Hexing the Technical Interview (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Hexing the Technical Interview (2017)

aphyr.com

268 pointsjbredeche41 comments

“Magic numbers.” You are, after all, a witch. “Every class begins with a babe, in a cafe.”

Including a reference to the first 8 hex characters of every Java class. Such detail and prose!

Huh, TIL, thanks! https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2808646/why-are-the-firs...

I'm guessing that's the St. Michael's Alley in Palo Alto? It's still there if that's the one - pretty nice Italian restaurant. I think the Java building was originally 156 University Ave so it would have been down the street.

That Java "cafe babe" magic number seemed unfortunate, in hindsight, because of what was going on in industry when Java launched.

Besides programming suddenly becoming more of a "bro" thing than before, due to the dotcom gold rush, there was sexism that hit close to Java.

Kim Polese was business leadership for Java, but there were sexist slights in the field, like, IIRC, an article in the business press suggesting that she was able to get lunch with anyone because (the article said) she was an attractive woman. Nevermind that Java obviously had monumental promise at the time, both for software development in general, and for the future of the skyrocketing Web, and Polese was arguably the person to network with, if you could.

Here's one quick, incomplete introduction to the environment at the time: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/people-in-technology/...

When that started happening, 0xCAFEBABE felt like something one might've chosen to do differently, had one known all the overt sexism that would be going on, including targeted at one's colleague.

> Besides programming suddenly becoming more of a "bro" thing than before, due to the dotcom gold rush, there was sexism that hit close to Java.

The article references that, implicitly, by making the aforementioned babe male in this story.

Originally, there was also going to be 0xCAFED00D - BABE was for the class file, and D00D was for serialized object files, and the two together would give you the ability to move programs over the network, mobile agents and "the network is the computer" being the vision at the time.

However, that vision did not come to pass, so there was no mobile object format. 0xCAFED00D eventually got used in the Pack200 format, which has now also fallen by the wayside.

I think if you were cool in the '90s, "babe" and "dude" seemed like perfectly natural, even rad, ways to refer to people. Particularly if you only had access to hexadecimal digits.

You probably wouldn't pick those terms today, sure.

I can't speak for the context in which the magic number was chosen, but in this context, the creation of classes, the usage of "babe" seems to more closely refer the definition wherein it refers to a "a baby infant". In fact, I initially didn't realise where the claim of sexism came from until I read the phrase a second time and remembered that there was also another definition of that word.

I assure you, the intent was not to refer to a baby.

I used to interview a lot of software engineering teaching candidates, I would have given my non-existent pocket watch for an interview as prosaic as this.

(grin)

You would not have a chance as:

- Your HR department would filter it, as they would check its LinkedIn account and realize the author account has been suspended due to chicky photos ( how unprofessional...)

- Your manager would filter it out, as the author does not have a formal CS Education. Also certainly does not come from a "good university" per Silicon Valley standards.

PS: Kyle if you are reading this...We have a statue of you in every spaceship refueling dock at the Belt!

This or another article by this author was posted previously, and I adore the style.

EDIT: Here we are! https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=aphyr.com

Wonderful style, lots of comedy, I laughed hard. I hope you write more shorts to feel out a novel.

You’re in luck! The author has written many in this style and they’re all entertaining and usually educational too

I love the vocabulary here, especially "sussurential." It's great to see a word used that has a clearly-understandable meaning, and yet does not appear to be present in the OED.

Purple prose is fun. But I can’t find that word and don’t know what it’s supposed to mean.

What’s it mean?

Probably made up, based on “susurration”, which means whispering

Thank you. Never heard of that before. I love it.

Not all possible English words are found in dictionaries. It's a real word formed from adding the suffix "-ial" (meaning "of the form or character") to susurrant.

(The writer did misspell it though.)

I'm not sure what rule prefers susurrantial over susurrantal. To my eye, the former appears correct, but I can't explain why.

c.f. "substantial", I assume that's why the spelling looks right.

I hail from the grammar descriptivist camp, so made up words are perfectly valid to my eye. All words are possible English words with the right attitude :)

Instant classic, to be paired with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11753627

  “So, erm… Perhaps you could tell me a bit about your background?”
  He hasn’t read your resume. No man can.

Not necessarily. It gives the applicant a chance to highlight the cool details he did but perhaps can't put on a resume. It gives opportunity for poking more questions. And it is a question the applicant prepared for and can talk about a lot, a good way to "break ice"

If no man can read the resume, it’s a safe assumption Tim the interviewer hasn’t.

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...

I've never been asked to tell about my background, it's always about my self. It's just something every interviewer starts off with and frankly, is a waste of time. I just quickly blurt out my job history and we get on with the interview. But, if I was asked about my background, I would think the interviewer didn't read my resume.

    It's just something every interviewer starts off with and frankly, is a waste of time.

It may be a waste of time for you, but as an interviewer it seriously helps nervous candidates find their footing by starting something that they're super comfortable and confident with. It can be intimidating to jump right into questions without a bit of social lubrication.

I normally start my interviews pointing out that we indeed have your CV, so it would be helpful to know how all the pieces came together in your last project. I find the conversational-style of interviewing more productive than the inquisitional-style, and past projects is a nice entrance to deeper questions

EDIT: And in some cases we dont even have your CV. I'm testing a new hiring pipeline where instead of asking for a resume we instead ask a few open-ended questions. This is to see if we can reduce any unconscious bias in the first selection of applicants. In this case, starting with a short summary _is_ new information

These have long been my favorite series of technical blog posts. I wish I could write prose like the author does.

"The javanisse. Surely you have heard of him!"

A reference to Duke, the Java mascot.

And also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nisse_(folklore)

I was thinking about this just the other day and couldn't find it. Funny coincidence it got reposted and upvoted!

This is amazing, cheeky, and even has the technical accuracy to back up the humor. Bravo author, if you're here.

Does Kyle even need a coding interview given his caliber? I'd imagine that he is constantly pursued by multiple companies and the most proper interview questions would be about strategies, architectures, technical and product visions, and how he deals with people and organizations.

Danluu mentions him in one of the (popular) posts about hiring, check it out.

Which one? Sorry, I couldn’t find it

> Or Aphyr, one of the world's most respected distributed systems verification engineers, who failed to get responses to any of his job applications when he graduated from college less than a decade ago.

http://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/

They're all quite amazing pieces of writing, and very funny. Are there some people who understand the technical content?

Sure?

Great! I sort of see that in the "typing" one the candidate manages to solve the problem using type-level (compile-time) computations alone. But I can assure you that for the majority of Hacker News readers, trying to read the "hexing" one makes them feel stupid because it's so far over their heads. Would you be able to give a summary of the technical content?

The protagonist "simply" implements the algorithm in hand-coded JVM bytecode (including all the boilerplate that JVM requires), plus writes a classloader in Clojure so the "hexed" class can be, well, loaded at runtime.

Am I the only one who finds the writing style very distracting? I couldn't even get past a few paragraphs. It's aweful!

You are not. I can't stand the tortured style and I think it's about as funny as recursive acronyms - not, basically.

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