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bob dobbs is dead
Oct 8, 2017

I love peeps
Nap Ghost
love the opening quote on part 2


the article posted:

No one thinks about moving the starting or ending point of the bridge midway through construction.
-Justin Cave

I had to move a bridge.
-Anonymous

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SeXTcube
Jan 1, 2009

Quackles posted:

I actually saw an opinion article in the Journal of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery for those who don’t know— basically IEEE for programmers) suggesting that programming is a profession, like being a lawyer or a doctor, and needs a professional organization and accreditation process. The article made a convincing case.
Sounds great, but what’s IEEE?

bob dobbs is dead
Oct 8, 2017

I love peeps
Nap Ghost
another one for the "nobody pays attention to acm or ieee poo poo under 50" pile

SeXTcube
Jan 1, 2009

bob dobbs is dead posted:

another one for the "nobody pays attention to acm or ieee poo poo under 50" pile
It’s likely you know both if you know one. I was ribbing them for explaining what the initials meant with unexplained initials

Kuvo posted:

imo if software devs want to be called 'engineers' so badly they should have to study, apprentice, and certify like the rest of the engineering professions
I haven’t met a licensed PE in person in quite some time now, and I work on stuff that will kill people if it malfunctions!

Quackles
Aug 11, 2018

Pixels of Light.


sieve jorbs posted:

Sounds great, but what’s IEEE?

Not much, what’s IEEE with you? :eng101:

Jokes aside, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a US professional organization for engineers, particularly electrical engineers.


sieve jorbs posted:

It’s likely you know both if you know one. I was ribbing them for explaining what the initials meant with unexplained initials

e: it’s a fair cop, guv’nor

Pie Colony
Dec 8, 2006
I AM SUCH A FUCKUP THAT I CAN'T EVEN POST IN AN E/N THREAD I STARTED
guy who asks fizzbuzz in interviews:

quote:

i am so tired of having to explain basic poo poo like "how to set environment variables" to people

quote:

can universities or code boot camps or whoever the gently caress is training the people I'm getting please start showing people how to use a fuckin shell

quote:

i know “blame-free RCAs” or whatever are the thing now and i think mostly thats for the best but sometimes someone royally fucks up in a very stupid way and it is absolutely ok to point put that yes, Steve $ Carl really hosed up here and the way we’re going to prevent this problem from recurring is to fire steve & carl and do our best to not hire more people who will do stupid poo poo like that.

i can't believe this keeps happening!

Pie Colony
Dec 8, 2006
I AM SUCH A FUCKUP THAT I CAN'T EVEN POST IN AN E/N THREAD I STARTED
fizzbuzz is fundamentally worthless because it gives you ZERO signal if the interviewee gets it right

you don't know whether they can do the job or whether they are a first-year programmer

ask a question that actually matters, if someone would have failed fizzbuzz, they would fail that one too

bob dobbs is dead
Oct 8, 2017

I love peeps
Nap Ghost
can you give the harder question in 200 seconds tho

bob dobbs is dead
Oct 8, 2017

I love peeps
Nap Ghost
rotor is also from a time when ordinary computer users used the shell, too, lol

outhole surfer
Mar 18, 2003

i had a guy who had docker and python on their resume, so i asked them about deploying their application starting with how they handled dependencies, specifically while building a docker image. they replied "requirements.txt", so i asked ok, but how do you go from having a requirements.txt file to dependencies installed in the image... crickets... do you use pip with the requirements file? "oh, yeah, we use pip to install the dependencies". cool, how do you invoke pip to put those deps in the image, roughly speaking, what does that line look like in the Dockerfile?... crickets...

The Fool
Oct 16, 2003


I think just straight up asking the interviewee if the can do a fizzbuzz is as good of a signal as having them actually do it

Cybernetic Vermin
Apr 18, 2005

Pie Colony posted:

guy who asks fizzbuzz in interviews:





i can't believe this keeps happening!

the opposite, asking about fizzbuzz is about : 1) making zero assumptions about what the persons background is; 2) looking for any coding awareness; and, most importantly; 3) immediately rejecting clown idiots like you

Not a Children
Oct 9, 2012

Don't need a holster if you never stop shooting.

Quackles posted:

I actually saw an opinion article in the Journal of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery for those who don’t know— basically IEEE for programmers) suggesting that programming is a profession, like being a lawyer or a doctor, and needs a professional organization and accreditation process. The article made a convincing case.

