What I learned from spending 3 months applying to jobs after a coding bootcamp

Re:What I learned from spending 3 months applying to jobs af... by grogenaut on Monday November 21, 2016 @01:02PM (#13007444)

If you call it out to me during your interview during my standard warm-up question of "what have you done that you are particularly proud of it was challenging" and you don't bomb the rest of the interview then I WILL go look it up. I use things like this to remove any coding skills doubts during a debrief. Just putting it on the resume means there's maybe a 20% chance I'll see it.

I'm usually giving the holistic system design question which the interviewee can take any direction they like they just have to go all the way down in one area.

Jr devs on my team give the algorithms question much of the time and I make sure they're looking for the right things. Problem solving not memorization... Comfort in a language not trivial knowledge or formatting issues... Etc. They get sent to the interview class if they ask anything that is a named algorithm... Like three sum, tortoise and hare, etc and expect a candidate to derive it in a 30 minute coding section of an interview. T&H for example took 10 years for industry to derive.

On a side note don't use a language you're not familiar with in an interview because you heard the company likes it. Use what you are solid in. Python and ruby and the like make most interview questions trivial. I cringe on the inside when people jump for c/cpp in an interview esp college hires as it seems to take longer to get fluent in these languages.

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Re:What I learned from spending 3 months applying to jobs af... by grogenaut on Monday November 21, 2016 @02:18PM (#13008258)

Note I'm not saying to do interviews in Python and ruby but if you're solid in one of them it's like real working pseudocode compared to Java c# c++. But use your a#1 solidest language. Unless u have more than one and that language makes a particular problem trivial.

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Re:What I learned from spending 3 months applying to jobs af... by brutus1213 on Monday November 21, 2016 @05:45PM (#13009955)

I am most comfy with Python but think it is the wrong language for me to do coding interviews. When I was in school, I was taught intro CS in C and Java. I got tripped by a fairly CS 101 question even though I use Python very productively and regularly at work. In C or Java, I'd be able to knock off that question easily.

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Re:What I learned from spending 3 months applying to jobs af... by grogenaut on Tuesday November 22, 2016 @12:32AM (#13011869)

As I said, it depends. If it's text heavy, python or ruby (or perl) is likely the best. If it uses a lesser known data structure, maybe java with it's massive set of libraries. If it's bit twiddling or memory intensive, then maybe c++ is the right answer. But a lot of questions are trivial in ruby or python. 3sum can be done in 2 lines of ruby (how I wish it was one, would be cooler).

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