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Re:The Insecure Developer by golergka on Thursday October 05, 2017 @10:53AM (#15409624)
As someone who has hired programmers, I cannot upvote you enough. Last time was less than a month ago. I interviewed everybody from junior to (presumably) almost lead.

During that time, I haven't met a single soul who would be able to describe what a call stack is and how it works, in rough terms. I don't have a CS degree, but I would imagine that it is something you would learn in the first year - I was tought it in high school (but have actually learned it much later, of course). Best that I got was a description of stack data structure and mumblings about how "variables go there and it's faster than heap". And the amount of bullshit that people came up with, looking completely confident, instead of honestly saying "I don't know it", is mind-boggling.

Re:The Insecure Developer by Clubber on Thursday October 05, 2017 @11:04AM (#15409720)
I had to look it up, once I did, I knew exactly what you were talking about, I just didn't know it by name. I was thinking about the process a request/response goes through via TCP/IP port. I've been doing this for 20 years. Maybe you need to rethink your interview questions. You are just testing for word/definition association which doesn't really matter outside of tech chest pumping. Perhaps explain what a call stack is, then ask why it's important and how it's used for debugging, etc. You shouldn't care so much about the what but rather the why.

I remember an old Delphi interview where they asked me what a I already forgot was. I didn't know by name, but once they showed me what they were talking about, I could explain it in depth. They ended up hiring me and I fixed their broken DSS engine and it ended up in a lucrative M&A.

Anyway, standard IQ tests have sections for various skills. Among the ones that are important for programming is abstract thinking and pattern recognition. You should be testing for that rather that word/definition association.

http://www.thinktonight.com/WISC_IV_subtests_s/331.htm

Re:The Insecure Developer by golergka on Thursday October 05, 2017 @12:08PM (#15410275)
Well, I certainly do not just ask "what a call stack is" and then stare at the candidate blankly, if that's the picture you're getting.
Re:The Insecure Developer by Clubber on Thursday October 05, 2017 @12:28PM (#15410442)
Hah. You'd be surprised at how common that is.
Re:The Insecure Developer by wtflmaohnisdumb on Thursday October 05, 2017 @11:16AM (#15409843)
Maybe you're asking the wrong questions or are from an undesirable area. I mean the example question you're using is just trivia and not difficult to learn when a problem arises. I'm not sure how much more you want compared to "local variables, return addresses, parameters" tbh.
Re:The Insecure Developer by golergka on Thursday October 05, 2017 @12:07PM (#15410266)
> I'm not sure how much more you want compared to "local variables, return addresses, parameters" tbh.

The fact that you include "return addresses" already shows that you understand the concept much better than developers I interviewed.

It's not about knowing the trivia that you can google - it's about knowing that you should google something when you need it.