Lorin Hochstein 
The three skills with a lot less overlap than you’d expect:
1. Ability to code.
2. Ability to perform well in a coding interview.
3. Ability to validate code.
rk: it’s hyphen-minus actuallyI hate live-coding interviews. If someone is watching me, I forget how to even type. Obviously my 30+ years of writing code, all my open source stuff, my extensive resume, all those papers and conference presentations were just me faking it.
Chris Petrilli@rk @norootcause ever since Google made me write code (not pseudo code, not math) on a fucking white board during an staff engineer interview, I have seen them as an indication of pompous douchebags hazing people.
Nobody writes code like that.
I honestly thought people were exaggerating how stupid they were.
meejah@petrillic @rk @norootcause The only interview I almost just walked out on was some dumb "write this in C++ on the whiteboard" which is already monumentally stupid -- but then one of the interviewers was like "you missed some braces here, and here".
That was the last part I really heard ;) since I at least _mentally_ left the interview at that point
@meejah @petrillic @norootcause
Years ago I interviewed at a place.
The interview was ostensibly for C programming on QNX or something, I don’t remember. But when I got there they were like “oh that position has been filled, so we’re going to interview you for…” some Windows-position or something. Something I had no experience with.
At one point the interviewer was like “I don’t feel like you really have a lot of experience with this” and I was like “I don’t!” I then excused myself and left.
Justin Derrick@rk @meejah @petrillic @norootcause I had this happen at a corporate library. There was an IT support position, and a secretarial / administration position. They started with interviewing me for the admin job. The interviewer seemed really frustrated that I had no clerical experience. I asked if there was going to be a technical portion to the interview, and they asked me if I was familiar with their (admittedly very modern) copier. Just when I thought I was wasting my time, she looked at my academic transcript - and apologized for wasting my time interviewing me for the wrong position…
We had a laugh, and the rest of the interview was smooth, and I got the job.
@JustinDerrick @rk @meejah @norootcause Weirdly something similar... in the very early 1990s, I worked on a research project (post doc) at UT-Austin as the developer. I had to go through the hiring process for that, and it included a ... typing test. I scored something like 130wpm, and they tried to convince me I should be an admin rather than a programmer.
@petrillic @rk @meejah @norootcause So weird that they wouldn’t get you into technical writing to produce documentation - that’s a far more valuable skill than being a good typist. :)
@JustinDerrick @rk @meejah @norootcause instead I got to write well-log analysis code on NeXT that used a Connection Machine to do the heavy lifting (partnership with Schlumberger). It was a learning experience! I was quite in over my head, if I'm honest.
@petrillic @JustinDerrick @meejah @norootcause
NeXT and a Connection Machine, my god.
@rk @JustinDerrick @meejah @norootcause the blackness was overwhelming! I mostly got hired because I knew Lisp and we used *Lisp for the heavy lifting... yeah.
It was a wild time in 1992 :)
@meejah @rk @norootcause I literally looked at them and asked "Can you all not afford computers here?"
@meejah @rk @norootcause and given I was interviewing for a staff security engineer, asking me to write A* on the board for graph search seemed... like have you all not heard of libraries before? Maybe write it once and optimize the hell out of it, rather than having every engineer write their own.
"I didn't know I was interviewing for a foundation algorithm libraries job"
mtnrbq65@petrillic @meejah @rk @norootcause
Great comeback! 😁
arclight@petrillic @meejah @rk @norootcause I joked about it but these days I probably would bring my copy of Sedgewick's "Algorithms" along in my shoulder bag and toss it on the table if faced with that BS again. "Learn to read."
At this point I will never interview with another pure software organization due to their hazing practices and other social and organizational pathologies. I have enough engineering safety analysis background that I can work with subject matter experts and still write code. Regulated spaces like nuclear have not yet succumbed to the onslaught of AI and that's unlikely to change anytime soon.
Peter Ludemann@meejah @petrillic @rk @norootcause
Yes, there are bad interviewers at Google. And at other companies. (I turned down a Microsoft job offer because I thought the interviews were too easy - and I had another job offer that ended up being a better financial choice as well)
(I did design interviews at Google until I got tired of a thankless job ... I didn't care what answers the candidate gave; I wanted to see their thought process)
MissConstrue@petrillic @rk @norootcause I walked on a similar interview. I really did look at them like the rca dog, and then said, I’m sorry boys, I didn’t realize this was a hazing interview. Thank you for the coffee, I can see myself out.”
Fuck all of that. I’d rather sling drinks in a gentleman’s club than be asked to perform on command. I’m not a show pony, I’m an experienced professional with a resume that existed before those tech bros were born, and I will be goddamned if I’m gonna be bullied by people that don’t wear long pants.
Matt Rife@petrillic @rk @norootcause I'm a UX designer and feel the same about "whiteboard design challenges." They are utter bullshit and I do not subject candidates to them. If I can't look at your portfolio and figure out what you can do then I probably shouldn't be doing this job.
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)I had one of those at Google and it wasn’t that bad, because the interviewer understood it was unrealistic. It was ‘write some C code, this isn’t an IDE so there will obviously be mistakes’, they ignored obvious ones like missing semicolons (I don’t type semicolons in C, my fingers hit the key when my brain sends and end-of-statement signal to my spine) and discussed the others. The interviewer was using it mostly as a ‘how do you respond to code review’ thing, which is a very useful thing to know (and why I like to look at PRs that job applicants have opened on projects other people run). If you get defensive or try to justify why your mistakes are actually correct, you’re probably going to be a pain to work with. Writing on a whiteboard pretty much guarantees that there will be bugs that a reviewer can point at.
arrakeen_urbanite@david_chisnall @petrillic @rk @norootcause I had a similar interview process at Microsoft over 20 years ago. Personally, I found it kind of fun. They only expected pseudocode on the board, and it was honestly a conversation to see what I knew about algorithms and whether I could think on my feet. This was especially important because I was coming from the physical sciences, and my comp sci minor was 10 years in the rear view mirror. It was a different time. One could still land a coding job with a graduate degree in almost anything.