7 ms·

I interviewed a guy the other day. CS degree. "I have a proven track record of building and leading amazing engineering teams." "Okay. What's the difference

by ethbr0 3y ago

I interviewed a guy the other day. CS degree. "I have a proven track record of building and leading amazing engineering teams." "Okay. What's the difference between a character and a string?" *crickets* We all have our specialities, but jesus ¢@&#ing christ: if you're interviewing for an engineering role, of any sort, you should be able to answer basic questions.

yieldcrv 3y ago
The bytes it takes up and how it can be cast? What answer would you be looking for
- F-W-M 3y ago
  "Strings are sequences of characters" or sth. like that.
  - yieldcrv 3y ago
    oh ok, I tend to overthink irrelevant questions in interviews
    - ineedasername 3y ago
      There’s nothing irrelevant about measuring someone’s technical understanding of the very basics at the same time that you gauge their ability to have a conversation about the domain.
  - ethbr0 3y ago
    It's a grab bag, tell-me-something-interesting icebreaker question. I'm looking for some evidence of the fact that you can differentiate the two in some meaningful way. Not intended to be a gotcha question! Just a quick test of basic CS knowledge to get the candidate comfortable.
    - yieldcrv 3y ago
      > Just a quick test of basic CS knowledge to get the candidate comfortable. did it work for that purpose?
      - ethbr0 3y ago
        Not this time! But for every candidate that could answer, I think so.
- somestag 3y ago
  Presumably something like "a string is a sequence of characters" would be a good first answer, though it might prompt some follow-up questions. I love how questions like this suddenly become more complicated when you have a deeper understanding of the internals. Your first instinct of an answer might not be 100% correct. If I were asked this question unexpectedly, I'd probably trip over myself a few times as I thought through it out loud.
  - ethbr0 3y ago
    My high water mark was the basics... and then the candidate drawing an analogy between char as primitive and char-array-based-strings as object oriented classes that offered additional functionality on top of chars.
    - janstice 3y ago
      That sounds like someone who will make a four-page fizzbuzz solution, which was at one stage a highlight for us. What I try to get candidates to do in interviews is find the project they are most proud of, and get them to talk about it at a technical level - the constraints, challenges & solutions. That’s much harder to fake than pretty much anything else, and works at any technical level. My theory is that if they can communicate technical things in enough detail, and show that they have sufficient depth in at least one area they should be able to move sideways into our stack and context.
      - ethbr0 3y ago
        I've also had good luck asking about a project they were on that went off the rails and what they'd do differently next time around. You can tell pretty quickly how involved they were and if they were thinking through solutions vs just doing as told.
        squeaky-clean 3y ago
        I also ask the same question. Because of my current industry, usually with the caveat that they have to be able to get into some technical details without breaking NDA. Some of my favorite other questions are: 1 - You're diving into one of our repos for the first time and you need to add X feature. Let's assume everything is perfect, what would you want to see in the repo and what are your first steps in learning the code? 2 - Tell me about your favorite bug? It doesn't have to be one you caused. And it doesn't have to be a super technical obscure bug. Just your favorite bug. 3 - What are some of your personal philosophies when it comes to programming. In other words: What are some of your opinionated takes. I understand, when working here you'll follow company policy. But what if you were the person who wrote the company policies. All are great jumping off points for further discussion and open up a lot of followup questions. I find they're pretty hard to fake after the conversation goes on for more than a minute or so.
- ultrasaurus 3y ago
  Not the OP but I'd expect the desired answer to be some kind of semi-technical discussion that shows they understand the fundamentals even if they've forgotten all the details and can have a healthy conversation, not that they know the answer. Possible good indicators: "I haven't written C code in a decades, but one is a byte, one is a structure" "I'd be in over my head with Unicode but.." "What are you looking to solve?" Bad indicators: Hostility. Authoritative wrong answers. (For a director of Product role once, I was asked the difference between REST and SOAP -- not because he cared that I knew the answer, but because he wanted to see how I could work with an engineer who was focusing on the wrong problem)
  - yieldcrv 3y ago
    “Lets ask neurodivergent people stupid questions for stupid reasons”
euroderf 3y ago
"Why is this interview like a string? Because it is terminated with A ZERO."
t0mas88 3y ago
What role were you interviewing for? Sure anyone with a serious CS degree at some point knew the difference between a char and a string. But if you're hiring a VP or product in a larger org, it doesn't matter whether they remember because the people they'd be managing wouldn't even need to know.
- ethbr0 3y ago
  Customer-facing implementation engineer, more or less.
  - ionwake 3y ago
    I find people who judge others on how they answer a tech question to be sus highly judgemental and often wrong about their hunches But I could be wrong
    - ethbr0 3y ago
      That's why I try to ask open-ended questions. Get to a solution. Might not be my solution, but at least get me there. How do you run candidate interviews?
      - ionwake 3y ago
        I dont interview, I just hire based on their portfolio, and increment their work load as results come in.
- lumost 3y ago
  It’s quite possible to avoid learning this. A trivial way is to do all of your coding in python, and then never do anything more advanced than a todo MVC app. Do this for 3 years then get promoted to management and stop coding. When money was cheap, delivery didn’t matter for a while.
  - squeaky-clean 3y ago
matrix_overload 3y ago
In their defence, many companies advertise various "leadership positions", but once you get to an interview stage, you see they are looking for another JavaScript monkey in the team, and the whole leadership thing is a pie in the sky in lieu of a competitive salary.
zo1 3y ago
Maybe this is a reverse fizz-buzz filtering test. I.e. they want to self-select themselves out of positions that require them knowing such basics. Either that or they're completely incompetent. Likewise it takes a special kind of stupid to think they could wing it.
alex_lav 3y ago
I interviewed an ex-FAANG (developer) currently working as a software executive for a director role at a previous company. This person included 5 years-ish of Haskell experience on their resume. I don't know Haskell at all, but am aware of the language and its design principles, so I figured a lot of my technical questions would be pretty easy for him Boy was I wrong. My first question was "Name the most common data structures you use day to day". He stayed silent for a bit and then said "What, do you want me to just list them?" I said yes. After some more silence he said he couldn't recall any. The fact that he said "list" was particularly ironic. I kind of gave up on expecting used-to-be software developers to have retained a single bit of knowledge from their time as a dev after they've moved on to "leadership" or "management". I believe it's important for technical leadership to understand technical problems and their solutions in broad strokes, but it seems I'm mostly in the minority in the real world. That interview (and trying to hire for that role) really showed me how little engineering leaders remember about software.
- fho 3y ago
  That's interesting ... Might be my specific view on Haskell, but there is a lot of emphasis on using the right data structure for the right job. That's probably because due to Haskell being immutable you have to rethink which standard data structures you can reasonable use.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- randomdata 3y ago
  I write code every day and I still had to ponder your question for quite a while before I could think of a data structure I use regularly by name. It is not exactly useful knowledge to keep top of mind. It is not like you need to look up how to use daily data structures. I had an easier time remembering the names of data structures I almost never use, or even have never used, as retaining their names actually has some usefulness. In an interview situation, I expect I would also give up with stating I could not recall any to save the awkwardness of sitting there silent for half an hour racking my brain.
faangiq 3y ago
Why not ask him what a bit is? This is a low IQ question.

