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Comment by trhr | Hacker News Reader

Interviewing is outside my skill set, so take this with a grain of salt, as it's just the sort of question I'd like to answer:

"We have an application that needs to run inside a vehicle, which means the power will be killed at regular, but unpredictable, intervals. How would you design this to ensure data integrity?"

It's weird enough that few people will have solved it before, but it can be solved at every layer between circuit and application, so you can actively brainstorm with the candidate to draw out some of their solutions into more detail.

And if they start with, "well, I'd build a react app," you can go straight into the trash can with their resume, because you can have that whole discussion without deciding on so much as a language, much less a framework, so you can see who jumps too hastily to wrong assumptions.

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(Parent comment did mention the grain of salt, so my response below is to the spirit of the comment itself and not directed at the person).

> And if they start with, "well, I'd build a react app," you can go straight into the trash can with their resume, because you can have that whole discussion without deciding on so much as a language, much less a framework, so you can see who jumps too hastily to wrong assumptions.

So you would reject someone based on the first thing they say? That’s called prejudice - maybe they don’t have the systems programming lingo in place to describe the ideas you are looking for, but might actually have some ideas trending in the right direction given some nudging. Also, that sounds like you gave a systems programming problem to someone who may have specialised in react the last two years - did you read their resume?

Seeing how complex this discussion gets every time on what is the “right” way to interview and how biased people can get (things haven’t changed in a generation - it used to be about picking the wrong Java library I heard) - no wonder Leetcode has emerged as a “fair” standard-bar that everyone in computing has an actual shot at clearing.

That said, Leetcode-style does bias towards people who have time, resources, and not many responsibilities, especially with problems trending to ever more esoteric algorithms. I don’t know the solution.

I perhaps explained poorly in two cases:

I'd knock serious points for anyone who mentioned any languages (except in the context of talking about low-level features of that language that would help solve the problem),

and I don't see it as "systems programming" because it absolutely could be answered at the application level. It could also be solved with a battery pack (systems level) or immutable storage (hardware level), to name a couple others. The point is giving folks an opportunity to talk in the areas of their experience, and the strongest devs have taken a break from VSCode to do other stuff which adds value to solving problems holistically.

Clearly, you need a bank of magnetic core memory.

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