Re:Explain the first 10 lines of Twitter's source code to me
by nomel on Friday February 25, 2022 @06:36PM
(#30473719)
I assume that I'm bad at interviews, but I've had people intelligently talk about code, but then completely fail at simple coding tasks. In pretty much all of the cases, they completely understood what was going on, but they were part of a team where someone else was actually implementing it all. So, I think more is needed. This seems to be great for screening though, since it can be done casually, on the phone or while eating a sandwich.
It’s not a quiz, if done right. But you can get to know a lot about someone even by how they respond to not knowing the answer.
Someone with experience knows it’s not a big deal to not know every bit of trivia, but they can talk intelligently about what the code might do. And they know how to find out.
For example, they may point out they know about charset=utf8 in the Content-Type header and admit they thought the meta tag was redundant, and you can have a conversation from there. Or how about "I know 'ltr' means left to right but I never thought about using it with lang=en, but now I want to see what 'rtl' does with English". I suppose it's not the best starter question, but I don't think it needs to be to suss out good candidates from bad ones.
Rage-quitting the interview or blurting out confidently wrong guesses, on the other hand, are bad signals.