by ethbr0 3y ago

yieldcrv 3y ago

The bytes it takes up and how it can be cast? What answer would you be looking for

F-W-M 3y ago
"Strings are sequences of characters" or sth. like that.
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  oh ok, I tend to overthink irrelevant questions in interviews
  - ineedasername 3y ago
    There’s nothing irrelevant about measuring someone’s technical understanding of the very basics at the same time that you gauge their ability to have a conversation about the domain.
- ethbr0 3y ago
  It's a grab bag, tell-me-something-interesting icebreaker question. I'm looking for some evidence of the fact that you can differentiate the two in some meaningful way. Not intended to be a gotcha question! Just a quick test of basic CS knowledge to get the candidate comfortable.
  - yieldcrv 3y ago
    > Just a quick test of basic CS knowledge to get the candidate comfortable. did it work for that purpose?
    - ethbr0 3y ago
      Not this time! But for every candidate that could answer, I think so.
somestag 3y ago
Presumably something like "a string is a sequence of characters" would be a good first answer, though it might prompt some follow-up questions. I love how questions like this suddenly become more complicated when you have a deeper understanding of the internals. Your first instinct of an answer might not be 100% correct. If I were asked this question unexpectedly, I'd probably trip over myself a few times as I thought through it out loud.
- ethbr0 3y ago
  My high water mark was the basics... and then the candidate drawing an analogy between char as primitive and char-array-based-strings as object oriented classes that offered additional functionality on top of chars.
  - janstice 3y ago
    That sounds like someone who will make a four-page fizzbuzz solution, which was at one stage a highlight for us. What I try to get candidates to do in interviews is find the project they are most proud of, and get them to talk about it at a technical level - the constraints, challenges & solutions. That’s much harder to fake than pretty much anything else, and works at any technical level. My theory is that if they can communicate technical things in enough detail, and show that they have sufficient depth in at least one area they should be able to move sideways into our stack and context.
    - ethbr0 3y ago
      I've also had good luck asking about a project they were on that went off the rails and what they'd do differently next time around. You can tell pretty quickly how involved they were and if they were thinking through solutions vs just doing as told.
      - squeaky-clean 3y ago
        I also ask the same question. Because of my current industry, usually with the caveat that they have to be able to get into some technical details without breaking NDA. Some of my favorite other questions are: 1 - You're diving into one of our repos for the first time and you need to add X feature. Let's assume everything is perfect, what would you want to see in the repo and what are your first steps in learning the code? 2 - Tell me about your favorite bug? It doesn't have to be one you caused. And it doesn't have to be a super technical obscure bug. Just your favorite bug. 3 - What are some of your personal philosophies when it comes to programming. In other words: What are some of your opinionated takes. I understand, when working here you'll follow company policy. But what if you were the person who wrote the company policies. All are great jumping off points for further discussion and open up a lot of followup questions. I find they're pretty hard to fake after the conversation goes on for more than a minute or so.
ultrasaurus 3y ago
Not the OP but I'd expect the desired answer to be some kind of semi-technical discussion that shows they understand the fundamentals even if they've forgotten all the details and can have a healthy conversation, not that they know the answer. Possible good indicators: "I haven't written C code in a decades, but one is a byte, one is a structure" "I'd be in over my head with Unicode but.." "What are you looking to solve?" Bad indicators: Hostility. Authoritative wrong answers. (For a director of Product role once, I was asked the difference between REST and SOAP -- not because he cared that I knew the answer, but because he wanted to see how I could work with an engineer who was focusing on the wrong problem)
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  “Lets ask neurodivergent people stupid questions for stupid reasons”

