Broadcom lays off many VMware employees after closing acquisition

Re:Broadcom lays off many VMware employees after closing acq... by cmrdporcupine on Monday November 27, 2023 @03:58PM (#38438174)

People doing whiteboard coding should not have to get the syntax 100% (or even 80%) correct. It should be enough to just show conceptual understanding of what kinds of syntactical elements and concepts are present in the language. When I trained for giving interviews @ Google, this was emphasized, at least. It's not about getting the syntax exactly right, it's about getting the algorithm right. Though obviously if someone is getting something fundamental wrong, it raises eyebrows.

If I were interviewing for database/SQL work, I'd be personally probing around understanding of the relational data model, not specifics of SQL syntax. How would you model this table? What's a join? What's normalization? What's wrong, conceptually, with the following schema? etc

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Re:Broadcom lays off many VMware employees after closing acq... by bluGill on Monday November 27, 2023 @05:00PM (#38439034)

When I give coding interviews I often jump in with "it doesn't compile because you forgot the semicolon at". The tools we use don't make it easy for me to fix such mistakes and it doesn't pay to waste their time to search out a mistake I (as an observer) already happened to know - I want to see their algorithm work so we can move on (or see how they debug why it isn't working yet depending on what phase we are in). I don't really care how long it takes you to find that missing semicolon - we all make that mistake once in a while and there isn't much to learn from it.

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