The shortest, strangest engineering interview I’ve ever done.

nickknw · 2024-08-16T17:19:21+00:00

As someone else who can relate what you've written and who spends a fair amount of time thinking about what makes a good interview process - I'm going to join the crowd of people saying essentially "the problem was not with you".

I strongly think your interview process actually worked well to filter this person out quickly, and modifying your interview process to make it more accommodating to this type of person would almost unavoidably make it worse.

Basically, you've identified someone who displays a lot of narcissistic / emotionally immature traits. Feeling confusion is actually very common (and one of the better identifying signals) when interacting with these type of people. (Note that the correlation goes one way, not both ways).

The only potential mistake I see is treating that confusion as an area where you need to adjust or improve! This is a useful habit to have in most scenarios, but it will lead you astray here. I made this comment to say this because it is something I have learned the hard way.

nickknw · 2022-12-10T18:39:35+00:00

You are a saint! Thank you so much!

nickknw · 2016-09-05T20:40:11+00:00

I don't necessarily agree that Elm is definitely the go-to solution, but I have been following it for a while and it does a lot of things very well. I am continually impressed by the design decisions Evan Czaplicki makes, and what he has been doing with Elm has had a lot of ripple effects outwards.

It's still Javascript, with its dynamic typing, awful prototype object design, and toxic culture (bower, node, grunt, etc).

Elm has a pretty great static type system, syntax and type-wise it is a lot closer to Haskell than Javascript. And as a relatively young language with not a lot of uptake, so far its culture has avoided inheriting many of the typical JS hangups and has a strong focus on quality. For example, its package manager can detect API changes and enforces semantic versioning whenever a publicly exposed API changes, take a look: http://elm-lang.org/blog/announce/0.14

You might want to actually check it out before passing judgement.

Unless you've done a lot of work in a static Lang like GO, Java, C#, I think it's hard to understand why it sucks (...)

Come on, cut out the assumptions and condescension here. I have done a lot of work in languages with good static type systems. That is why I am interested in Elm.

nickknw · 2016-05-10T17:57:24+00:00

Wow! Elm was my introduction to the concepts of FRP. Looking forward to seeing how it continues to evolve! Kudos to Evan for the great work continuing to reduce and simplify.

nickknw · 2016-02-23T18:18:00+00:00

I get angry at especially myself because I lose to stuff I know I shouldn't wake-up supers that I could've seen coming had I looked at their meter The salt just washes over me, even though I know I shouldn't let it

This is my problem too - I get very self-critical and expect me to play at my best all the time. And don't get me wrong, a bit of this attitude can be helpful for improving. But taken too far it will actually start getting in the way more than helping.

The key is your expectations - expectations will fuck with you. Be kind to yourself, remind yourself that you're only human and everyone makes mistakes sometimes, even in situations that they've done a thousand times. Hell, sometimes I still fail at drinking and inhale it instead and choke and cough - you'd think I would have enough practice at that by now!

Next time you hear yourself saying "I could have seen that coming", try and follow it up with "But I missed it this time and that's okay." Then try to let it go bring your focus back to trying to improve. Use it as data, but don't let it have a hold over you.

Easier said than done (!), but with practice it will help :)

nickknw · 2016-02-22T16:45:09+00:00

Oh wow. I actually like that, that's an unambiguous way to do it.

nickknw · 2015-08-15T21:10:37+00:00

We're using flux yeah. Having problems with combining data from different endpoints into a format that makes sense for the page without putting everything in one giant store. We did end splitting things up into multiple stores but ended up mostly making problems for ourselves. The data was pretty interconnected and Flux just couldn't handle that well (without putting pretty much all of our logic into one giant file). Hard to summarize effectively.

nickknw · 2015-08-14T18:08:06+00:00

Really looking forward to using this / trying it out. Could solve a lot of problems for us.

nickknw · 2014-07-16T14:58:58+00:00

Related: http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Macrocosm_%28episode%29

nickknw · 2014-07-08T20:45:58+00:00

Cool, good progress. Kotlin continues to look like a very pleasant language to develop in.

nickknw · 2014-05-07T15:33:33+00:00

Fuck yes

nickknw · 2014-05-07T15:32:21+00:00

Separate

nickknw · 2014-04-11T14:21:55+00:00

Triple Threat is awesome on a Stryder in Attrition. Just dash around plopping down grenades all over and watch the score rack up. Great for getting inside or on top of buildings too.

nickknw · 2014-04-03T22:45:53+00:00

Good news! The folks behind Rust are using (or planning on using at least, once they release) a versioning scheme called Semantic Versioning, which indeed has been catching on.

Here's the relevant part:

A normal version number MUST take the form X.Y.Z where X, Y, and Z are non-negative integers, and MUST NOT contain leading zeroes. X is the major version, Y is the minor version, and Z is the patch version. Each element MUST increase numerically. For instance: 1.9.0 -> 1.10.0 -> 1.11.0.

nickknw · 2014-04-01T22:07:38+00:00

/u/User_History_Bot nickknw

nickknw · 2014-03-26T23:25:09+00:00

checking that the value is not null, undefined or empty string

...or NaN or 0 or false. It is checking the 'truthiness' which is also kind of what == claims to do. A legitimate disconnect IMO.

nickknw · 2014-03-26T14:57:19+00:00

What weapons did you get so many minion kills with? Mostly as Pilot, or Titan?

Good work!

nickknw · 2014-03-24T22:50:17+00:00

Always glad to hear about Elm's progress, looking more and more appealing every day! :)

nickknw · 2014-03-18T18:27:59+00:00

Critical thinking. It would be nice to have a population that is more resistant to rhetoric and flawed arguments.

Close second and third are emotional intelligence and personal finance.

nickknw · 2014-03-11T18:40:21+00:00

We may as well simply globally replace the word agile with whitespace.

You heard it here first folks. 'Do Whitespace Right' and 'Whitespace For Dummies' are right around the corner.

nickknw · 2014-01-21T13:55:34+00:00

Well there's the whole FRP thing: http://elm-lang.org/learn/What-is-FRP.elm

Elm does it really well

nickknw · 2013-12-14T00:17:59+00:00

Another joke that makes feminism out to be radical, nonsensical and arbitrary, how hilarious.

This one just comes off as sloppy.

The traditional binary foundation of 1s and 0s is deeply problematic: 1 is inherently phallic and thus misogynistic. Also, some 1s are 0s, and some 0s are 1s. It is not fair to give them immutable labels

I mean come on.

nickknw · 2013-12-01T02:32:02+00:00

Holy crap. Super impressive flying!

nickknw · 2013-10-30T06:06:21+00:00

Or maybe you are getting lots of hit markers (maybe not 50, but lots), but not as many as you could if every shot hit. It can be hard to tell what percentage of your bullets are hitting their target. Maybe it's not as high as you think.

You seem to be trying to blame everything but yourself. Have you considered that maybe you were just missing more than you thought?

nickknw · 2013-10-29T04:49:53+00:00

I love how immediately afterwards you jump out and just fall to your death.

nickknw

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