Re:How to Pass a Programming Interview
by steven777400 on Tuesday March 08, 2016 @02:28PM
(#11247809)
As a candidate, I feel that it is fair to stand up for this as well. If the interviewer wants psuedocode, I'm happy to whiteboard it. But I've been whiteboarding before and had the interviewer say, "that code wouldn't compile, you're missing a bracket." So I said, "If you want code that compiles, bring in a laptop and I'd be happy to put it in to Visual Studio [it was a .NET position] and have it be syntactically correct; but if I'm whiteboarding, it's going to be psuedocode."
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"This organization uses whiteboards as their Code Editor?" - did not get the job.
But be honest....by that point did you really want it?
good point.
Some places I interviewed did mostly whiteboarding, but had a problem that required producing working code. One place had a standard desktop setup aside for me - with the most popular IDEs pre-installed. Another had me bring my laptop.
What was their response to this? I think it's perfectly valid to state this, and may even throw the balance of the interviewer/interviewee dynamics but I can also see other people seeing this as obtuse. But pointing out a missing bracket (in a nonconstructive manner) on a whiteboard is pretty obtuse too...
Re:How to Pass a Programming Interview
by steven777400 on Tuesday March 08, 2016 @03:22PM
(#11248283)
It was the last interview of the day, and I was tired and had already decided I was almost certainly going to decline any offer, if given. So, honestly, I probably said it with a little bit of an edge and that was inappropriate on me.
Nevertheless, the interviewer was gracious and replied, "Fair enough" and stopped nitpicking my brackets and semicolons.
I got asked to find the intersection of two squares for a Django cosing job. I pointed out that it had absolutely nothing to do with Django (after getting a solution).
I was told they thought I might be difficult to work with.