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Getting a job in software development: A Reddit discussion round-up

159 points by nassosdim 15y ago

dpritchett 15y ago
Most of the questions and answers seem aimed at college seniors planning for Google-style Big O cross examination. For experienced developers it's a bit simpler: build a portfolio, craft a cashflow-oriented elevator pitch, build a network, and plan ahead for a bit of buzzword compliance in your desired niche as needed.
- throwaway122011 15y ago
  when you say portfolio do you mean having a github account or a blog or a live website running? what kinds of projects should I have?
  - dpritchett 15y ago
    The goal is to regularly provide proof to both your professional network and to selected potential employers that you are highly competent and will be a decided advantage to their organization. Some people don't know what github is and won't care, others really like live sites even if they're modest, and still others really just want to see resume bullet points about dollars saved / created. Eventually you can put all of that together, but naturally it'll help when your prospective hiring manager has the same ideals you're demonstrating with your portfolio. Portfolios are secondary to name recognition and social proof. Let me reemphasize that sharing your goodwill, your skills, and your successes with your professional network is probably more valuable than anything else you can do - develop a local or national reputation as a top gun and work will come to you as long as you keep your connections warm.
    - ftwinnovations 15y ago
      As a small company owner I want to completely endorse this comment. These "proofs" of a developers skills and technical interest are the hard requirements I have before conducting any interview. Naturally the "social proof" is also important but less common and more difficult to attain. Even tiny personal projects demonstrating ones interest in keeping up with newer hot technologies like node, redis, backbone, etc mean a lot. tl;dr Having a set of quality personal projects (github, live, whatever) is absolutely critical.
tycho77 15y ago
This seems... really simple. Basic algorithms, data structures, and theory that I learned in second-year comp sci. Knowledge on these subjects is easy to pick up, taking you a few days of study at the most. Knowing this stuff doesn't mean you can program for shit (see: academic coding horror). Best to build a portfolio as dpritchett said, with a few "lessons I learned from experience when working on this project" anecdotes ready to go. That's just personal experience though, and I competed in the ICPC during my university career so I never worry about the problem solving questions.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- mahyarm 15y ago
  Tech firms seem to love these kinds of questions all the time. Almost every interview I've had has had them.
  - rhizome 15y ago
    It's how they get around labor laws.
    - NegativeK 15y ago
      I don't understand; can you elaborate on that?
      - jsight 15y ago
        My guess is that he subscribes to the theory that companies use questions that would normally be taught in college to filter out older applicants. Ie, some assume that time since college isa major factor in people knowing these answers. Personally, I find it terribly unlikely that any such filtering is intentional on any level.
        rhizome 15y ago
akg 15y ago
If you want a job in software development - do software development. There is no substitute for coding. I interviewed with Google a little while ago and the first thing they asked me was "How many hours do you code a day?". That set the tone for the rest of the interview. CLRS has some very useful information and by all means, every developer should know it, but using that theory in practice is what makes the knowledge stick. You find out more idiosyncrasies and sticking points when you actually build something. If you don't know where to start, fork a project from github and contribute to it.
- raganwald 15y ago
  Amen. If you want a job playing basketball, you ought to watch a lot of video of great players. You ought to read a lot of books about training, techniques, and strategy. You ought to hang out with other basketball players and exchange tips. You ought to cross-train by lifting weights and running. But all of that is secondary to playing a lot of basketball.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
itmag 15y ago
Comments here seem to be about the importance of demonstrating competence. While this is of course important, I feel that it's equally important to make sure you actually want to work in an organization. This means fitting in, tolerating corp BS/insanity well, being expected to tone down the cowboy ethos, and appearing productive at all times. In other words, being the oft-mentioned "team player".
- xer0 15y ago
  Be a solution, not a problem.
- rhizome 15y ago
  Different sports have different levels of cohesion in their teams. Rugby vs. American Football, for instance.
pilgrim689 15y ago
I love this comment: " At the end of a whiteboarding interview whenever the interviewer asks "do you have any questions for me?" I'm always tempted to hand them the marker and say "Imagine you are given a binary tree with elements containing linked lists ..." " Have any of you guys ever done this? How did it play out?
- mahyarm 15y ago
  It depends if the interviewer has a sense of humor. Some people are so stuck up about that kind of thing although.
steve8918 15y ago
I recently interviewed a master's student for a job at our company. I asked him a very traditional question, and then was going to follow up on it with increasingly more difficult questions to see how deep his knowledge was. I wasn't out to "get" him at all, I hate interviewers that ask super-hard questions, I'm more interested in having a good conversation with the person to try to get a feel for what they really know, not just what they've memorized. My question was easy: how would you iterate through a binary search tree. He immediately asked me "should I do it recursively, or iteratively? Can I use a stack if I do it iteratively?" It was obvious he had studied for this question, and he banged out a solution in 2 mins. Iterating through a binary tree is a bit tricky if you've never done it before, and I wasn't even going to ask him this, but since he brought it up, I knew he knew the answer. The fact he could come to an answer immediately only indicated to me that he had memorized the answer and was essentially gaming the system. So I asked him an even simpler question: Given a binary search tree, write code to find a particular value. If you can't find the value, then return me the next smallest value. For example, if the tree contains 1, 2, 3, and 5, and I ask for 4, then return 3. He couldn't answer this, even though it's easier than the previous question. He had no clue how to solve it, and even worse, he couldn't recognize the simple bugs in the code, and the fact that he was dereferencing NULL pointers, etc. So I passed on him. Personally, I think the best way to advertise for a job is to have a portfolio of code, as dpritchett says. I'm tired of testing people on whiteboards, and seeing if they can memorize solutions to every single program on glassdoor.com. I'd rather just have them point to a github repository, so that I can see their coding style, and see if they can produce quality code. Having an indepth conversation about their project, and quizzing them on their code, to me, is a more real-world determination of whether or not they're a good programmer. Then, the onsite interview would be limited to determining if their personality is a good fit for the team, instead of trying to come up with 10 different variations on "iterate through a binary tree".
- itmag 15y ago
  So I asked him an even simpler question: Given a binary search tree, write code to find a particular value. If you can't find the value, then return me the next smallest value. For example, if the tree contains 1, 2, 3, and 5, and I ask for 4, then return 3. Out of curiosity, what is the solution? I would imagine something like keeping a variable of the highest found value under 4 and if you don't find 4 then you use this variable.
known 15y ago
interview != quiz
djb_hackernews 15y ago
Be careful, some of those reddit threads have terrible information/ advice in them voted to the top. For instance http://www.reddit.com/r/compsci/comments/g9ugs/just_bombed_an_interview_how_do_i_do_better_next/ http://www.reddit.com/r/compsci/comments/g9ugs/just_bombed_a...
kondro 15y ago
I'm surprised to see information missing on source control, automated testing and automated deployment. You'd be surprised how many blank stares you get back from candidates when you ask questions about the very fundamentals of writing maintainable code in a team.

