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 :)