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Comment by ninkendo | Hacker News Reader

Just to chime in with a different take from the rest of the comments: there’s lots of tools that aren’t really appropriate to use during an interview. If you’re being asked to do (say) tree traversal, then in real life it’s totally fine to Google it and copy/paste a code snippet. But during an interview, presumably they want to know how much you can do on your own without “help”.

It’s not that much of a stretch to say that a debugger is a level of “help” that they want to see you do without during an interview. Using a debugger is a sign that you’re not sure what your code is doing and so you need “help”… maybe the interviewer was looking to see that they could fit the exercise in their head well enough to solve the problem without a debugger.

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To add more context. The task included interfacing with a 3rd party API that was poorly documented. In order to even see what a response looked like would have been incredibly hard without a debugger. Dumping it to the console would have been many pages of nested JSON. So sitting there twiddling, trying to make sense of an API doc that didn't provide a clear description of the results rather than just run the thing and see what it did was the wrong way to go.

A debugger is as much "help" to an engineer as a hammer is to a carpenter. In my experience, engineers who don't use one are a detriment to the entire engineering organization wasting time and money.

Anyway, yeah I dodged a bullet on that but it's such a pain in the ass that I went though a two month interview process only to be vetoed at the end like that. During that time I spent about two weeks to learn an esoteric API that I'll never use again. Oh and it would have been highly unlikely that I would have even used that API in the job. It was just a requirement that I learned it for this particular interview. ...and no I'm not going to commit it to memory just so I can pass a coding interview and if that was the expectation then this whole situation is even more ridiculous.

Yeah, if the exercise is in using a poorly documented API, and the answer depends on fiddly bits of trivia around how the response is structured, then a debugger is absolutely the right approach, even during an interview. You did the right thing here, and the interviewer is a dummy.

> In my experience, engineers who don't use one are a detriment to the entire engineering organization wasting time and money

Well that's a strong opinion and probably a closed minded one.

Maybe you exposed your mindset and this is part of the reason you didn't get the job.

After all you're being judged on everything, including your attitude. Not just your technical prowess.

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