Implementing breadth-first search isn't that complicated, right? You put nodes on a queue, ta da?

Some legit complaints there - I hadn't heard of the guy who wrote homebrew being rejected from Google which seems pretty lol, and in general I would agree that interviews are probably overreliant on whiteboard problems relative to how often those problems actually need to be solved in the course of doing your job - but at some point you need to be able to employ some problem solving unless you just want to spend your career being a robot writing the same code over and over for different projects.

I think a lot of otherwise good programmers have holes in their knowledge base which can be unfortunate in an interview setting when those specific holes are used as proxy for other things that they are good at but this particular person seems to have replaced any sense of perspective with mostly an unjustified sense of entitlement. Someone that's 2 years out of a CS program without much professional experience should not be complaining about being questioned on CS fundamentals and he should be aware that some of the questions he's answering successfully (and does not question) and other judgments being made in his favors are potentially unfair to many others. It's not really healthy to start blaming everyone and spin up narratives about how everything is broken to protect your own ego when you don't get an offer, which you should expect to happen most of the time.

After reading this post my best advice is to focus on acting like you've met humans before.

@goofyballer & @candybar

FWIW, in my view, Sahat wasn't very selective in who he interviewed with. One thing I've learned is get answers to specific questions about the role they are looking to fill, when they expect to fill that role, the qualifications they deem essential, and how they will make that determination. It saved me a lot of time in the last go round. I will play aling for a bit talking to recruiters be won't interview without knowing a lotmire than is in a job req.

Sahat gave a perfect lesson on the exact wrong way to try and get a job.

Go after name brand companies who are significantly more likely to have **** hiring practices while somehow having the arrogance to massively under-prepare.

Hiring is completely broken, but him publicly shaming these companies is like sneaking onto the highway and laying down and then getting hit by a drunk driver and blaming them.

Sure these companies have TERRIBLE hiring practices and hiring probably takes up WAY TOO much of their time, but you can literally spend 5 mins googling them and have a decent idea of what to prepare for.

The dude works at Yahoo, sure they are still doing interesting, difficult, and complex things there, but it's also super easy to imagine it being a wasteland of people doing a whole lot of nothing.

i read that and my first thought is, the interview process is working perfectly. they met you and sensed the cry-baby, tantrum-throwing person that you really are, and decided not to hire you despite thinking you were technically qualified and a capable dev...

I was really with him right up until "you can't expect me to know how to write a BFS can you??"

I mean... yeah? I can? I think those kinds of questions are fair game. I'm just not that happy with much more complicated or obscure stuff, where it really is a kind of roulette.

And yeah, I have written a BFS more than once since I graduated college.

The funniest part I thought was where he wrote "I am not a recent college graduate anymore" yet if you look him up, he graduated in 2014. Also, anecdotally BFS appears to be the single most common algorithm interview topic - I've had 4 interview loops so far (one more tomorrow!!!) and it already came up twice, both times as part of a larger problem. And every tech interview guide mentions BFS as a must-study - I have a hard time imagining a twenty-something recent graduate who apparently has a ton of time to work on all sorts of random stuff on github, yet not being prepared to implement a BFS, before going into these types of interviews.

2 years does seem like a lot longer time if you're 24 than 40, but yeah. That is by any reasonable definition a recent college graduate. I mean he's probably at his first job after college, right?

I have never come across BFS directly in an interview that I can remember. I have seen it some indirectly, or DFS, such as in questions like "find the minimum number of coins to make change" or something similar.

Yeah that would be a bad interview question because you're just testing for recall - both times I had to infer from the problem description that it was a graph search problem and that BFS was appropriate, then go ahead and implement it in the context of that problem. DFS came up once as well, similarly as part of a larger problem.

This repo is basically everything I was hoping to do with my node framework, to make it hackathon friendly, and much much more. Guess I can give up on that idea.

Quick JS question - I have some data in the server app that I want to use to generate HTML in pages that I serve to clients. From my research it sounds like I'm describing a template engine.

My research has also shown that popular options appear to be...
- Handlebars - I like the angular-like syntax but I don't see a lot of examples of how to utilize it server-side (related: would pay at this stage to never get another google search result from webapplog.com, where every article has at least 3 plugs for their membership/classes/whatever the **** is going on there)
- Jade - seems very common throughout random examples/tutorials I've been reading in past weeks but I hate the idea of having to write my HTML page in their pseudo-language to use it

So, which of the above are misconceptions on my part and what should I use?

I've never used either as I've always done angular on the front end getting json data from node, but looking at both I'd go with handlebars because having to learn that pseudo code would drive me nuts.

I mean what is the advantage of typing this

title= pageTitle
script(type='text/javascript').

instead of this

<title>Jade</title>
<script type="text/javascript">

Sure I had to look some **** up, but I saved typing 10 characters! woohoo!

also if you decided to switch over to html/angular or something else handlbars seems like it would be an easy cut/paste

Actually I can do that here too, that makes total sense. Thanks!

just use ejs.

i went thru all the hot templating engines in ruby at one point, and then realized for most things simple erb is better. not as much node experience, but i'm sure it's the same. if you know html, don't learn another abstraction layer on top of it. the small benefits won't be worth it.

what's funny is that in many ways the edited version is better than the original, despite being held up as parody.

I like Jade. Its simple to learn and the advantage is its whitespace and indent dependent meaning there's no way some idiot ****s up the formatting. Or yourself, YMMV.

my ideal thank you (as the gift giver) is:

Not sure anyone outside of tech would feel that way. Gramma doesn't want to see bullet points in her thank you letter.

This. The indent dependency and rendering engine validation actually catch a lot of HTML errors early - vs. trying to debug some weird behavior in the web inspector due to un-matching div tags or similar.

Mentioning that the sweater is blue is redundant too because daltonism is an exclusively male disability.

Another interview loop today and got another DFS problem so that's 2 BFS and 2 DFS in 5 interview loops. You gotta know your graph/tree traversal apparently these days.

obviously. i didn't mean you'd literally want to send the 2nd over the 1st. but it's closer than it seems. the 1st is breezy and full of unnecessary crap -- i get it's supposed to be part of the charm and all, and it has some charm, but it's too verbose. the 2nd takes efficiency too far and becomes robotic, but the original letter writer could improve by absorbing the same principles without going overboard.

You missed your calling as a romance poet.