Oh, about six years.

Yes, yes, and yes.

Of course, some interviewers are just looking for an excuse to talk about technical issues and will not prejudge you in any way. Speaking for myself, I would laugh if you wrote something like this out. But then again, I once worked for someone who had won the second International Obfuscated C Contest.

Don’t Overthink Fizzbuzz

What I’m about to say will be blindingly obvious to the Enterprise crowd (sorry, not you over there with the Greasemonkey script that translates your web email to Klingon). The rules must be considered as carefully as the entities . Enterprise developers have known this for years: that’s why you see rules engines, table-driven designs, and visual workflow editors in many Enterprise applications.

My favourite interview question

In case you didn’t know this, about 1/3 of all technical interview questions worldwide are variants of “How do you fit 10 pounds of crap in a five-pound bag?” Examples: how do you reverse a string in place, how do you sort a billion numbers, how do you write a decent compiler backend for an architecture with only four frigging registers, how do you handle fair scheduling when someone just forked off 1000 copies of some Towers of Hanoi simulation, etc.

Interviewing Ruby programmers

I’m exaggerating a lot, but the point is, when you select 1 out of 200 applicants, the other 199 don’t give up and go into plumbing (although I wish they would… plumbers are impossible to find). They apply again somewhere else, and contribute to some other employer’s self-delusions about how selective they are.

Joel on Hiring

And then there is the issue of why would someone care if I knew how to write a file copy function, ahead of what the difference between an interface and an abstract class was. Or when would I use encapsulation? Or in my design, how would I choose between polymorphism or inheritance? Or what pattern would I recommend for dealing with a general or specific problem?

What’s with the programming test!?

I know lots and lots of interviewers, at many companies, who’ve decided that they can fully evaluate you based on whether you can solve some particular convex optimization problem (or graph-search problem, or logic problem, or whatever their pet Elephant Question is), and they ask every candidate this question regardless of their background or experience. In fact, I’d estimate that some 10% of all technical interviewers ask the same questions, year after year, and they could care less about your experience.

The Truth About Interviewing

Circus Manager: How long have you been juggling?Candidate:Manager: Can you handle three balls, four balls, and five balls?Candidate:

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