159 points by nassosdim 15y ago

Most of the questions and answers seem aimed at college seniors planning for Google-style Big O cross examination. For experienced developers it's a bit simpler: build a portfolio, craft a cashflow-oriented elevator pitch, build a network, and plan ahead for a bit of buzzword compliance in your desired niche as needed.

throwaway122011 15y ago
when you say portfolio do you mean having a github account or a blog or a live website running? what kinds of projects should I have?
- dpritchett 15y ago
  The goal is to regularly provide proof to both your professional network and to selected potential employers that you are highly competent and will be a decided advantage to their organization. Some people don't know what github is and won't care, others really like live sites even if they're modest, and still others really just want to see resume bullet points about dollars saved / created. Eventually you can put all of that together, but naturally it'll help when your prospective hiring manager has the same ideals you're demonstrating with your portfolio. Portfolios are secondary to name recognition and social proof. Let me reemphasize that sharing your goodwill, your skills, and your successes with your professional network is probably more valuable than anything else you can do - develop a local or national reputation as a top gun and work will come to you as long as you keep your connections warm.
  - ftwinnovations 15y ago
    As a small company owner I want to completely endorse this comment. These "proofs" of a developers skills and technical interest are the hard requirements I have before conducting any interview. Naturally the "social proof" is also important but less common and more difficult to attain. Even tiny personal projects demonstrating ones interest in keeping up with newer hot technologies like node, redis, backbone, etc mean a lot. tl;dr Having a set of quality personal projects (github, live, whatever) is absolutely critical.

tycho77 15y ago

This seems... really simple. Basic algorithms, data structures, and theory that I learned in second-year comp sci. Knowledge on these subjects is easy to pick up, taking you a few days of study at the most. Knowing this stuff doesn't mean you can program for shit (see: academic coding horror). Best to build a portfolio as dpritchett said, with a few "lessons I learned from experience when working on this project" anecdotes ready to go. That's just personal experience though, and I competed in the ICPC during my university career so I never worry about the problem solving questions.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
mahyarm 15y ago
Tech firms seem to love these kinds of questions all the time. Almost every interview I've had has had them.
- rhizome 15y ago
  It's how they get around labor laws.
  - NegativeK 15y ago
    I don't understand; can you elaborate on that?
    - jsight 15y ago
      My guess is that he subscribes to the theory that companies use questions that would normally be taught in college to filter out older applicants. Ie, some assume that time since college isa major factor in people knowing these answers. Personally, I find it terribly unlikely that any such filtering is intentional on any level.
      - rhizome 15y ago

