told me I would be interviewing for a completely different position but since I flew out here I figured I might as well go through the interviews anyway" is not the correct answer to this question.

Or maybe it is, as the Microsoft interview process did a pretty good job of convincing me that I'd never want to work there.

# ¿ Oct 14, 2011 05:42

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

I just never bothered signing the non-compete my current job asked me to sign and eventually HR stopped bothering me.

# ¿ Nov 5, 2011 00:12

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

There are certainly plenty of companies that don't care about GPA unless you have zero internships and zero projects to show them, but if someone told me they actively penalized high GPAs I'd assume that they were simply horribly insecure about their own grades long past when any normal person would continue to care.

# ¿ Nov 9, 2011 03:01

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

That usually means it's an administrative assistant position which involves a lot of data entry as opposed to just endlessly entering handwritten forms into computers. It has nothing to do with sysadmin work.

# ¿ Nov 28, 2011 05:52

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

If it's just a one month project then grabbing the first person who doesn't seem completely unqualified sounds perfectly normal.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2011 17:28

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Epic is an argument in favor of companies which require degrees are companies you don't want to work for.

# ¿ Jan 4, 2012 21:42

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

shrike82 posted:

I've been helping my team with resume vetting.

Setting aside how 3/4 of applicants are mainland Chinese/Indians (tough for them to stand out), it amazes me how people with great looking resumes bomb our IQ test. This is pre-contact with anyone on our team; we have them take an online 3rd party IQ test.

An inexplicable number of people coming from top CS/engineering schools/with a good work pedigree getting sub-50 percentile for the test. W T F.

have you ever considered that perhaps an IQ test is not a software development test and there may not even be much of a correlation between the two?

# ¿ Jan 20, 2012 06:06

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Until just now I didn't realize that I have no idea how to go about actually calculating a square root, since no math class ever covered it and I've never needed it in a language where the standard library didn't have a sufficient implementation.

I guess just binary searching for the root is always an option :v:

# ¿ Mar 16, 2012 04:37

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

C# strings are immutable, so it's impossible to implement an in-place reverse or to reverse a string without the two copies that method does (one for ToArray, one in the string constructor) (although one or both could get optimized out).

# ¿ Jun 8, 2012 17:30

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

hieronymus posted:

Wouldn't it be better philosophically (for the purpose of the question) to use a StringBuilder then?

Still requires two copies and may require more heap allocations in total.

# ¿ Jun 11, 2012 06:15

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

You've probably gone too far when the tests for your testing helper functions are longer than your application.

# ¿ Jun 20, 2012 00:03

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

The only job interview I've had where HR was involved in the actual interview process was for a job that required security clearance and the HR person was there to make sure I could get it and understood the implications of it.

# ¿ Jun 21, 2012 20:42

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

baquerd posted:

Counterpoint - if you've screwed something up badly, unpaid overtime can be warranted.

Unless you're being paid a salary appropriate for someone who is perfect and never makes mistakes of any kind, cleaning up after your mistakes is a normal part of every job.

# ¿ Jun 26, 2012 21:43

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

how!! posted:

The problem I have with this code is that its not commented, not tested, not refactored to be readable, etc. What the hell is 'c' supposed to be? what is 'r'? Yeah it runs and gives output, but no one is able to follow that code and adapt it except for you.

well he's looping over the rows and columns of a board...

how!! posted:

For instance, what if the format of the input changed? Instead through stdin, it comes in through an xml file? You'd have to completely re-write your program.

and after a dozen rewrites from scratch he'd still have spent less time on it

# ¿ Jul 9, 2012 19:32

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

how!! posted:

That code took me three days to create. It represents exactly how I write code for production. Everything I write for my personal projects and for stuff at work, I strive for it to look like that. I never ever ever ever check in code that looks like tef's code. For that reason, I always feel like it's unfair when I'm given a programming challenge where I'm forced to turn in code that I'm not able to polish up the way I like. For the same reason, I hate it when my co-workers check in code thats not polished up either. Reddit did it right because they let me take as much time as I wanted. I feel proud of the code I wrote and feel confident in emailing it to them. Do you think I'm a terrible programmer because it took me three days to write that? I guess I could have gotten it done in one hour, but it would have been awful code and I would have been ashamed of myself for sending them a solution that was not as good as I am capable of creating.

so basically you spent an hour solving the problem and then 23 hours making future maintenance less time consuming

in this context that may be the right thing to do, but only because they don't actually know how long you spent on it so it doesn't automatically reveal that you are terrible at time management

how!! posted:

By the way, does anyone have a job where they're tasked with solving problems with only one hour to do it in? Since I started programming about 5 years ago, I've never had such a short amount of time to get something done. Most deadlines I deal with are on the scale of days, not minutes. Does it make me a bad programmer if I get anxious when told I need to write something complex and I only have an extremely short amount of time to complete it?

have you ever worked anywhere other than a large and inefficient non-software company?

# ¿ Jul 9, 2012 23:36

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

I'd just write Summers 2008-2011. If you're lucky someone only spending five seconds looking at your resume will interpret it as four years of experience.

Don't list anything on your resume that you would have trouble answering reasonable questions about.

# ¿ Jul 29, 2012 00:38

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Don Mega posted:

That looks like something that could be re-created in 5 minutes using msword or any office program and you won't have to learn how to use LaTeX. So I fail to see the advantage, unless you plan on using LaTeX in the future (which does have its uses).

You could make something very similar but far uglier in about five minutes in Word, and slightly uglier in about 5 hours.

