Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jenk | Hacker News Reader

Also not OP, and also similar experience. Most of my interviews are an hour or two of conversation, sometimes with a "I've been told I have to ask.. " techy question but never involves any actual code/whiteboard. Several times the interviewer has said something to the effect of "I won't insult you by asking you to do a tech test, it's clear to me that you understand the work" or similar. One occassion (some years ago now) I've replied to a request to complete a tech test with a "Would you rather look at my open source code/contributions?" which they did and I didn't need to perform the test.

View on HN

Not quite as experienced as you (I’m in the 10-15 year bracket).

I never ask LeetCode questions because it’s far easier on both sides to ask experience-based questions like “what do you like/dislike about <technology on your resume>?”

If I get superficial answers that tells me something. If i get well thought-out answers from people who have clearly spent time in the trenches that tells me something too.

Yes, I'm exactly the same.

I've been doing this for 30+ years, and I've found the same. It's not just whether the candidate can answer correctly, but how they answer.

Back when I was doing C/C++ interviews, I'd ask questions like:

What's the difference between single and double quotes? A meh candidate answers something about you need single quotes for just a single character. A good candidate answers about how the data type for a double-quoted constant is a char.

If I want to pass a variable into a function, and have its value changed by the function, what do I do?* A lousy candidate says "put an ampersand in front of it". A meh candidate says to pass a pointer to the variable. The best candidate will talk about the difference between call-by-value versus call-by-reference.

People really do reveal a lot about themselves not just in what they say, but the way they say it.

Both great questions, where the answer will give you a level of knowledge, rather than a yes/no.

(personally, I would be a meh candidate until you probed further - but I've not touched C for.. hmm, I'm old)

I often get questions where I need to determine if they're looking the textbook answer, or a real-life answer. Usually I will go with "well generally, the answer is $Textbook. However, ..."

I just realized that my above model answer gets broken by the formatter. the first question should get answered with char-star, that is, pointer to char.

This is why I don't use C. ;)

If you put a backslash in front of the asterisk it should be kept as-is instead of triggering the formatting.

> If I want to pass a variable into a function, and have its value changed by the function, what do I do? A lousy candidate says "put an ampersand in front of it". A meh candidate says to pass a pointer to the variable. The best candidate will talk about the difference between call-by-value versus call-by-reference.

I agree it's good for a candidate to demonstrate a solid understanding of evaluation strategies, but the way you phrased the question, the 'meh' answer seems about right. You asked what do I do? which invites a narrow answer specific to the language.

Agreed.

In fact, I had an instructor in college that would have marked you down if a quiz/test asked this question and you wrote an entire paragraph describing call-by-value versus call-by-reference.

On the final, he said "Each of these questions is answerable in 1-3 sentences. If you're writing 1-3 paragraphs, you're wasting my time and I will subtract points even if your answer is correct."

We need your professor to coach interview candidates. On the "interviewer" side of the table, I can't tell you the number of times I've asked a question that should produce a quick, simple answer, and instead got a 5-10 minute stream-of-consciousness word salad out of the candidate. Or a huge run-on sentence this-and-that-and-this-and-also-that-oh-and-this... without coming up for air. It's so common, I must assume that these kinds of replies are being taught to candidates as some sort of best practice.

I suspect many interviewers reward using a question as an opportunity to showcase knowledge though, even if it means rewarding that kind of expansive verbosity. I suspect the this and also that you allude to is the candidate not wanting to be called out for failing to mention a corner case or tradeoff. Of course, conversations are rarely legalistically constrained to answering only the precise letter of a question asked; it's a matter of degree.

Forgive a painful mixing of metaphors: if the Workplace StackExchange is anything to go by, one interviewer's flying colours are often another interviewer's red flags.

I'll add that, as an interviewer (whether of candidates or doing qualitative research), a pattern of very clipped responses to questions about experiences of various sorts soon makes me feel that I, as an interviewer, have suddenly become responsible for filling airtime. It should be a conversation even if that can involve sometimes going off on tangents.

> if the Workplace StackExchange is anything to go by, one interviewer's flying colours are often another interviewer's red flags.

This is absolutely true.

In /r/RecruitingHell, I recently saw a job seeker saying a hiring manager dropped them after they tried to connect on LinkedIn during the interview loop. Meanwhile, another HM in another loop praised them for it.

This is what I've been told. The idea being that the questions are more like prompts, and you should go ahead and elaborate to show your knowledge? Of course sometimes a questions really is just a question.

I think it's more likely a nervous candidate who may not be comfortable or experienced in conversation, as many introverted tech type people seem to be. I don't think it's being taught; it's more likely the result of the candidate not having had interview coaching at all.

Yeah, nerves plus the big question-mark of not knowing what the interviewer's actually looking for. One interviewer's perfect answer will be another's "red flag" (see this very thread, where directly and correctly answering the asked question apparently got you put in the "meh" bucket).

> On the "interviewer" side of the table, I can't tell you the number of times I've asked a question that should produce a quick, simple answer, and instead got a 5-10 minute stream-of-consciousness word salad out of the candidate.

Yup.

There's a fine line between giving a thorough answer and just vomiting up everything you know that's slightly relevant to the original question.

I do AppSec. If I'm interviewing a candidate, and I ask them what Cross-site Scripting is, then if at some point during their answer they bring up SQL Injection, that's a red flag.

Must have been before rvalue references.

Completely off topic, but I wanted to see if your bio could be parsed for an email with chatGPT - since I thought yours was the most interesting I've seen in some time. Turns out cgpt is quite clever:

What's the email address: To email, send to the domain [redacted], using the mailbox "[redacted]".

In general, email addresses consist of a username followed by the at symbol (@) and the domain name, such as [redacted]@[redacted]. However, without being able to verify the existence of the domain [redacted], I cannot say for certain what the email address would be.

Hey someone flag the above comment - I’m an idiot and left the email in there

We've redacted it now.

as the person you're talking about - I just up-voted you anyway, just because this is interesting :)

Why would using pointers be better than references ? At least a reference cannot be null?

Well, at the time I was doing that, it was actually for a C and not C++ job, so &references weren't even a thing. But my point wasn't that using the ampersand is wrong - just that if that's how you describe what you're doing, you probably don't have a very strong foundation in how the language really works.

Exactly this! I haven't been interviewed for a long time now, but since the beginning of my career, when I have interviewed people I ask deeper questions. Even with tech tests, I use them as a jumping board for diving deeper into language design, tradeoffs and experiences. Even a trivial, reverse-a-string kind of questions can take you deep into candidate's knowledge.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com