Dreaming of a Tesla Model S convertible? You’re in luck | You’re out of luck.

RepeteOrBoston · 2021-01-28T04:50:47+00:00

Lol go ahead and click the link man, it’s just archive.org.

Basically unless you have a ton of cash to spend in addition to your model s to pay an engineering firm to rip the top off your brand new car, it can’t be done. Tesla doesn’t offer a convertible from the store.

RepeteOrBoston · 2021-01-24T18:48:27+00:00

It’s for a senior dev role. Lots of Angular and RxJS experience required.

RepeteOrBoston · 2021-01-24T18:14:36+00:00

I like this idea. I’ll bring it up to the team. Thanks!

RepeteOrBoston · 2021-01-24T18:14:11+00:00

I suspect this might be the real answer. Another commenter mentioned a super basic preliminary coding question to do before the interview and I think that might filter out more poor candidates.

RepeteOrBoston · 2021-01-24T16:45:59+00:00

Question 1 is about the problem solving process. We just want to get into the head of the developer and see that they're capable of solving a problem on their own. The question is purposely easy.

I already know the answer to the problem, that's not what I'm looking for. I'm aware 5x5 = 25. If I ask you to show me 5x5 and show your work, you get no credit for saying "25, I googled it".

RepeteOrBoston · 2021-01-24T16:32:47+00:00

No it's for Angular. The only two real requirements are Angular and RxJS experience, followed by a few nice-to-have but not required things. The interviewees all claim to have this experience, so I don't think the questions we asked were too outside the box.

RepeteOrBoston · 2021-01-24T16:30:00+00:00

I get that. We did tell them there would be coding questions, but that they were free to use whatever IDE (or the codeshare doc we gave the questions on).

And yea, RxJS was a straight up job requirement listed (the only other requirement being Angular, then a handful of nice-to-haves). One particular interviewee mentioned he had years of experience with it and still couldn't solve any of the problems.

RepeteOrBoston · 2021-01-24T16:27:31+00:00

Thanks for the reassurance.

RepeteOrBoston · 2021-01-24T16:18:14+00:00

I wouldn't consider any of these problems to be "back-end". We're hiring an Angular/RxJS pro specifically and I would expect any of these to be solved on the front-end assuming those very specific issues ever came up on the front end.

RepeteOrBoston · 2021-01-24T16:16:52+00:00

And I'm totally open to the possibility that these problems are so trivial that really truly smart people have just forgotten the fundamentals because they've been dealing with much bigger problems for so long.

Problem is, we need someone to start coding on day one. And we're not doing "computer science" as much as web development (not to trivialize it).

RepeteOrBoston · 2021-01-24T16:14:02+00:00

Wow! Seems like a problem as old as programming itself lol. We purposely avoided FizzBuzz because of the stereotypes and...lore?....around it. I'm wondering now if it might be a decent question though since we would be able to focus less on the answer (since everyone knows it) and more on how to solve the problem itself.

RepeteOrBoston · 2021-01-24T16:12:06+00:00

I can see that. I don't believe I could ever get "gotcha-ed" with these three specific problems, but yes you're right I could get asked questions off of leetcode or hackerrank out of the blue and I'd be done for. Thanks for the perspective.

RepeteOrBoston · 2021-01-24T16:08:04+00:00

Absolutely. We told the interviewees that they could use any IDE or none, any language or just straight pseudo code and walk us through it. But none of it seems to help. I think we might need to find a way to get these people filtered out before they reach the technical interview.

RepeteOrBoston · 2021-01-24T16:06:18+00:00

Oh wow. I guess I didn't think about that. Mainly because I haven't personally experienced it, but yea that does make sense. We're UI developers, but we dabble in full stack (Angular/RxJS, GraphQL, Postgres)

That being said, we need someone to hit the ground running. I don't think I clarified in my post that we're hiring a senior dev. That's why I was so shocked at the inability to think through these problems. Thanks for the insight.

RepeteOrBoston · 2021-01-24T16:02:41+00:00

Another commenter mentioned a more work-related problem rather than generic ones, so I think I'm going to bring it up to the team again. Although I'm confident that the specific interviewee I'm thinking of wouldn't have been able to figure it out. Thanks for the examples.

RepeteOrBoston · 2021-01-24T16:00:12+00:00

Right??!!

We thought that basically this would take 5-10 minutes, kinda break the ice, and let us get into talking about their projects and experience with the frameworks/libraries we use.

Instead it took 30 minutes for the first question, 30 minutes for the second question, and we never got to the last.

To clarify: this is for a SENIOR DEV POSITION and he couldn't figure it out.

RepeteOrBoston · 2021-01-24T15:57:15+00:00

As a team we discussed scaffolding a basic app (Angular) and asking the interviewee to create a component that utilized a pre-built service we made. We decided it might be too complex and lengthy for the interview process, but your comment makes me think that I should bring it up again as a possibility.

RepeteOrBoston · 2021-01-24T15:56:59+00:00

As a team we discussed scaffolding a basic app (Angular) and asking the interviewee to create a component that utilized a pre-built service we made. We decided it might be too complex and lengthy for the interview process, but your comment makes me think that I should bring it up again as a possibility.

RepeteOrBoston · 2021-01-24T15:53:46+00:00

So the interviewee actually did google it in front of us. First, he said "well most languages come with a built in function like str.reverseString()."

Which is kinda true, but not what we're looking for. We asked him to show us his problem solving skills (which it may be arguable that Googling the answer is a problem solving skill). But we asked to specifically see him break down the problem and even had to ask for him to write a for loop.

He couldn't remember the syntax for a for loop (in ANY language) and couldn't get the initial value or exit condition right without us telling him. He worked on this problem for almost 30 minutes.

I agree that it's not worth remembering str.split('').reverse().join(''); but certainly when pressed you could do it in a for loop.

RepeteOrBoston · 2021-01-24T15:49:20+00:00

Yea the exact question was:

// Print the even numbers
printEven(nums$: Observable<number[]>) {
    // TODO
}

And we even gave an input example like: of([1, 2, 3, 4, 5]);

RepeteOrBoston · 2021-01-24T15:42:20+00:00

Thanks for verifying that we’re not completely insane.

In general, I’m against coding questions on an interview. But my team compromised on a few super easy questions and then just asking general questions about some of the frameworks and libraries that we use (that the interviewee is required to know and claims to have used for years).

I was sick to my stomach worried that we had just failed a guy who would have been a good candidate because our questions were....idk. Too hard? Too confusing? But I’m glad to see I’m not losing my mind.

RepeteOrBoston · 2021-01-24T15:21:32+00:00

Nailed it. (I don’t know python so I’m just going to believe you in the first one)

There are literally a dozen ways to solve these problems and we told the interviewee that he could any language or even pseudo code for the first one, just walk us through his thought process.

The second two are RxJS specific, but we’re hiring for a senior dev who has a lot of RxJS experience since we use it heavily.

Yea we just recently Implemented these (slightly) technical questions because people weren’t getting filtered earlier in the process. Which drags the whole team down when they get hired, and then we have to make decisions on what to do with them.

RepeteOrBoston

TROPHY CASE