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Comment by vijayr | Hacker News Reader

This happened to me once. I went for an an interview at a huge real estate company. They had a chat with me for exactly five minutes, then gave me a computer (an old one, with keyboard not working properly) and some legacy code. I wasn't asked to fix it, but I was asked to make a small change and given half hour for it. That code had no documentation and no comments. Then 5 more mins to explain what I understood about the codebase - no questions, just me talking about the codebase as much as I understood in that half hour. The whole thing took like 45 mins or so in total. No whiteboard questions etc. And they made an offer.

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> gave me a computer (an old one, with keyboard not working properly)

What I like most about this is how close to reality their interview model is. Less than stellar equipment, legacy code, and a maintenance task... just a normal Monday.

Another story - I walk in on my first day (this is a subsidiary of a HUGE company). Nobody remembered that a new guy was supposed to join that day - so no desk or computer for me. First couple of hours I spent reading magazines, then I was given the oldest (probably older than me, ha) computer I've seen in my life. I am not kidding - I spent half hour just cleaning the thing (not talking about software, but hardware. it had half inch of dust on it).

Good times.

You know, interviews ideally go both ways. If a company was not willing to provide me with working equipment, I would likely decline any offer they might make. Not because I need the best of the best hardware or anything, but because it would be a huge red flag that they don't value the position or the people that fill it.

How'd you do it if the keyboard wasn't working?

Our main product was developed on a keyboard that was missing a "w". It's not a big deal, though - you can use a for(;;) loop instead of a while loop without hurting performance. And it's easy to just avoid "w" words in the view templates by being clever with word choice.

Of course, that's not true at all. But giving someone a defective-but-not-entirely-broken tool can be a clever way of seeing how they work around problems or how they deal with frustration. Joking aside, we once let a guy go during his 1 week probationary period because he got a little too angry at a slow server. It's a valuable test.

It's too contrived though; not having a single working keyboard anywhere isn't a real business situation. A slow bottlenecked server, sure.

If the "w" key weren't working I'd copy-paste "w" characters from elsewhere in the document, or bring up the on-screen keyboard. Writing bastardized code -- for (;;), really?! -- would be a huge negative against a candidate. And, of course, if a company really didn't have a working keyboard to provide me with, I'd never work there in the first place, because if they can't even provide working peripherals there's no limit to what else they might skimp on.

I actually have three keyboards at my desk right now -- one with Cherry MX blues, one with Cherry MX browns, and a Model M. No way in hell would I ever write code without "w"s.

Whenever you need a character your keyboard won't produce - either because it's broken or because it's in a different language and you can't figure out how to get it, just google the character and copy/paste it. i.e. Google "double u"

Or just use the mouse to open your whatever "Character Map" program comes with your OS... which works when you're missing the same letters you'd need to "sound them out", or even with no keyboard at all. (Assuming you managed to log in.)

Try doing that when you sit down at a machine that has the language set to something you can't read :)

I actually like "for (;;) {}" as an idiom for an infinite loop (or at least, the terminating conditions are in the body rather than the loop construct itself.) It maybe stands out more than "while(true)", so readers can easily see what's going on. But maybe that's just a justification, and the real reason is that it looks clever because not everybody knows you can do that with a C-style for loop.

    #define ever (;;)

Not at a company, but in Bulgaria every year there is a National Programming Olympiad - basically high-schoolers (but some time even mid-schoolers) would compete by solving 2 or 3 exercises in small amount of time. Their code would be ran, against tests, and it should finish in time, and with correct answers. Possibly code review might be done as well. Most used languages were Pascal, C, C++, Basic.

But then computers were not provided, each school had to travel with a computer for each student. So around 1993/94 a friend of mine, who also had some terrible medial situation at the time, and was quite weak decided to compete, and to make things worse for him - his spacebar wasn't working. I think he did a lot of presses of Alt+32 (or was it Alt+20 - I haven't used this combination of entering ASCII codes in a long time). He finish pretty good for the situation and keyboard problem he had, and next year when he was healthy and with good keyboard he did just awesome!

I'm sorry but I can't help to find this situation ridiculous.

Unless you're from a very poor country there is no excuse for not having a working keyboard.

I don't know if that was part of the test, but if it was, it's worse than the big blue chip corps asking about the number of piano tuners. Which actually can be valuable at understanding how one reasons about unknown problems/areas.

