Hacker News Reader

Comment by nerdjon | Hacker News Reader

Some companies do technical interview great, but there are a couple things that I have noticed that always make me question if I actually want to work somewhere:

- Being sent to a website to do a take home coding exercise, with a checkbox basically saying "I won't use the internet, stack overflow, or similar". I get that you need to test my knowledge, but shouldn't you care more that I know how to search for my problem and understand a fix instead of flailing around?

- (this one I have noticed in person) Being handed a thing to build, being told I have a limited amount of time. That all they want is a proof of concept, but the tooling they are asking me to use go completely against the idea that it is a "proof of concept" since they make certain assumptions about the end goal. EX: deploy something with terraform but we don't want you to build an AMI or anything like that so just manually go into each system once you create it

View on HN

I hate companies that act like it is a sin to use Google or Stack Overflow when coding.

When I hear this BS, then I know it is clear that they have never coded themselves. I would love to meet a software engineer who truly can sit in a padded room and write code with no internet access to use for help or reference.

Especially those of us that juggle multiple languages (full stack). Sometimes I know I need to run a method but I can't remember the actual method name or how it is formatted in this language. I know it exists, I have used many times before, but I might not remember the exact way it is worded. So I have to look it up. It adds <60 seconds for me to find.

Or I might know a method exists but not sure which parameters it accepts. I might usually use the first 2 params and leave the rest, but this specific use case requires changing something i don't normally need. So guess what, I have to look it up!

Sometimes I might get an error message that I don't recognize, so a quick look at StackOverflow reveals that a configuration item is off, or something was formatted incorrectly. I often can understand my problem with only just reading the first few lines of the selected answer on SO. I might be able to solve a bug in 60 seconds by using Stack Overflow, that might otherwise take hours to do without them.

Especially as software developers keep getting asked to know more and more stuff, we have to rely on documentation and helpful sites in order to do our jobs. It is crazy to expect that you don't use those resources.

Oh and ObjectiveC/Swift developers have it really bad. Some of the method names are entire structured sentences.

You're right about ObjC/Swift. Even though that's my line of work, I use C++ to answer questions in interviews. There's no way I'm going to remember method names for those.

I did have a Google phone screen where they asked me to live code something in Objective-C, but they gave me an existing class whose code I had to fill in and they were lenient with remembering common method names.

Once I had a half day exercise that went even further - they provided the computer, removing the internet, but also removing all of the normal module documentation, and for good measure forbidding you from using any documentation from any source.

There were a lot of compilererrors on the way to a solution for that one.

Unless you were using standard C with the standard lib that's madness. If it were C it would only be stupid.

I remember the handwriting examans on University. But it was never any real full lenght programs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com