Re:The best engineering interview question I've ever gotten
by zimpenfish on Monday April 18, 2022 @07:56AM
(#31069546)
> Universally applies to all software jobs.
I dunno, I've worked at a bunch of places where it seems people have gone "I'm not bothering to understand the old code, I'll just replace it with <framework/technology du jour>[1] and GOOD LUCK MAINTAINERS."
[1] Sometimes they write their own frameworks. These are almost always the worst.
> "diving into an unfamiliar area of the code and quickly figuring it out" was very important for us.
Universally applies to all software jobs.
What's I find interesting (based on my own personal history) is not only the ability to solve a task in an unfamiliar code base, but also do so without creating side effects (like say quadrupling the size of a binary since you incremented a poorly named constant that is reused as a size of a memory allocation by multiplying itself with itself).