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Comment by enahs-sf | Hacker News Reader

I regularly do technical phone screens at my company and it is amazing the number of people with masters degrees or very pedigreed backgrounds who are unable to solve a relatively simple problem. I think part of it is performance anxiety being put on the spot, but I have noticed that asking anyone to write java or c++ without an IDE is very akin to taking a fish out of the water.

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Maybe I'm in the minority for the HN community, but even I would struggle to write Java without an IDE. I've done it before and compiled manually using javac, but if someone asked me to do that in an interview I might struggle. The IDE just does too much in java, from generating boilerplate code, to managing packages and imports, and autocompletion.

Maybe that's the reason I've almost never done interview questions in java. I always use python/javascript, because I write those with VIM, even though, until recently I did only a small percentage of my professional programming with those languages.

definitely. Tools like coderpad naturally lend themselves to dynamically typed languages.

If I opened a Vim cheatsheet in a browser tab would you write me off? I do know :wq.

ZZ is better to save and exit.

I chuckled thinking about how much coding I've learned in interviews. Early on in my career I messed up on SQL joins and the interviewer walked me through my mistake before excusing me.

That's very surprising for c++. A lot of c++ jobs require remote development. Plus there's a lot of older devs who prefer to use only vim or emacs.

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