måning

Morning

morning.... and thank you all for your good lucks....

I had two interviews yesterday, both for jobs... first one went better in IMHO, but they decided to go for another candidate, but might come back if there are more opening (soonish)

second one was good as well, except for the whiteboard exercise... write an algorithm to find the max depth in a b-tree... I couldn't do that in 10 minutes.

I have never ever used a b-tree myself in any program I wrote, and if I had to write something like that I'd look it up.

the first company btw. ran mostly ran ClojureCLR which I thought was interesting and they would like to migrate to JVM clojure.

algo whiteboarding things are just comp sci gatekeeping

designing on a whiteboard around a business problem is a bit different and is more about communication I think

yeah 😕

even with a CS degree (which I have) I don’t think it’s a suitable medium 🙂 a whiteboard is for communication like you say, so it works really well for things like system design

I recently got a “algorithms and data structures nanodegree” ad from Udacity, it said “You learned the skills you need in industry, now learn how to pass the interview” or some such and it was a :woman-facepalming:

I wonder if anyone has gone up to the whiteboard and written curl -o possible_answers.html

no but now I really really want to

with https://lmgtfy.com/ as a target

lol

master hacker level (the idea with curl)

cat \n hello world \n ^D

I don't have a CS degree either.

What’s a degree?

and that is an excellent idea @jasonbell... Mind if I nick that next time?

celsius

it’s what you use to check whether UK classifies as a fit place to live (it doesn’t) (don’t mind me, i just really really want proper spring to come already)

@thomas of course my dear friend, of course.

thank you

Wait, how did we get from degrees to the UK sucking?

easily done these days @dominicm, sorry.

asking an unreasonable question to see if (and how quickly) the candidate admits I don't know can be a interviewing strategy

they are gonna be asked loads of unreasonable questions IRL

are you in NL @thomas?

the problem is context.

in an interview, you don't know whether they're testing your i don't know-ness, your resolve, your general problem solving, whatever.

but surely they are always testing if you are someone who is easy to work with

Asking people to do a red-black tree on a whiteboard is one of those interviewing memes from the States

Most people will never need to do it in their code, and if they do you can just look it up

yes I am @ben.hammond

@conor.p.farrell - @otfrom is totally correct imho, it's nothing more than CompSci gatekeeping. It's the equivalent of asking an Eng Lit teacher to quote Chaucer or Shelley from memory, in an interview.

I think that there is a way to make whiteboarding a valid interview component, and that is to use it as a way of gauging someone's approach to problem solving and comms; i.e. "Here's a problem that we'd like you to walk the interviewer / board through using a whiteboard. Here's a laptop and an internet connection and an hour to prepare - go!"

Knowing where to look and what questions to "ask" as well as how to convey an answer, no matter how complete or detailed, are the skills I am looking for when I am hiring - broadly...

Next time somebody asks you to do a whiteboard, agree on condition they can solve the N Queens problem for you in return

😂

@thomas did the interviews act like the 'B tree' description was vitally important? Or was is just a spring board for conversation?

When I conduct interviews, there is never any whiteboarding at all. There is just me and the candidate working together on a small bit of code (that the candidate wrote beforehand, in their own time). I always say "you are free to use google/stackoverflow/duckduckgo/whatever" to get the job done. I would never expect a candidate to work differently than the way we work.

yep

do a pairing exercise or something where the interviewer has to actually do something

because the candidate is interviewing your company

@ben.hammond not really, but he did hint at that he expected candidates to be able to do this.

well. if the job is to implement a database from scratch then it would make sense

otherwise you've learned something about the interviewer's secret ambition

I strongly doubt it is implementing a database from scratch.

as I said earlier... I never ever have used a b-tree for anything in 20 years of programming.

@elkdanger 👋

It really depends on the work. Some roles/problems definitely require algorithmic thinking; and if that’s what people actually need to hire then I guess those algorithmic whiteboarding sessions make more sense. e.g. if you’re recruiting people to write a query planner, or solve a set of optimisation problems. These people are often developing some foundational IP for a pretty specialised company/product though. However very few employers actually require people to do that, and even if they do require it; they’re not managed well enough to appreciate and fund the R aspects of their R&D. What’s much more common is companies ruling out good candidates by asking them poor questions. My interview horror story was interviewing at Citibank, where in the final stage interview I had the CTO phone me from NYC and grill me on trading problems that were NP-hard CS bin packing problems in disguise. Having to solve those algorithmic questions over a whiteboard is one thing, but doing it over a telephone was nigh on impossible — especially when you stopped talking for 10 seconds and all you got was him saying “Hello, hello?” — “Errr yes I’m still here, I’m just trying to effing think!!!” 😢

That 👋 was a bit redundant as I'm sitting opposite @elkdanger

as long as you actually waved at @elkdanger it is fine @agile_geek.

@rickmoynihan that sounds rather familiar... I had a similar experience with Citi years ago. not fun.

Yeah - their interview process was a total shambles - even before I got to the final stage I’d decided to turn them down… So many things about it rang alarm bells, the first sign was being invited down to interview (travelled from Isle of Arran to London) showed up and they’d totally forgotten they were interviewing me that day. The panel were all out of the office, so I ended up being interviewed by some random (probably an intern), who was totally unprepared for it. Then they refused to pay travel expenses that they’d said they would. Then the salary ranges were shifted down from what was advertised. Then the above phone interview. Totally unprofessional. Highly disrespectful.

I mean I know interviewing is hard to do well, but…

that sounds very bad indeed.

@rickmoynihan (inc well-thats-a-bit-kak)

@rickmoynihan I randomly visited a guy at such a bank and sat in his office whilst he carried out an interview like that with some poor person on the phone.

This was years ago