Re:Explain the first 10 lines of Twitter's source code to me
by jspash on Friday February 25, 2022 @01:50PM
(#30470706)
But don't underestimate the importance of reading as a skill! It's incredibly frustrating to see devs make stupid mistakes and spend time trying to get something to work when the answer is right in front of their nose.
I see this too often. A developer (usually more towards the junior end) who think they can just chug through any problem. Trying this, then that, then google, then that again. When, if they would just stop and think through the problem - and use their eyes - they would see the solution was there all along.
Re:Explain the first 10 lines of Twitter's source code to me
by manuel_w on Friday February 25, 2022 @06:59PM
(#30473905)
I sometimes see this with C++ compiler errors. People don't even try to understand them. They just change some random things and copy/paste some snippets from Stack Overflow, and finally request help instead of just investing a few minutes to actually understand what the compiler has problems with. Yes, g++ compiler errors are heard to read, but often the needed information is right there.
Re:Explain the first 10 lines of Twitter's source code to me
by filmgirlcw on Friday February 25, 2022 @04:17PM
(#30472480)
Totally agree. I’ve definitely made this mistake myself (we all have) and the lesson is definitely to stop, think, read the code and that usually helps with the solution (or at least makes it easier to hone in on what to google)
Re:Explain the first 10 lines of Twitter's source code to me
by filmgirlcw on Friday February 25, 2022 @04:15PM
(#30472467)
You’re right that this is closer to a reading test than a direct knowledge test, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
Re:Explain the first 10 lines of Twitter's source code to me
by tedunangst on Friday February 25, 2022 @02:48PM
(#30471503)
It's a perfectly cromulent attribute!
> Surprisingly, only a few people knew about the dir attribute in my interviews
No. Most of those few people who "knew" it are decent-to-good readers with enough context to figure it out, and in this particular case they probably recognized "ltr", then worked backward to get what "dir" means, and were confident enough about that guess to state it as fact. They did all this in less than a second, because, again, they're decent-to-good readers who had the right context for this particular task. If this had been a made-up attribute you'd have gotten nearly as many people who "knew" it, I guarantee.
This is closer to a web dev reading test than a direct test of knowledge. Which, again, might not actually be a crazy thing to administer.