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Comment by aristus | Hacker News Reader

Hi, author here -- the article focuses on "code prep" because that's something you can brush up in a short-ish period of time. You can't become a nicer or more thoughtful person quickly, so on those parts of our criteria we take people as they are.

Implementing some well-known library functions is basically a quick way to see whether you know how they work.

If you don't feel it's necessary to ever practice for an interview, well, ok. This advice is not for you.

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> If you don't feel it's necessary to ever practice for an interview, well, ok. This advice is not for you.

I don't think that was his point at all, with all due respect. I got the impression he was just criticizing the rather stereotypical technical interview, which Facebook seems to subscribe to very strongly based on the article.

Have you stopped to consider that given the pressure situation of an interview at a well respected company, and without the common resources a programmer generally works with (an IDE and reference documentation), that a person might have trouble with this despite understanding how it works?

It seems like you should be asking 'Write me something to do X, using Y from the standard library' and evaluating that code, if you're looking to evaluate how well someone knows a library function.

"Knowing the argument signature" and "knowing how to implement the guts" are two very different things. I personally don't care if you can remember fine details of the API. We ask many kinds of questions; in the article these are only examples.

If people who already work in software feel the need to study for an interview, it's a pretty decent indication that the interview itself is... not ideal.

Please share what is the ideal interview.

Not necessarily "ideal" IMO, but a friend told me about an interview where they told him beforehand "bring your own laptop, set up", then when he arrived they told him "please build this" (I think it was something similar to Everything). After a couple of hours when he was done, they asked him to add some functionality (network support? can't recall).

At least this type of interview seems to solve the problem of developers strangely needing to study for an interview, and I would guess it also better represents coding ability.

Alternate versions can include "debug this" and "design this" (which is pretty popular AFAIK).

> If you don't feel it's necessary to ever practice for an interview, well, ok. This advice is not for you.

It is wrong to conclude that the person whose comment you replied to, feels that way. Excerpt: "Needing to "prep" and "practice" coding questions in the way encouraged seems rather odd to me." [emphasis added]

>You can't become a nicer or more thoughtful person quickly Why not?

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