Kuvo posted:

imo if software devs want to be called 'engineers' so badly they should have to study, apprentice, and certify like the rest of the engineering professions

The professional organization and accreditation process serves two purposes: Verification of a baseline level of competence, and career protectionism. The latter is obviated by the high salaries already paid to devs, so on the labor side you probably won't find much support until A) salaries slip to the level of the rest of the proles, B) bad programmers are in charge of a critical mass of development and/or C) the profession's reputation goes from "you're a programmer huh, you must be smart" to "you're a programmer huh, you must be very good at lying for money"

As a side note I've been using one of the previously mentioned interview questions to try to teach myself python by building Minesweeper in console, thank you for the project inspiration

Pie Colony
Dec 8, 2006
I AM SUCH A FUCKUP THAT I CAN'T EVEN POST IN AN E/N THREAD I STARTED

bob dobbs is dead posted:

can you give the harder question in 200 seconds tho

you would have 200 more seconds for the good (doesn’t have to be hard) question is my point. the only way asking fizzbuzz is more efficient is if you walk out your candidates immediately after failing fizzbuzz, which i wouldn’t recommend for basic decency reasons

The Fool posted:

I think just straight up asking the interviewee if the can do a fizzbuzz is as good of a signal as having them actually do it

this i believe

Cybernetic Vermin posted:

the opposite, asking about fizzbuzz is about : 1) making zero assumptions about what the persons background is; 2) looking for any coding awareness; and, most importantly; 3) immediately rejecting clown idiots like you

you are allowed to assume they know the basics of coding if they make it to your coding interview. it is literally not your job to worry about that

Pie Colony
Dec 8, 2006
I AM SUCH A FUCKUP THAT I CAN'T EVEN POST IN AN E/N THREAD I STARTED
in other interviewing news i noped out of the OpenAI job application today when they asked me to “give an example or provide evidence of my exceptional ability”

Truman Peyote
Oct 11, 2006



Pie Colony posted:

you are allowed to assume they know the basics of coding if they make it to your coding interview. it is literally not your job to worry about that

as has been pointed out what feels like dozens of times, it is absolutely not safe to assume this. whether it's your job doesn't really matter.

Cybernetic Vermin
Apr 18, 2005

Pie Colony posted:

you are allowed to assume they know the basics of coding if they make it to your coding interview. it is literally not your job to worry about that

ok, so narrow it down to; 1) ask a dumb question to make idiots like you blow up about it so i can cull you. where normal people will appreciate a softball and have a conversation.

Pie Colony
Dec 8, 2006
I AM SUCH A FUCKUP THAT I CAN'T EVEN POST IN AN E/N THREAD I STARTED
you don’t have to take this so personally lol. you are not the fizzbuzz

ultrafilter
Aug 23, 2007

It's okay if you have any questions.


interviewing: you are not the fizzbuzz

Cybernetic Vermin
Apr 18, 2005

Pie Colony posted:

you don’t have to take this so personally lol. you are not the fizzbuzz

i am not, you're the rear end in a top hat is the thing

The Fool
Oct 16, 2003


ultrafilter posted:

interviewing: you are not the fizzbuzz

Pie Colony
Dec 8, 2006
I AM SUCH A FUCKUP THAT I CAN'T EVEN POST IN AN E/N THREAD I STARTED

Cybernetic Vermin posted:

i am not, you're the rear end in a top hat is the thing

so far you’ve called me an idiot, abnormal, and an rear end in a top hat for saying fizzbuzz is a low signal question

bob dobbs is dead
Oct 8, 2017

I love peeps
Nap Ghost
you did aggro on rotor first

Quackles
Aug 11, 2018

Pixels of Light.


ultrafilter posted:

interviewing: you are not the fizzbuzz

bob dobbs is dead
Oct 8, 2017

I love peeps
Nap Ghost

ultrafilter posted:

interviewing: you are not the fizzbuzz

kitten emergency
Jan 13, 2008

get meow this wack-ass crystal prison
so can you tell me about a time you disagreed with someone, and how you navigated the disagreement

Chopstick Dystopia
Jun 16, 2010


lowest high and highest low loser of: WEED WEE
k
I start off with something that's a type of string comparison within an array (anagrams, substrings, or set comparison stuff depending). I don't think it's harder than fizzbuzz for a working programmer but it does take longer. The benefit is that there's something to talk about in terms of optimisation or changes for variations on the problem.

This is the only solution based coding question I ask. If you can do this I assume you can code. The signal I get is that some people do it in sub 15 minutes and some take closer to 40-50, sometimes that's because of nerves. Some people get optimisations out of the gate, others talk well about potential optimisations, people describe their problem solving approach very differently but the majority of people take only a couple of approaches to the logic of the problem.

The other questions are more open ended "how would you design x" never something as big as "design twitter" or whatever because I don't interview enterprise architects, more along the lines of a drone or a survey app or a sports analytics email.

I've been very happy with the mids and seniors I've hired from this process.

To be perfectly frank though it's too much for juniors and I am really not sure how to hire juniors well behind selecting for attitude and general intelligence. I haven't been in a position to hire juniors very often though.

