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from the prove-Fermat's-last-theorem-using-only-a-protractor-and-straight-edge dept.
Saw this discussion on Reddit, and thought it might be of interest here, too (as such things perennially are):
I've been a successful software engineer for 10 years at various startups and small businesses. I do a lot of contracting on the side too. I've recently had cause to start looking for work again.
What the hell is up with these interview questions? They don't really have much to do with the ins and outs of clean code, architecture or collaboration. I had hoped they'd stop with this bullshit already. There's a lot of companies that promise 'No whiteboard interviews' like Triplebyte, only for that to be a complete and total lie.
They're more like annoying riddles I'd find in an Sierra adventure game or D&D. I'm just not very good at these types of 'riddle questions'. I know they always wind up having to do with binary trees, graph algorithms or something like that, but the dress-up and time constraints are unrealistically stressful.
I honestly wasn't very good at these questions when I'd graduated and I'm still not good at them now. How screwed am I? Are companies willing to hire based on projects and seeing live code?
I'm always careful to speak with my employers and convince them to write a 'portfolio' clause in my contract that allows me to keep code for the purpose of seeking further employment.
I really don't want to spend 3 months of my life learning how to solve riddles just to get another job.
I also suck at these kinds of questions, despite having designed and written a lot of software and systems. What say you, Soylentils, are these kinds of interview questions necessary to find good software engineers?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday March 08 2017, @03:00PM
They want to see you reference at least some of the syntax of the language.
That aspect makes me nervous sometimes. I use emacs, the last time I typed and indented a right parenthesis was ... a long time and a couple languages ago ...
Also I'm lazy and paranoid so I put all the brain cells on testing and system level stuff and I'll look something obscure up online every single time. two decades screwing around with mysql and I still occasionally pluralize INTERVAL types despite having made that mistake a zillion times, but I never do anything really dumb, however. Oh here's another good one, you'd think after 20 years I'd have memorized that DAYOFWEEK() result index starts at 1 is Sunday but every time, including typing this post, I have to look it up, or I do something dumb like Monday=0 or whatever. Hilarious. I suppose I wouldn't want a lower level job where my only thinking task is remembering that Tueday=3 or WTF anyway.