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Re:Google admits brainteasers were useless for hiring (2013) by unit91 on Thursday May 31, 2018 @01:04PM (#17198009)
This can only be true if your codebases are very small (e.g., at a rinse-and-repeat site mill).

For anything non-trivial, as your code grows the amount of time required to understand it will grow too -- even if you're using "standard" frameworks, etc. -- because the business logic driving your design decisions is learned with experience. For example, we have a guy at our large company who's a terrible programmer but we keep him on the team (albeit somewhat quarantined) because he's been there forever and has enough institutional knowledge to be valuable.

As your systems grow even more, there will not be off-the-shelf solutions. You'll have to sit down and do some real-life architecting and that won't be learned in 2 weeks. Even if you could perfectly document all your systems and design intentions (you can't), well documented decisions still take time to be read and "soak in".

Re:Google admits brainteasers were useless for hiring (2013) by whyaduck on Thursday May 31, 2018 @01:15PM (#17198131)
Exactly. Add interaction with highly complex custom hardware and you're looking at more like 2 years rather than 2 weeks to get to the point where anyone can claim expert level knowledge.
Re:Google admits brainteasers were useless for hiring (2013) by bluGill on Thursday May 31, 2018 @02:42PM (#17198903)
I've been on both sides of this with large code bases, and I disagree. A good programmer can get into even very messy code bases quickly. Even in the worst case of ugly code there is a structure/architecture trying to keep thing understandable.

Or maybe it is easier in large code bases because the worst programmers fail? I don't know, I haven't worked with many tiny code bases.

Re:Google admits brainteasers were useless for hiring (2013) by clintonb on Thursday May 31, 2018 @09:21PM (#17201832)
I've been at a new company for a few months, and still find the codebase confusing/frustrating. At my previous job, I was a tech lead/architect. Here I feel like a dummy. Talent can't necessarily overcome poor documentation.