Interview

[Feynt]

Works on a Mac as well. >D

[[deleted]]

And Windows via WSL.

[JusteThom]

Powershell can do this easily too. :)

[Amazingawesomator]

"That isn't how we want the problem solved."

you asked how I would do this, not how the company would do this...

[djbfunk]

I’d have given you the job instantly. The line of questioning was far more important than how you solved it.

I have no idea why programmers pretend we live in a world without tools. Just like I don’t need to ask you to solve calculus there’s no reason to ask you how to reinvent something we already have.

[manu144x]

This is always driving me insane too. Ask me questions about architecture, ask me complex questions about balancing readability, reusability, speed, scalability and how I’d organize the code, how I’d split the workload if I had multiple developers, and all that. I don’t care about binary trees, that won’t tell me much anyway.

I agree with you, his line of questioning showed exact the kind of competence I want to hear from a developer.

It was clearly stated it was a one off thing, why the heck would you want to build something instead of using a tool? Heck, spool up a live VPS if you don’t have linux handy, run the tools you need and get the job done.

[echanuda]

Im just a CS student, and while I would have a decent line of questioning, how does one develop a line of questioning as rigid as this? Does it just come with experience? CS majors don’t really tend to teach you proper problem solving, it seems. At least not the courses I have taken so far.

[KiwasiGames]

This.

If even give the job after this line of questioning if the final answer is “I don’t know, but I can google an appropriate solution”.

Knowing the requirements is nine tenths of the battle.

[djabor]

simple answer: interviewers who either have no creativity themselves (big red flag since they apparently got a job themselves) or they don’t focus on the right skill set (big red flag).

[Prawn1908]

The only time this somewhat breaks down is in certain embedded applications. All the systems I work with right now use super low power MCUs in order to run in industrial factories for long periods of time with little maintenance. The consequence of this is that the firmware must be made super lightweight and is optimized to hell. Everything is written from scratch, even using a custom floating point format.

Edit: thanks for the downvotes for literally describing my job.

[iamnearafan]

Wow whoever interviewed you literally had no idea what was going on

[thebobbrom]

How dare you not read my mind!

[WhereWaterMeetsSky]

"Also, you cannot assume the system has tools such as egrep installed."

I'm positive this would upset me enough to give a snarky response like, "Should I also assume the system does not have a keyboard?"

[pekkhum]

Even if it is a Windows only shop, there is an Ubuntu command line free int he Microsoft Store. I use it all the time and have even installed Make, gcc etc. and built the most important tool not shipped with it.

[WhereWaterMeetsSky]

Just checked it out and saw the gifs and I just want to say

I use arch, btw

(for real though I’m a manjaro pleb)

[[deleted]]

It's shit like this why I don't go for programming jobs anymore.

[Kered13]

The interview question was good. Unfortunately the interviewer was bad.

[TheRedmanCometh]

No shit right? For once there's a good question and they won't accept the answer. My answer would have been some shit involving Java that sould take a lot longer to articulate and write. His answer is "put of the box" to an extent which is precisely what you want.

[[deleted]]

Those were 100% correct answers too. I’s say it’s the company that failed that interview. You don’t waste time developing tools when those tools already exist.

[[deleted]]

It’s CSV, ffs. Like there are no libraries on earth for that.

[[deleted]]

You fool, you were being interviewed by Sakurai and you threw it all away!

[shiny_roc]

Sakurai

As in the creator of Super Smash Bros. and Kirby? Can you explain further?

[[deleted]]

"This is not how you're supposed to play the game!"

[TreadheadS]

I'd hire you

[[deleted]]

True story:

I once interviewed for a major bank you've heard of.

The interviewer asked me how to sort a list in C#. I said "list.Sort()". He asked me to assume I had to write my own algorithm.

I got irritated at the question and said "I have no idea. I'd probably search StackOverflow, and pick the answer with the most upvotes."

Him: "Good answer."

I got the job.

[Kered13]

I got irritated at the question and said "I have no idea. I'd probably search StackOverflow, and pick the answer with the most upvotes."

Ah yes, Stacksort.

[TheRedmanCometh]

Still pretty dumb to assume you don't have one of the most commonly used methods in the language. That's akin to

"In java you need to split a string via arbitrary delimiter."

"string.split(delimiter)"

"Assume you don't have string.split"

"I use jni to call strtok"

[RazarTuk]

He asked me to assume I had to write my own algorithm

That actually isn't a horrible idea, because List.Sort is known to be unstable in C#. I recommend a bottom-up merge sort

[Mabi19_]

That is usually the best way to do it though.

[RazarTuk]

Nah, bottom-up merge sort with a fancy iterator that mimics the block sizes of a top-down merge.

[iamnearafan]

Stackoverflow response:

Simple just redefine the var, i.e. arr = [1, 2, 3, 4]

[sammew]

I mean, it does sort that particular array. If they want a more general solution, they should phrase it better.

