Hacker News Reader

Comment by Aeolun | Hacker News Reader

The inability to listen to people judge you for not knowing the answer to arbitrary and contrived problems?

I’ve been a valuable professional for years, and then this little snot tells me I don’t qualify for his position because I don’t know what happens when you sum two arrays in Javascript? Fuck off.

View on HN

If you claimed to be an experienced JS dev, applying for a JS position, asking to be paid big bucks then yes he had every right to quiz you on that

I dont know what really happened though

Yeah, that really happened (well, similar in nature if not exactly the same).

These are the kind of questions I do not know the answer to because no sane person ever does that.

I tried explaining as such, but I think the interview was on a downward trend after that.

I think we were supposed to discuss their take home assignment, which I thought was actually great fun, but the interview was a JS pop quiz instead because they probably didn’t inform their interviewer correctly.

Did you get visibly pissed off with the question? That might be why the interview went poorly. Whenever I get pop quiz questions, I just say I don't remember and if it came up in a real codebase I would test it in a REPL to see what it does. The interview carries on normally after that in my experience.

Except that experienced devs could well have forgotten (at least to the point of it not being in immediate recall) more than they currently "know".

I couldn't remember what happens when you sum two arrays in JS, just that it's weird and you probably shouldn't do it. So I remembered the useful part, but not the trivia.

(FYI, array1 + array2 casts the arrays to strings and then concatenates them).

i mean no sane company/ interviewer weighs the entire interview on a pop quiz question. But imo they are fine to be used in the process (in tandem with other stuff). you can't claimed to be expert on the language without getting any one of them correctly

also, the way the interviewee handles the stuff they dont know

The hell with the person's ability to learn new stuff, navigate JS's epic ecosystem, and keep himself on par with new developments and the trends. Summing js arrays is where it's at and tells the interviewer the whole story of the candidate's understanding of the language.

take that chip off your shoulder mate

about tech interviews, the way you handle stuff you dont know is also important. I didn't say he deserved to be rejected because he didn't know what summing 2 arrays results in, but the interviewer was fair to ask that (if the position was about javascript). and yes if you were the interviewee with this kind of attitude I'd reject you on the spot

Of course it's fair and by the rules - at least technically. It's the practicality of it that is questionable. But you have to experience the hot seat yourself and get thrown at tons of tricky and obscure things one interview after the other in order to understand that frustration.

The irony is, not even the world's best mathematicians and engineers could safely predict what JavaScript would do when summing two arrays.

I was like what's so offensive about Array concat()? Oh you mean "+". Yeah that's basically trivia night at the pub. When is trivial pursuit coming out with the JS edition?

I believe you are experiencing a 'sarchasm'.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com