I guess I meant that relative to other professions we programmers seem to talk about it more here on 2+2. The BFI forums sees a little bit of this, but I think it is less than programmers.

Point taken that is very interesting trying to figure out good filter questions when interviewing candidates because it is so difficult to find a good one.

Interviews are not as important in most other competitive industries because credentials, experience and/or relationships pretty much define who you are in terms of what employers are looking for.

What did you learn yesterday/this week?
That you can legitimately talk about coq and bra (-ket notation) in math lectures.

What excites or interests you about coding?
Making machines my slaves before they become self consious.

What is a recent technical challenge you experienced and how did you solve it?
Windows VM crashed. Rebooted.

What UI, Security, Performance, SEO, Maintainability or Technology considerations do you make while building a web application or site?
Good content = SEO. Security is irrelevant, UI...should be usable by colorblind folks like me.

Talk about your preferred development environment.
Playboy mansion.

Which version control systems are you familiar with?
CTR+Z until the buffer runs out.

Can you describe your workflow when you create a web page?
Drink coffee, build webpage (drink coffee in between)

If you have 5 different stylesheets, how would you best integrate them into the site?
I'm rel-atively cool with any method.

Can you describe the difference between progressive enhancement and graceful degradation?
Yes.

How would you optimize a website's assets/resources?
Canadian CDN (NO WAY BECAUSE I THINK CNDN CDN SOUNDS FUNNY...FOR CRYPTO REASONS OR SOMETHING).

How many resources will a browser download from a given domain at a time?
It's probably an integer.

What are the exceptions?
Not the rule.

Name 3 ways to decrease page load (perceived or actual load time).
rm -rf *.html, reduce UX until visitors fade away, 301-goatse

If you jumped on a project and they used tabs and you used spaces, what would you do?
Recommit the entire codebase with 3 spaces= 1 tab

Write a simple slideshow page
a simple slideshow page

What tools do you use to test your code's performance?
Stopwatch.

If you could master one technology this year, what would it be?
Quantum computing.

Explain the importance of standards and standards bodies.
Life would be better without them, they limit creativity.

What is FOUC? How do you avoid FOUC?
I'm not sure you can use that word in an interview.

Explain what ARIA and screenreaders are, and how to make a website accessible.
I'm German..we don't like to talk about that.

Explain some of the pros and cons for CSS animations versus JavaScript animations.
What about generating CSS from JS. React is all the rage is it not?

I'm with jj on this one. I think I hired one person outright one time.

I was asked this once, and it was actually kind of easy in this situation, so I did give an answer. Despite being an impressive applicant, I couldn't hire her because she lived very far away, and she said she would move closer if she got the job. That puts too much on my conscience.

I've never wasted time on the clock.

I've definitely wasted time on the clock. On the flip side I can be pretty productive off the clock.

But I wouldn't assume they were spending work time doing it (unless it was explicitly part of their job or they came out and told me that).

I guess if somebody told me they spent a good chunk of their time at work answering stack overflow even though it wasn't part of their job I'd consider that a negative - but I doubt that would happen.

maybe i'm dense, but how does that put too much on your conscience?

http://www.glassdoor.com/blog/10-job...s-dont-answer/ number ten

It says right there that you can ask if they'll relocate (which I assume is what Dave was talking about).

I didn't ask. I won't ask any of those questions in an interview.

It would put too much on me because I'd have a very difficult time figuring out what to do if things didn't work out. Adding in the possibility of making someone homeless or making a huge change in their life for this job... its not worth it.

No one with a heart would ask an employee to travel 3 hours each way to start around minimum wage.

The distance question has been the most oft asked question of me. I live in LA, and this kind of question never struck me as unnatural. I could pull up a ton of job ads stating very specifically that the applicant must live within N miles to apply. I totally get that, living 15 miles away can mean a commute that randomly flows between 10 minutes and 2 hours. They just want to be sure I can make it to work on time, and from an employer's perspective, if someone is going to spend 4 hours a day in transport, they aren't going to last very long. In fact, I don't think I've ever NOT been asked this question, followed with "good, we don't want someone who lives in Santa Monica" or whatever town.