akg 15y ago

If you want a job in software development - do software development. There is no substitute for coding. I interviewed with Google a little while ago and the first thing they asked me was "How many hours do you code a day?". That set the tone for the rest of the interview. CLRS has some very useful information and by all means, every developer should know it, but using that theory in practice is what makes the knowledge stick. You find out more idiosyncrasies and sticking points when you actually build something. If you don't know where to start, fork a project from github and contribute to it.

raganwald 15y ago
Amen. If you want a job playing basketball, you ought to watch a lot of video of great players. You ought to read a lot of books about training, techniques, and strategy. You ought to hang out with other basketball players and exchange tips. You ought to cross-train by lifting weights and running. But all of that is secondary to playing a lot of basketball.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

itmag 15y ago

Comments here seem to be about the importance of demonstrating competence. While this is of course important, I feel that it's equally important to make sure you actually want to work in an organization. This means fitting in, tolerating corp BS/insanity well, being expected to tone down the cowboy ethos, and appearing productive at all times. In other words, being the oft-mentioned "team player".

xer0 15y ago
Be a solution, not a problem.
rhizome 15y ago
Different sports have different levels of cohesion in their teams. Rugby vs. American Football, for instance.

pilgrim689 15y ago

I love this comment: " At the end of a whiteboarding interview whenever the interviewer asks "do you have any questions for me?" I'm always tempted to hand them the marker and say "Imagine you are given a binary tree with elements containing linked lists ..." " Have any of you guys ever done this? How did it play out?

mahyarm 15y ago
It depends if the interviewer has a sense of humor. Some people are so stuck up about that kind of thing although.

steve8918 15y ago

I recently interviewed a master's student for a job at our company. I asked him a very traditional question, and then was going to follow up on it with increasingly more difficult questions to see how deep his knowledge was. I wasn't out to "get" him at all, I hate interviewers that ask super-hard questions, I'm more interested in having a good conversation with the person to try to get a feel for what they really know, not just what they've memorized. My question was easy: how would you iterate through a binary search tree. He immediately asked me "should I do it recursively, or iteratively? Can I use a stack if I do it iteratively?" It was obvious he had studied for this question, and he banged out a solution in 2 mins. Iterating through a binary tree is a bit tricky if you've never done it before, and I wasn't even going to ask him this, but since he brought it up, I knew he knew the answer. The fact he could come to an answer immediately only indicated to me that he had memorized the answer and was essentially gaming the system. So I asked him an even simpler question: Given a binary search tree, write code to find a particular value. If you can't find the value, then return me the next smallest value. For example, if the tree contains 1, 2, 3, and 5, and I ask for 4, then return 3. He couldn't answer this, even though it's easier than the previous question. He had no clue how to solve it, and even worse, he couldn't recognize the simple bugs in the code, and the fact that he was dereferencing NULL pointers, etc. So I passed on him. Personally, I think the best way to advertise for a job is to have a portfolio of code, as dpritchett says. I'm tired of testing people on whiteboards, and seeing if they can memorize solutions to every single program on glassdoor.com. I'd rather just have them point to a github repository, so that I can see their coding style, and see if they can produce quality code. Having an indepth conversation about their project, and quizzing them on their code, to me, is a more real-world determination of whether or not they're a good programmer. Then, the onsite interview would be limited to determining if their personality is a good fit for the team, instead of trying to come up with 10 different variations on "iterate through a binary tree".

itmag 15y ago
So I asked him an even simpler question: Given a binary search tree, write code to find a particular value. If you can't find the value, then return me the next smallest value. For example, if the tree contains 1, 2, 3, and 5, and I ask for 4, then return 3. Out of curiosity, what is the solution? I would imagine something like keeping a variable of the highest found value under 4 and if you don't find 4 then you use this variable.

known 15y ago

interview != quiz

djb_hackernews 15y ago

Be careful, some of those reddit threads have terrible information/ advice in them voted to the top. For instance http://www.reddit.com/r/compsci/comments/g9ugs/just_bombed_an_interview_how_do_i_do_better_next/ http://www.reddit.com/r/compsci/comments/g9ugs/just_bombed_a...

kondro 15y ago

I'm surprised to see information missing on source control, automated testing and automated deployment. You'd be surprised how many blank stares you get back from candidates when you ask questions about the very fundamentals of writing maintainable code in a team.