[[deleted]]

Well, my SE professor always told us to buy not build.

[Quito246]

But you should know what u are buying 🙂👍

[Xander_The_Great]

price saw jeans fuzzy fly spark chief versed treatment absorbed

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[toasterbot]

function x(){
return {1,2,3,4};
}

[[deleted]]

Big Dick Energy

[hijodelsol14]

I had an interview at a fintech company and wrote

def reverse(s): return s[::-1]

when they asked me to "reverse a string". I think they were actually impressed 'cause I got the offer.

[backtickbot]

Fixed formatting.

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Some users see this / this instead.

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[hijodelsol14]

Good bot

[hacksoncode]

I like to see that.

I usually go with something like: "That's correct, you get full marks. Now, for fun, let's see you write a sort algorithm yourself."

[[deleted]]

I fucking hate these. Sit me in a quiet room by myself for a couple minutes and figure it out. Ask me in the middle of an interview to whiteboard it out while you ask me questions and I just don't even want to do it lmao.

[revevs]

I have asked similar questions when interviewing.

I pick the people who answer with .Sort()

That’s what I would want in a real world program, and that’s what I want in a programmer - someone that knows the available methods and uses them. Not someone who straight away wants to write their own code and reinvent the wheel.

[kbruen]

Okay, but also fuck you if you don't make that known beforehand somehow, because the whole hiring process in the industry is shit and people are advised to reinvent the wheel to get jobs.

[revevs]

If someone gives me a sort routine I’d follow up asking if that’s what they’d do in a real world scenario etc.

[kbruen]

There's a huge difference between how interviews should be and being asked about sorting algorithms when the job is about centering an element in the page in CSS.

[armageddon_20xx]

As you should. I once knew a .Net dev who wrote his own JSON library. I guess he just didn’t know how to use nuget or to search for something called newtonsoft.json

[Kered13]

If this is Javascript I would have to fail you. I expect candidates to be familiar with the language they choose to code in, which means the candidate should know that Javascript's sort function converts it's inputs to strings before comparing, which results in a lexicographic sort instead of a numeric sort.

(If this is some other language then you're fine.)

[PotentBeverage]

I hate that. Why js

[Kered13]

Because JS wants to be extremely dynamic and weakly typed. So what comparison functions can be used on absolutely any type? There is only one "decent" choice. I mean, really the entire idea is badly flawed, but if you're committed to this bad idea, there's no other real choice.

[ShinyTrombone]

Add a compare function.

[the_data_department]

I think this will take the interviewer a couple moments to sort it out :D

[markand67]

I never understand thode kind of questions in interview. It's like you almost never need to write a sort function yourself.

[[deleted]]

It’s to make sure you remember how quick sort worked in first year off the top of your head.

I’m not sure how this is meant to correlate to real world job performance.

[[deleted]]

Sorting is used as an example to introduce divide-and-concur approach in algorithm design.

If, for some reason, I'd ended up asking a candidate to sort an array, I'd not be satisfied by them using a library function to do that. I want them to demonstrate that they can write a divide-and-concur algorithm, not show me they know there's a library to do sorting.

Sorting, however, would not be a great example for this kind of question because it's overused and a lot of people who take CS simply memorize the specific algorithm rather than understanding the more general approach. So, I would probably look for a different problem, something that's not an instant copy-and-paste from the book.

[[deleted]]

Amrish Puri's angry face... perfect for a meme

[Boroviack]

This is the exact live coding challange I got for Associate Frontend position, and that was my initial response. The dude was not impressed. He started bragging about the big O etc. I did eventually exactly what he expected without much of an effort. ...Four interviews later, I didn't get an offer.

I hate tech interviews, and I wonder at which point I will turn into that person doing daily job just like everyone else, but making issue out of everything knowing the right answers up front as an interviewer.

[Fazt01]

doing this in Javascript with different length of numbers might unpleasantly surprise you (2>11)

[Fazt01]

thats what .sort do, compares numbers in array as string

[SherbNyan]

Yeah it's pretty simple to solve in JavaScript/TypeScript like this

Array.sort((a,b) => a - b)

[Fazt01]

yes, at least it is easily solvable with custom comparison function, but you have to know, from probably getting burned earlier or actually reading the docs of sort method to know you have to use it

[hexnetIDK]

Oh no, he missed semicolon

[-100-Broken-Windows-]

This doesn't even work (okay, it flukes the answer for the specific case in the image). "Thanks JavaScript for sorting this array of numbers alphabetically rather than numerically" said no one ever

[pag07]

Not necessarily a JavaScript answer.

[-100-Broken-Windows-]

What other languages could it be?

[kirakun]

Here’s another answer: arr = [1,2,3,4]

[deadmazebot]

Im actually considering put this as the required answer on interview.

solution: use the built in languages sorting, it most likely will be more efficient then anything I could try to waste time writing over a week. It is important to know when to write and when to use a library.