About the server being slow, well I don't know the magnitude of the slowness or the anger, but unless you're a ramen fueled startup there is no excuse for having slow machines. It's management failure. It's a waste of developer time. Instead of coding the dev is having to deal with stress inducing constant 5 second hiccups or similar things.

Put yourself in the interviewee's shoes. Do you really want to work in a company that can't conduct a proper interview and has broken/slow hardware?

And yes, I do use vim and I do like w very much.

> Do you really want to work in a company that can't conduct a proper interview and has broken/slow hardware?

Slow is relative. The employee in question was trying to figure out why a remote server was experiencing extreme slowdown. He ssh-ed in, but he was able to type far faster than the beleaguered remote could echo his keystrokes. So he needed to just carefully type his commands, wait for them to appear, and then press enter. Instead, he typed angrily and too quickly, swore at the connection, and eventually started slamming his keyboard in a fit of pique.

It was a totally reasonable real-world slow machine problem, and a totally useful insight into the mindset of a potential new employee.

Not egregious at all. We're developers, sometimes we have to walk into an annoying situation and deal with it like adults.

Yeah but poor guy - in an interview situation the pressure is different and public. He might have done fine at his own desk.

It wasn't during the interview. According to knodi123's first comment it was during the guy's first week on the job.

>Joking aside, we once let a guy go during his 1 week probationary period because he got a little too angry at a slow server.

I have been forced to work with really old computers connected to as old research hardware. At some point it is probably more economical to let someone figure out the interface and solder something together with an Arduino or similar so we can start using a new computer. But that point is never now. Until then we have this old chain of hardware just to get the data from the old machine via 5 1/4 floppy disks.

Maybe it's why I'm not a developer anymore, but my approach to a broken "w" key wouldn't be figuring out a workaround to using "while", but rather copying and pasting a "w" from somewhere else.

ascii 119, son on Win Alt-119. But seriously, stand up and ask for a working keyboard first. The test there is communication.

Exactly.

If someone's approach to a broken keyboard is some workaround instead of just asking for another keyboard it is a sign they handle problems very, very poorly.

It's an insurance company, maybe they want to assure that they still work even if there is something exploding. ;)

^^^this is the correct answer. as a manager I want to know if my team is experiencing an obstacle that should be simple for me to fix for them. A managers job is to remove these kind of obstacles. I don't want them wasting time with poor workarounds.

'twas meant to be a joke. but you're right, there are much better solutions, starting with "go to the closest store and buy a new keyboard".

My would be to (in order): jury-rig the keyboard to make it type "w" anyway, rebind it to some unused key, or just bring my own keyboard from home (if this would not be an interview but probational period setting).

Windows (and most OSes) also have an on screen keyboard.

It does, but having to click to type that one letter would be annoying as hell, and a last-ditch resort (after copy-pasting the letter itself from some text that contains it).

The W button? That's interesting. It wasn't related to the Clinton transition out of the White House[0] was it?

[0] http://www.truthorfiction.com/trashingthewhitehouse/

Just find a text where there's a w, copy and paste it.

(And then make a preprocessor run where \/\/ is replaced with a w)

If the 'w' key is the only worn out key on a keyboard, I would suspect that it had seen heavy use attached to a gaming PC, as the "forward" key in the default WASD movement layout.

I have a keyboard with a broken 'w' key myself, and I know exactly why that key cap died young. It sure wasn't from typing out "while".

You might benefit from more strafing.

Somewhat off-topic, but I'm suddenly reminded of a joke proposal for Fortran to drop the letter 'O' entirely from its character set (in response to frustration regarding its confusion with '0'), the justification being that 'GOTO' statements would suddenly be impossible and therefore incapable of doing harm.

I dunno. If you're not going to care enough about your employees to give them the best possible tools, why do I want to work there again?

It wasn't working "properly". For all we know, that just means the insert and home keys were switched around somehow. Or maybe caps lock was broken.

They changed the keyboard twice :p

I wonder why this isn't more common with interviews.

Did you accept?

No, I had another offer that I took. I'm an average programmer and was able to do the task easily, but that codebase really scared me. Plus the other job was to build something from ground up and I really liked the CTO, so I took it. They were primarily hiring someone just to keep it running than adding new features.

It was a great interview experience though. One of the engineers commented that they gave the same task to other interviewees too.

I think this is a smart and lazy way to hire people :P No need to spend an hour in the room asking random questions, having awkward pauses etc. Just let the candidate fight with the codebase - lazy and simple!

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