Cybernetic Vermin
Apr 18, 2005

Pie Colony posted:

so far you’ve called me an idiot, abnormal, and an rear end in a top hat for saying fizzbuzz is a low signal question

i did not, i called you an idiot for making this post, which is the dumbest most incoherent poo poo i've seen in an age:

Pie Colony posted:

guy who asks fizzbuzz in interviews:

quote:

i am so tired of having to explain basic poo poo like "how to set environment variables" to people

quote:

can universities or code boot camps or whoever the gently caress is training the people I'm getting please start showing people how to use a fuckin shell

quote:

i know “blame-free RCAs” or whatever are the thing now and i think mostly thats for the best but sometimes someone royally fucks up in a very stupid way and it is absolutely ok to point put that yes, Steve $ Carl really hosed up here and the way we’re going to prevent this problem from recurring is to fire steve & carl and do our best to not hire more people who will do stupid poo poo like that.

i can't believe this keeps happening!

decide if i can "assume they know how to program" or i'm being some turbonerd for asking them to do a small bit of entirely generic coding as an initial conversation topic

polyester concept
Mar 29, 2017

so if someone fails the fizzbuzz or otherwise makes it very clear they lied on their resume do you just say “welp thanks for your time bye” and abruptly end the interview, or do you go through the motions for a bit longer, feigning interest, then wrap it up

Mr. Crow
May 22, 2008

Snap City mayor for life

Pie Colony posted:

you would have 200 more seconds for the good (doesn’t have to be hard) question is my point. the only way asking fizzbuzz is more efficient is if you walk out your candidates immediately after failing fizzbuzz, which i wouldn’t recommend for basic decency reasons

Yes?

Look if you lied and/or misled your way to a software panel where you cant answer FizzBuzz why should I give a poo poo, you're an idiot wasting everybodies time. I don't outright standup and leave but I 100% stop my questioning and checkout if I have to handhold someone through a FizzBuzz, "Well I guess that's about all the questions I had" and punt to a peer or start small talk till the hours up.

bob dobbs is dead
Oct 8, 2017

I love peeps
Nap Ghost
i still wrapped it up and just rejected with hard prejudice in the meeting afterwards the time i got called a chink by my interviewee so lol

Mr. Crow
May 22, 2008

Snap City mayor for life

bob dobbs is dead posted:

i still wrapped it up and just rejected with hard prejudice in the meeting afterwards the time i got called a chink by my interviewee so lol

Jesus christ, ya that's 100% justified

Chopstick Dystopia
Jun 16, 2010


lowest high and highest low loser of: WEED WEE
k

bob dobbs is dead posted:

i still wrapped it up and just rejected with hard prejudice in the meeting afterwards the time i got called a chink by my interviewee so lol

yeah sounds reasonable tbh!

bob dobbs is dead
Oct 8, 2017

I love peeps
Nap Ghost
meaning, always wrap it up. physical violence get them out i guess tho lol

PokeJoe
Aug 24, 2004

hail cgatan


One time I was whiteboarding some find the island in a 2d array kind of thing. I finished it in like 1/3 of our alloted time and the interviewer stepped out to take a phone call from his mechanic about his motorcycle. When he came back we just talked about motorcycles the rest of the time. I got the job

PokeJoe
Aug 24, 2004

hail cgatan


I don't care for whiteboarding but it is what it is. You can practice it but it sucks rear end to do so. Those toy problems aren't really that good of a gauge of how you make big software but you can only ask so much in an hour or w/e

rotor
Jun 11, 2001

classic case of pineapple derangement syndrome

Quackles posted:

I actually saw an opinion article in the Journal of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery for those who don’t know— basically IEEE for programmers) suggesting that programming is a profession, like being a lawyer or a doctor, and needs a professional organization and accreditation process. The article made a convincing case.

yes, i strongly agree with this or a union or fuckin something

PokeJoe
Aug 24, 2004

hail cgatan


it would make software a lot better and we would get paid more, on the other hand I don't like jumping through hoops 🤔

rotor
Jun 11, 2001

classic case of pineapple derangement syndrome

Pie Colony posted:

guy who asks fizzbuzz in interviews:





i can't believe this keeps happening!

the dudes are not good, my dude

the partial explanation is that my org is QA, and QA typically does not attract the best of the best.

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rotor
Jun 11, 2001

classic case of pineapple derangement syndrome

Pie Colony posted:

fizzbuzz is fundamentally worthless because it gives you ZERO signal if the interviewee gets it right

you don't know whether they can do the job or whether they are a first-year programmer

ask a question that actually matters, if someone would have failed fizzbuzz, they would fail that one too

I use fizzbuzz to rapidly winnow through candidates. You are correct inasmuch as you get zero signal if the interviewee gets it right, but as I mentioned before, it rapidly tells you who you can safely pass on. Its the first gate, not the only gate.

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