Re:Senior devs. Is anyone else insulted by coding exams?
by rmah on Wednesday March 09, 2022 @12:12PM
(#30617067)
Um, not to sound like an ass but how is being asked to dig into the things on your resume a surprise?
Re:Senior devs. Is anyone else insulted by coding exams?
by seba_dos1 on Wednesday March 09, 2022 @12:31PM
(#30617430)
Every single thing on it? I've worked with dozens of technologies across multiple fields in my career and I'm still in my (late) twenties, so there's probably more to come. I don't think I could be well prepared for every single question about my past that could come up during an interview. I once got surprised with a question about "the story that led to" discovering a CVE that's attributed to me, for example. In an asynchronous chat that would be a very fun question to answer, but not in a real-time conversation. Playing a detective trying to reconstruct your own memories clue by clue isn't compatible with keeping the interview going.
Nevertheless, I can be prepared on what I was working on during my time at company X, but a question like "what I liked/disliked the most" could still put me off track if I haven't thought about it before. I just don't know without a longer analysis.
Re:Senior devs. Is anyone else insulted by coding exams?
by grumple on Thursday March 10, 2022 @04:31PM
(#30632761)
I've actually prepared a document with common interview questions / answers / examples of work to talk about, which I typically review before an interview and keep open in my browser while I'm doing video interviews. I think it helps, you might find it to be a useful exercise.
This always stresses me out, not just in interviews (which are actually a bit easier since you try to prepare beforehand there, although I guess the anxiety and stress can cancel this out anyway) but also in everyday chit-chat with other devs. I strongly suspect that I may have ADHD and I'm just unable to randomly talk about things I've been doing even as recently as last week without preparation. I can recall a lot if I actually sit down and calmly trace back some stuff I've been doing years ago, but if I got surprised with a question like "you said in your CV that you used X at job A, what was the thing you liked the most about it?" it could take me the whole interview to just get into the mental state necessary to even recall my experiences with X, let alone put them into proper words. I'll eventually find a perfect answer, but chances are high that it will happen at evening under shower accompanied with a huge regret titled "I should have said that back then" :P