Comment by commandlinefan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by commandlinefan | Hacker News Reader

Whenever this comes up, I can only assume that people are talking about very different sorts of technical interviews than I’ve ever been subject to. I’ve been working as a programmer for 25 years now and must have been through at least two dozen technical interviews in that time (one just a couple of years ago) and I’ve never had this level of pedantry thrown at me. It sounds like the poster has been rejected from a job interview for missing a semicolon or writing “length” instead of “len”. Maybe I’ve just been lucky? I did once have somebody ask me if I knew SQL - I said I did since I had written some queries using it, but not much. He asked me what command was used to add data into a database. I didn’t know (like I said, I knew the query syntax, but that was about it). That seems to me to have been a very reasonable question to ask, and a good, quick way to figure out that I didn’t really have much experience with SQL.

Yes you're the exception.

Somehow we arent really adept at interviewing at what the day-to-day requirements of a position.

Instead were much more interested in edge-case stuff like bubble sort.

I wonder if this is some assessment of "are they capable of substantially more complex tasks, and if so, safe to assume they're capable of less-complex minutiae.

Seems about right, as often these evaluation type things are proxies.

That's my experience as well - 30 years under the belt and I don't see interviews like this nor do I give them. I think the audience here is a bit different, startups are by definition immature and usually don't have the experience or means to set up a proper interview team that screens for the right things.

The flip side is that in mature companies like the one I work for, where professional interviews are more of the rule, we don't get the best candidates, at least not right now. I could imagine that super attractive startups can afford to set the bar higher and still get enough applicants.

>It sounds like the poster has been rejected from a job interview for missing a semicolon or writing “length” instead of “len”.

These kinds of anecdotes make me often wonder if candidates are "disqualified" for far more superficial reasons, and if interviewers hone in on pedantry like this to legitimize their reasoning perhaps even unconsciously. I have trouble believing most candidates wouldn't make at least one trivial mistake of that sort and I am equally reluctant to believe the same interviewers would disqualify any given candidate for a mistake so trivial.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com