There was also other things that tipped me to "no," but that was the one item that really drove it home and was easiest to say, so in a way, I waffled it and didn't give a fully honest answer.

i don't get this - if she had better opportunities couldn't she just take those instead? maybe there's other circumstances that are motivating her to move to LA. personally, when i graduate i desperately hope to work somewhere that's not within a 900 mile radius of where i'm currently at, and i'd definitely be willing to make some sacrifices to do it (i live in North Dakota).

sidenote: what kind of programming jobs pay minimum wage or even close to it? i get so confused when i hear about how good the job market is and people charging $100/hour like it's nothing, people going from almost nothing to self-study+bootcamp --> 6 figures in ~1 year, and then i hear something like this. i realize some of those results are a result of survivorship bias from the type of people who make it into the better bootcamps and stuff, but the gap between that and minimum wage is so big, especially for someone who you describe as an "impressive applicant", i'm struggling to understand it.

mostly b), with a little bit of c), assuming they had a high rep and their answers looked good. i'd say 2K+ is a definite positive, and you probably start to drift into c) at the 30-40K level, though probably still a net positive. would have 0 a) and would find that reaction odd for any professional programmer nowadays, although not as odd for someone non-technical (although, tbh, in the age of fb and twitter, still odd)

Pew, I also don't understand dave's job/industry situation. I know nothing about LA as a tech employee though.

Salaries for people out of boot camps tend to be exaggerated or for very specific fields/geographies/backgrounds.

Well my work has started blocking 2+2 now for "gambling". So you'll probably be seeing a lot less of me.

Regarding the interview question, in the show the interview was already going well – so it made sense. But yeah I can see where it would be a judgment call at the moment.

I feel like if my work started doing that, either the company I was at before or my current job (helps that prior was video games and now is a kind of game-related startup), I'd feel comfortable going to the IT guys and being like "what the ****".

Glad you would and you definitely should. I'm originally from Ohio. Don't listen to people telling you there is nothing better out there. There is a lot of stuff that is better, trust me.

I'm not a developer.

In LA, I've seen jobs starting as low as $12 / hr for entry level positions and I've seen more than one job demand 3+ years of experience that want to start at $15 to $20 / hr.

The response to bootcamps is pretty dismal. If you are talking Hack Reactor who legitimately has something to show for it, then that is one thing, but for the most part, they are laughed at.

The applicant did want to be a developer, but as I don't work in a dev house, I didn't have anything for her to do to concentrate on that field. The requirements for my job is Excel (which essentially devolves to copy / pasting skills), typing fast, and an unusual ability to stay seated, which explains the low starting pay.

I can confirm that LA has strangely low pay with high experience requirements in job postings. It seems to be true across all industries, including programming.

It took us six months to get network connectivity from Rackspace back to our CMS environment. And we were hounding them every day as it held up development. I can't even imagine the Kafkaesque journey, which would ultimately lead nowhere, that I would go on if I even tried to address this.

Except it's not IT's fault. It's usually upper management getting together and thinking that it's a good idea. Ironically they are the same ones demanding certain sites be unblocked a day later after the web filter goes into effect. But then they forget that they implemented an approval process that puts the executives responsible for reviewing these request. But then it takes 24 hours because no one reads their emails!

But it's okay, I don't want work there anymore. I'm unemployed.

We had the filter forever. For some reason it just started blocking 2+2. The paranoid side of me is wondering if my browsing all day didn't actually have something to do with it.

Apparently websense or some filter provider just added two plus two. I've seen the complaints spread across other subforums.

You can use Google translate as a poor mans proxy though

Sometimes if you just type in forums.twoplustwo.com you should be able to get through. Otherwise yea, google translate works as a proxy.

that's even more confusing to me then, since i'm fairly sure i read on Quora once a Hack Reactor employee saying that the LA job market took the highest % of their graduates, given that geographic location is supposed to be one of the reason for their avg. salary numbers.

I'd be surprised if a majority of hack reactor grads ended up in LA. I mean the program is in SF and the bay area seems to have more web dev jobs if not programming jobs in general.

That said it's not like pay is totally suppressed in LA or anything. There is a start up scene and they tend to pay reasonably. I think it's just those types of jobs get washed out in the sea of non tech company crap in the city.

i think i read it was a plurality (and not the most by any significant margin) with LA being 1st and NY 2nd; i remember being surprised when i read it too for the same reason. there's also a chance i'm confusing it with App Academy or Dev Bootcamp, but they're in SF too anyway i think. can't seem to find the link atm, meh.

You can also just run an actual proxy. I used to do this at my last job though now I think of it, it probably was a bad idea since it was a financial firm and those types are serious about compliance, not to mention that I had the poor judgment to give accounts to other people. If anyone questions it, just tell them the filter was blocking some site that was actually useful.