euroderf 3y ago

"Why is this interview like a string? Because it is terminated with A ZERO."

t0mas88 3y ago

What role were you interviewing for? Sure anyone with a serious CS degree at some point knew the difference between a char and a string. But if you're hiring a VP or product in a larger org, it doesn't matter whether they remember because the people they'd be managing wouldn't even need to know.

ethbr0 3y ago
Customer-facing implementation engineer, more or less.
- ionwake 3y ago
  I find people who judge others on how they answer a tech question to be sus highly judgemental and often wrong about their hunches But I could be wrong
  - ethbr0 3y ago
    That's why I try to ask open-ended questions. Get to a solution. Might not be my solution, but at least get me there. How do you run candidate interviews?
    - ionwake 3y ago
      I dont interview, I just hire based on their portfolio, and increment their work load as results come in.
lumost 3y ago
It’s quite possible to avoid learning this. A trivial way is to do all of your coding in python, and then never do anything more advanced than a todo MVC app. Do this for 3 years then get promoted to management and stop coding. When money was cheap, delivery didn’t matter for a while.
- squeaky-clean 3y ago

matrix_overload 3y ago

In their defence, many companies advertise various "leadership positions", but once you get to an interview stage, you see they are looking for another JavaScript monkey in the team, and the whole leadership thing is a pie in the sky in lieu of a competitive salary.

zo1 3y ago

Maybe this is a reverse fizz-buzz filtering test. I.e. they want to self-select themselves out of positions that require them knowing such basics. Either that or they're completely incompetent. Likewise it takes a special kind of stupid to think they could wing it.

alex_lav 3y ago

I interviewed an ex-FAANG (developer) currently working as a software executive for a director role at a previous company. This person included 5 years-ish of Haskell experience on their resume. I don't know Haskell at all, but am aware of the language and its design principles, so I figured a lot of my technical questions would be pretty easy for him Boy was I wrong. My first question was "Name the most common data structures you use day to day". He stayed silent for a bit and then said "What, do you want me to just list them?" I said yes. After some more silence he said he couldn't recall any. The fact that he said "list" was particularly ironic. I kind of gave up on expecting used-to-be software developers to have retained a single bit of knowledge from their time as a dev after they've moved on to "leadership" or "management". I believe it's important for technical leadership to understand technical problems and their solutions in broad strokes, but it seems I'm mostly in the minority in the real world. That interview (and trying to hire for that role) really showed me how little engineering leaders remember about software.

fho 3y ago
That's interesting ... Might be my specific view on Haskell, but there is a lot of emphasis on using the right data structure for the right job. That's probably because due to Haskell being immutable you have to rethink which standard data structures you can reasonable use.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
randomdata 3y ago
I write code every day and I still had to ponder your question for quite a while before I could think of a data structure I use regularly by name. It is not exactly useful knowledge to keep top of mind. It is not like you need to look up how to use daily data structures. I had an easier time remembering the names of data structures I almost never use, or even have never used, as retaining their names actually has some usefulness. In an interview situation, I expect I would also give up with stating I could not recall any to save the awkwardness of sitting there silent for half an hour racking my brain.

faangiq 3y ago

Why not ask him what a bit is? This is a low IQ question.