Hacker News Reader

I'm a believer in Joel Spolsky's recruiting goal: "Smart and gets things done."[0]

Add "not a jerk" (which I find is part of "gets things done" on an ongoing basis) and everything else is either vanity or decision paralysis on the part of the interviewer.

[0]https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/06/05/smart-and-gets-thi...

View on HN

The article is from someone whose final-boss interview was with...joel spolsky. And it was a pretty useless-in-the-real-world question he was given as a coding exercise (base -2 number conversion).

The base -2 question was asked by someone other than Joel, and definitely fits in the category of interviewer vanity questions.

Yeah interview before Joel was base -2 conversion. Joel's interview was mostly a chat and we mostly talked about my dog (and other things I'm sure but I only remember talking about dogs).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com