** UnhandledExceptionEventHandler :: OFFICIAL LC / CHATTER THREAD **
04-30-2015
, 02:14 PM
Quote:
I'm starting to sound like a broken record but if your technical interview is such that there's no objective way to distinguish between the candidates and you're left to nitpick about style choices that reasonable people can disagree on, you're doing it wrong. If too many people are able to give the right answer, make the question harder.
If you need to hire a mathematician, would you give the candidates middle-school math problems and hire the ones who wrote down the prettiest looking answers using whatever methods that you would've used?
Subjectivity in a technical screen is dangerous because ultimately most interviewers have little skin in the game and most engineers aren't well-equipped to judge others on qualities that don't have much to do with technical ability. Letting your interviewers give easy problems that are graded subjectively effectively takes the "technical" out of the technical interview, which is bad news because your interviewer is neither well-trained to read people, nor particularly incentivized to care.
If you need to hire a mathematician, would you give the candidates middle-school math problems and hire the ones who wrote down the prettiest looking answers using whatever methods that you would've used?
Subjectivity in a technical screen is dangerous because ultimately most interviewers have little skin in the game and most engineers aren't well-equipped to judge others on qualities that don't have much to do with technical ability. Letting your interviewers give easy problems that are graded subjectively effectively takes the "technical" out of the technical interview, which is bad news because your interviewer is neither well-trained to read people, nor particularly incentivized to care.
I'm trying to learn to code to prepare for a junior coding position at some point - just wondering how I'd stack up vs others if questions like this are given.
I'm not the CEO of a large organization coming on 2+2 for help creating coding tests for the PMs to give potential candidates
04-30-2015
, 02:20 PM
Quote:
Hmm, ok cool, I'm sure there's some good stuff in here for someone but come again?
I'm trying to learn to code to prepare for a junior coding position at some point - just wondering how I'd stack up vs others if questions like this are given.
I'm not the CEO of a large organization coming on 2+2 for help creating coding tests for the PMs to give potential candidates
I'm trying to learn to code to prepare for a junior coding position at some point - just wondering how I'd stack up vs others if questions like this are given.
I'm not the CEO of a large organization coming on 2+2 for help creating coding tests for the PMs to give potential candidates
04-30-2015
, 02:46 PM
Can you restate the question a little better? IE no one's going to click a blog post link. Are you asking if that code is optimal? If so what's the problem?
04-30-2015
, 02:56 PM
So candybar gave me permission to show his initial response to my assigment:
So yeah I got this before the feedback from X, and I was like "oh ok, yeah that's on another level". If they would have come back with this, I would have basically had no reason to quibble.
Then the feedback from X came in, which I shared with candybar, and here's his response:
Then I felt much less suicidal. 
Btw candybar I can put you in touch with a guy at X if you're interested and willing to move to Los Gatos.
If I'd have gotten your feedback before I turned in my submission I could be on my way there. And in all sincerity after all this I'm really glad that didn't happen. And in the end I still got to reject them, albeit for the 3rd bridesmaid spot.
Quote:
I can go on further but I think you get the point. Given the description, I think they wanted you to essentially create a mini-framework that can solve many more problems than what was specified, and I think you took it a little more literally as, solve this particular problem in a simple straightforward manner. Hope this helps!
- Given their warning against Angular/Ember, I think using jQuery Templates may have been considered a bit of cheating, because you're taking advantage of its data-binding facilities, even if it has to be invoked manually. I'm not so sure about this though.
- Your navPanel is hard-coded and not data-driven, which I think goes against their directions. They do mention having to support n categories and x movies, but your solution is limited to the four hard-coded categories.
- Actually you may have misinterpreted their "we'll ask you questions like these" as don't architect for these yet, but have some strategies in mind for the interview that you're willing to discuss. I think the safe interpretation here is, have your app architecture explicitly take these extensibility concerns and more that you can imagine into account.
- With that in mind, I think they basically wanted you to create a hierarchical, container-based framework with event delegation. That's what the question "How would your key handling accommodate dozens more UI components, like episode selection and playback controls?" reads like to me. That way, if you were to replace, say one of the items in the list with a completely different component, you can. Also, if you want to replace the entire list panel with some other component, you can. Right now, there's some vague hint of componentization, but a lot of it is hard-coded and keystrokes aren't passed down in a hierarchical fashion, but from top level to the panel level, so you're limited to two levels of mostly predefined, hardcoded components. That's completely fine for a lot of things but if you read between the lines, that goes against their expectations.
- On a related note, this means your top-level composition doesn't at all resemble how your secondary-level composition looks. This prevents further hierarchical composition - what if your list panel is composed of several different panels?
- Also on a related note, your controller instances aren't properly scoped to its corresponding view and only manage to find their view through global selectors. This means you can't use any given controller more than once, for example.
- In general, your model is very shallow and the vast majority of logic is hard-coded in your raw controllers - I think they wanted it the other way around so that a deep application model that's hierarchically structured is uniformly interpreted by a core framework with just a bit of glue code specializing each component (events/view)
I can go on further but I think you get the point. Given the description, I think they wanted you to essentially create a mini-framework that can solve many more problems than what was specified, and I think you took it a little more literally as, solve this particular problem in a simple straightforward manner. Hope this helps!
Then the feedback from X came in, which I shared with candybar, and here's his response:
Quote:
Actually looking at their feedback, I'm not sure they know what they are doing either. I mean, who cares about constants and namespaces in an interview question - I did notice the namespace issue but I really didn't think they'd have a problem with it! And the level at which they were talking about code reuse, I don't know, seems kind of shallow. They are clearly a UI/UX specialist group and the problem with specialists is that they tend to lose perspective as to exactly which portions of their knowledge are essential and which are incidental. This is why otherwise great developers are often terrible interviewers. Judging people on their interpretation of vaguely worded interview questions is kind of silly.
Btw candybar I can put you in touch with a guy at X if you're interested and willing to move to Los Gatos.If I'd have gotten your feedback before I turned in my submission I could be on my way there. And in all sincerity after all this I'm really glad that didn't happen. And in the end I still got to reject them, albeit for the 3rd bridesmaid spot.
Last edited by suzzer99; 04-30-2015 at 03:03 PM.
04-30-2015
, 03:24 PM
Code:
console.log( makeBoard(8,8) );
function makeBoard(w,h) {
var row = repeatStr(' #', w) + "\n";
return repeatStr(row, h);
}
function repeatStr(str, n) {
return new Array(n+1).join(str);
}
