Comment by A_Person | Hacker News Reader

Comment by A_Person | Hacker News Reader

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I'm truly bemused by your response.

First, if you truly believe that the code I showed is "a snippet of code completely made up or taken out of context and then anonymized by renaming variables", I can only say that I don't believe you've ever worked on large codebases. There are millions of lines of code, in hundreds of thousands of application, in dozens of different languages, all over the world, precisely like the snipped I showed. If you've been coding for 20 years, as you say you have, and haven't seen snippets like that on a thousand occasions, you must have worked in very strange environments. If you really want me to, I'll spend 5 minutes and give you multiple links to exactly similar snippets in various large open source projects.

Second, I'm mystified by your comments regarding my trivially simple code question. that "Interviewers come up with their games with their arbitrary rules and a bunch of prejudice about how a good or bad candidate should react".

Wut? Let's make the question even simpler:

    X := Y / Z

Would you not expect an applicant to say, "What if Z is zero?" ? Would you actually expect the candidate to say - quoting you:

"This looks like a snippet of code completely made up or taken out of context and then anonymized by renaming variables. I have no idea what it's supposed to do, I have no idea why I'm looking at it, and I have no fucking idea what you want from me, and I don't play guess-the-rules type of games."

Are you seriously telling me that you'd hire a candidate who said that? Over one who said, "What if Z is zero?" ?

I think one of us is missing something...

Once again you posted a snippet without context or meaning. Once again it's like "what do you think of these bits?" Except that you didn't even ask a question. You just posted something that is presumably code.

So it's hard to engage meaningfully. Give me motivation. Tell me what I'm doing or why I'm looking at this code in the first place. Show me the context and maybe I will see whether I should care about Z possibly being zero or not. Tell me what the language is or how it handles divide by zero (does it have exceptions?) and I might figure out that we don't give a fuck about divide by zero because it's handled elsewhere or not at all relevant to this snippet. I regularly write divisions without zero check because I know the divisor is a positive compile time constant. Here, I just see a snippet out of context; again my thought is "what the hell does this guy want from me?" Show me real code with real context and a real purpose so we can talk real talk.

What's wrong with my x /= z;? Nothing, it's doing the perspective divide just right. And you don't go about checking for divide by zero because I've already clipped my primitives. There's nothing wrong with the names either.

Sure the snippet you posted could be a snippet from some real codebase but without context it is nothing. What do you think of 100101010100000100010001000110? Sorry, wrong answer! Next guy please. That's also real binary from a real file and it's easy to figure out what it says but hard to say what I want from you. Try it!

> I can only say that I don't believe you've ever worked on large codebases.

I don't suppose the operating systems and web browsers I've worked on are the largest of them all but damn. You can keep your religion though.

> it's hard to engage meaningfully

There we agree!

In a parallel universe, a candidate who is worried about a divisor of zero has his head stuck in the tiny details and is unable to do big-picture thinking. Personally I've gone my entire career without seeing a divide-by-zero bug. It's the last thing on my mind. If it's possible for Z to be zero, it will be caught in CI before we deploy/cut a release.

In your first snippet, would you expect a candidate to tell you that `f` might be undefined?

> In your first snippet, would you expect a candidate to tell you that `f` might be undefined?

No. Because I'd expect the candidate to focus on subtle issues, and not waste time on bleeding obvious ones!

Of course f() might be undefined. Blind Freddy knows that. But Blind Freddy can't necessarily see the other (much more subtle) problems in those 4 lines of code.

I want to know, is this candidate more than Blind Freddy? Does he inhabit what some of us call "the real world", where things like division by zero are things to be consciously managed by proper coding practices?

(Edits for clarity)

As someone who has worked on several legacy JS codebases, I can tell you with certainty that in some kinds of projects you'll find in the "real world", `f` being undefined is infinitely more likely than a divisor being zero. Maybe Freddy isn't blind. Maybe he just has a different background than you.

Quite possibly. I've worked mainly in languages where undefined functions kill the compile, and division by zero is a runtime error. Perhaps JavaScript just facilitates sloppy coding practices? Many other languages don't. Perhaps you're the one with the skewed perspective!

Wow, congrats on insulting people who use a different programming language than you. You really give an air of professionalism in your speeches.

But its the lack of communication on your front that would make people fail your test, not their lack of competence.

Anyone can summon an obscure puzzle and claim its easy when they know the key.

> who use a different programming language than you

isn't this a bit reductive?

> Wow, congrats on insulting people

I posted a detailed exposition of my own approach to interviewing. I expected nothing more than some intelligent comments thereon.

In response, someone says I'm "prejudiced", and why would he "give a fuck" about my concerns; another says my concerns exist "in a parallel universe"; and another says my views are "religious"!

Equeeze me if I don't take well to copping random insults in what is meant to be an intelligent discussion forum. Particularly from people who've contributed zero to the discussion so far - like you! I suggest you get out of the basement and get some exercise. Maybe ask your mum for a bike?

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