• themusicman@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    “Introductions and a bit of smalltalk” - I would shit myself if an interviewer started asking about smalltalk… /s

    • Pandantic [they/them]@midwest.social
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      7 months ago

      I was thinking the same thing. I mean, I just did a coding test for a potential job, and I know I did at least as good as, and likely better than this.

      edit: just to prove to myself, I went ahead and wrote the program without looking things up. I’m self-taught so I feel pretty proud. It took about 25 mins, and it works!

  • TowardsTheFuture@lemmy.zip
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    7 months ago

    As someone who teachers high school freshmen computer science this pains me as most of my freshmen could do all of these.

  • Cano@lemm.ee
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    7 months ago

    Still in university, never did an interview. Is that seriously the avarage difficulty of interview questions?

    • themusicman@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      This is on the easier end of the scale to be sure, but as someone who’s interviewed candidates with similar questions, it eliminates a surprising number of people…

      My theory is that modern coding bootcamps stuff their students full of buzzwords instead of letting them learn the basics

        • themusicman@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          Which shouldn’t be surprising. The company I was interviewing at only feed me the top ~1% of CVs to interview… Of course half of them were stuffed with bullshit

          • KevonLooney@lemm.ee
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            7 months ago

            Yeah, this is the problem. Someone who has legitimately built a basic application or website from scratch may know everything you need, but HR will filter it out.

            They don’t really understand what they are looking for, so someone who says they are an AI Researcher with 8 years of experience in the language “Zendaya” and work experience at five moon rocket startups will be at the top of the pile.

            Companies need to beef up their training programs so they can literally take in whoever and teach them what they need to know. Forget trying to get the top people. Just take the first 20 who can make it through an interview without drooling on the floor. You will probably get at least 9 ok developers and 1 good one.

    • Red@reddthat.comOP
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      7 months ago

      When I interview people, I don’t care how they get an answer, I want to see that they can get to the answer, ideally the correct one, but it doesn’t matter if it’s wrong. I want them to show me their problem solving skills and that they understand their own solution.

      If you can read existing code and understand complexities you are already better than 80% of these hires.

    • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.me
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      7 months ago

      That’s like stage one where you filter out the obviously incompetent ones.

      You wouldn’t believe how many candidates with years of experience can’t figure out those simple problems. Or even the super well known fizzbuzz.

      It’s insane, people will claim like 2-3 years of experience with Ansible, they can’t even get a file copied. Couple years of Python, they don’t understand async, generators and other pretty basic features.

      People have always been lying a bit about their experience but it’s getting way, way out of control.

      • Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social
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        7 months ago

        Knowing specific features of a language is one thing, but not being able to even pseudocode a FizzBuzz shows they lack the basic logical problem solving ability that programmers need.

    • dracs@programming.dev
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      7 months ago

      You might get something harder after that. But there’s a reason one of the most common code interview questions is FizzBuzz. There’s a shocking number of applicants that can’t do it.

    • OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml
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      7 months ago

      The last interviews I wrote the job posting for and conducted, I made it clear we give you a GPT4 subscription for the job so I expect you to demonstrate your ability to use it as a tool during the interview