# ¿ Aug 17, 2012 20:45

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Doghouse posted:

I am a 27 year old English major, with only two programming classes under my belt, who wants to go to grad school in order to hopefully pursue a career in programming. I really liked the programming classes I took, and the degree I have now is barely worth the paper it's printed on, so I figured that one of the computer science master's programs designed for - or at least accommodating of - people with non-CS degrees would be the way to go.

Is this the right way to approach this? I know, as it says in the OP, that CS is not programming. Should I look for a different, more programming-focused degree? Basically, I just want to find out what the most straightforward way to pursue a computer programming career is at this point.

Don't get a Master's if the main thing you want out of it is the programming-related degree, as it's entirely possible to get a junior position without a formal education or much experience, and with most companies the long term career impact is pretty minimal. If you actually find classes significantly helpful then it's not at all a terrible idea, though; certainly better than any of your other formal education options as long as you're willing to work hard and get as much as possible out of it.

# ¿ Aug 28, 2012 23:43

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Ithaqua posted:

ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE WARNING: Every developer I've ever met who has a masters degree has been a lovely coder but thought they were hot poo poo because of the extra degree.

I've known a few exceptions, but they all either got their degree either by dropping out of a phd program or by tacking on an extra semester or two to their undergrad, rather than specifically going to school for a masters degree.

# ¿ Aug 30, 2012 15:45

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

My last job I just outright forgot to sign any of the contracts they wanted me to sign and no one ever bothered me about it in the 18 months I was there.

# ¿ Sep 25, 2012 17:19

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

shrughes posted:

VMWare's sounds dumb, being expected to know the dictionary-definition of an algorithm is dumb. But then, VMWare is a reputedly bad place to work so I'm not surprised.

My one experience with VMWare was an information session at my school where they spent two hours talking about how awesome they are to work for and how we should all apply for jobs there, and then at the very end mentioned that they had just started a hiring freeze and wouldn't be looking at any applications for at least 6 months.

I decided to scratch VMWare off the list of companies I would like to work at.

# ¿ Sep 27, 2012 06:33

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Unless you're getting paid upfront or daily, if you're doing work for money you should always have a contract.

# ¿ Oct 4, 2012 21:15

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Safe and Secure! posted:

Do letters of recommendation actually mean anything to employers? I've never heard of them being used anywhere outside of school. What would I even do with one?

They can be used as references, but I've never actually had an employer ask for my references...

# ¿ Oct 21, 2012 03:24

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

FamDav posted:

The Knuth quote isn't really about algorithmic efficiency, which is what you're focusing on when you do these Euler problems.

Well, it can be. I know I've wasted a stupid amount of time coming up with a nice linear-time algorithm to solve a problem, only to realize that the O(n^3) naive solution was already way faster than it needed to be.

# ¿ Dec 10, 2012 22:13

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Ithaqua posted:

No, you rewrite the database. Duh.

Of course, you need to know B-trees for that, so gently caress it. Let's just use flat files.

But that'd require actually writing code, and all he does is Google for already existing code that does what he needs. Luckily there's a few more database servers to try before the company runs out of money.

# ¿ Dec 14, 2012 02:57

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

What's a phone line?

# ¿ Jan 5, 2013 01:32

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Nagle's algorithm is probably the only thing related to low-level networking that i could explain well, since for a while disabling it was considered an awesome lag-reducing trick in WoW.

# ¿ Jan 26, 2013 16:34

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Classes taken is mostly just a decent way to pad out a resume to comfortably fill a page without being blatant padding.

# ¿ Feb 17, 2013 22:59

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

shrughes posted:

separate C and C++ instead of writing them as C/C++

This is a really minor and dumb thing, but potentially pretty important. People who actually know both C and C++ tend to view "C/C++" along the same lines as "Java/Javascript"

# ¿ Feb 19, 2013 15:36

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Aerotek pays also pays weekly, which often means that they pay you a good month before they get paid.

Worry about whether you're getting a reasonable wage, not whether or not the company you're working for is getting ripped off.

Steve French posted:

I haven't seen many if any resumes that lump together C and Objective C like that, even though that's arguably less unreasonable because (afaik) Objective C is an actual superset of C, and C++ isn't.

Normal Objective-C is a lot less like C than normal C++ is like C, but since the Smalltalk portion of the language is so badly integrated with the C part I find myself having to write regular C in Obj-C projects fairly often, while that basically never happens in C++ projects.

# ¿ Feb 20, 2013 02:17

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

My experience with automated tests created by non-developers is that they're brittle, take forever to run, and don't even really manage to test much. There's plenty of things where writing good tests is at least as hard as making the thing.

# ¿ Feb 23, 2013 22:23

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Suspicious Dish posted:

Sure, but instead of adding an XML layer of configuration or whatever that describes some worthless code garbage, I create some code that creates all the objects and passes them around. I call it the "Driver".

And I would never call this "dependency injection".

Well I guess you're allowed to not use the name for a thing, but it doesn't change the fact that your "Driver" is implementing DI.

# ¿ Mar 2, 2013 04:07

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 00:47

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Xik posted:

They were probably doing it in the interests of self-improvement and expected you to be honest with them so it could help them in the future at other interviews. I'm sure that making you feel "uncomfortable" wasn't high on their priority list.

Giving honest feedback on a bad interview is a great way to walk into a lawsuit.

# ¿ Mar 7, 2013 02:42

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Newbie Programming Interviews/Get a Job Megathread: Fake it 'til you make it

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