i think it has some use in distinguishing between the guys who have really done this for two years banging their head against the desk debugging mysterious behavior vs the guys who have grinded interview prep for two weeks.

Not much. Why not ask questions about how they approach and go about rooting difficult problems if that is a key skill skill that is required? Ask questions about avoiding difficult problems that are hard to find.

I think that someone that has grinded interview prep is much more likely to answer trivia questions and gotchas like this correctly than someone that has been dev-ing actual systems for production for x years.

Laziness, risk aversion, incompetence all contribute to this phenomona you mention. Is there less risk to the hiring team in advocating the rejection of a candidate or advocating the hiring of a candidate?

I dunno. I've been grinding the typescript in angular world for almost 2 years and never encountered anything like this. We don't write code like this.

Fwiw all the bang your head repeatedly bugs have had to do with open observable subscriptions or race conditions.

This is one of those kinds of questions that experienced interviewers often say provide negative value.

Baseless trashing is dumb. Java isn't my preferred language, but it accomplishes a lot (higher level than C/C++ without sacrificing much speed). Only thing I'd hate about it is that forces OOP.

IDE's make sense if they provide value, e.g. Eclipse or Intellij for Java. Otherwise, it makes 0 sense to use an IDE for python, for example (haven't checked, but I don't think there are any good IDE for python).

LOL at programming language trivia questions. This is like exhibit #1 on why standard whiteboard interviewing is terrible, but less terrible than all other methods.

pycharm is quite good.

A girl today in my onsite interview talked about "munging the data" and all I could think of was the urban dictionary definition of munging. Definitely threw me off my game for a few minutes.

Oh yeah - other fun part of the interview. I had been told on the phone prior about this "grey beard" (which I also have some) who owns patents and wrote half of Akamai's software. Cool, sounds like a great guy to learn from. So I meet first with the head of engineering, then I am to meet with exalted Greybeard.

Right before he gets in the other guy says "You worked with Spring right?' Yeah, like 10 years ago. "Did you like it?" Well the config files were kind of annoying. "Um, don't say anything bad about Spring, Greybeard loves it." Ok.

Greybeard (which was really more like bald with salt & pepper goatee) then proceeds to trash node for the first 15 minutes of the interview. Sweet.

I could tell the other devs were all fairly junior and terrified of Greybeard. I think my role would be to bridge the gap somehow. Note I think Greybeard is actually a little younger than me, but has been coding a little longer.

Fun stuff.

lol. it sounds like kissing grey beards ass is the key to getting that job.

I did pretty much. But I don't think I want the job. It's a brutal commute and the other contract job seems better.

Also I may get an offer tomorrow on a much better job that's closer to me. So it's hard for me to be on my interview game when that's in the back of my mind.

Just found out my app at work doesn't have gzip enabled on production (4mb javascript bundle download) and none of the back end engineers I talked to really knew what it even was. Its been out there for a year plus. Yiiiikes.

Wtf I thought that was automatic on any webserver.

Oh yeah last funny thing - one of the junior devs interviewing me was SHOCKED that I couldn't wear shorts at my previous job at mega-corp.

Not even close, although it is usually an easy config option away.

Up until not that long ago shirt and tie was mandatory at IBM.

What do you find most useful about it? I don't think I could give up vim + i3 so easily.

Linux + strong text editor + strong tiling manager = IDE

And it would be better if python were typed.

You can use vim inside of pycharm

This is probably generally true, but in many cases its probably a lot easier to just go IDE.

Especially when you have IDEs that are customized to specific languages/technologies and it can take someone a lot of time to reproduce that for their own environments.

I'll try to keep this brief, there's a lot of stuff.

Some of the things, you can get from other sources, but it's nice to have tightly integrated, like
* debugger
* linter
* correctness checking, to a degree (it will show you things that will be syntax errors or missing imports or improper indendation or improper punctuation etc)
* symbol completion (including even hash keys)

The ability to run test suite from code, and be able to jump directly to tests that failed. Ditto the ability to run code coverage and be able to look at the file and see uncovered lines. I can run the whole test suite, or say "run all the tests in this folder/file" or "run this test." You can do this on the command line with pytest but it's so immediate in the IDE comparitively. I am used to just hitting ctrl-shift-f10 in whatever test function I'm working on and having the test run, output show on my 2nd monitor

The way you can highlight any function or class and be taken directly to where it's defined.

The way files loading works - it understands partial file names, like if I want to open
src/foo/bar/my_thing.py
I can type in f/b/my and it'll find it or even just my_t, almost any partial incomplete version of it. This is very addictive and when I'm at someone else's computer very frustrating. It does the same search semantics when you go look for symbols too, soo MyFooClass I can look for by typing in mfc or myf or mclass etc.

The ability to easily refactor. It understands import semantics so if I want to change a function or class name it will change all the places it's referenced. If I want to move something to a different file it will fix all my imports for me.

It shows me any uncommitted lines I have, and I can look at that chunk's diff and revert just that chunk if desired

It also has basic understanding of related technologies - it does syntax highlighting, linting/syntax checking on
* bash
* any python related template language
* javascript
* C/c++
* probably some other stuff that I don't usually use

It understands most python frameworks and includes their idiosyncracies. It understands docker and virtualenvs and stuff like that.

Really what it does for me is reduce my mental load

Freaking recruiters man. I've got one giving me the full court press and the other was supposed to have an offer today and I haven't heard a peep.

So I ask the full court press one if he can go up to $85/hr to cover the health insurance I'm gonna have to pay out of pocket. He says he'll ask the client, but only if that will guarantee my acceptance. Because I've been honest with him about this whole process, the only way he knows it will guarantee my acceptance is if the other offer if off the table or low. And there goes my leverage.

Also **** you - eat the $5 yourselves in your ****ty-ass no health insurance fly-by-night shop. I'll probably convert in < 6 months anyway so who cares about another $5?

And no I don't want to talk to you on the phone. I hate talking on the phone anyway and this **** is horrible. I hate hate hate it. Everything should just have a price - take it or leave it.

Also **** every article about "YOU HAVE TO NEGOTIATE ZOMG". I've successfully negotiated at a new job once, and that was a contract to hire conversion at my old company where they pretty much tell you there's $5k on the table - so you'll feel like a big boy who negotiated.

Have you guys successfully negotiated upward hourly rate, new full time, or contract conversion to full time?

My inbox the last 3 weeks lol.