Journal turgid's Journal: The Other Side of the Table 6
In recent times I've been fortunate enough to be the one conducting interviews instead of the one being interviewed. It's been an eye-opening experience. The first few times I was very nervous in case I asked a wrong/stupid question. I wouldn't want to put someone off or give a bad impression of the company.
Without wanting to sound conceited or pompous, I have been absolutely astounded at the apparent lack of ability of some candidates.
Put it this way: I'm completely self taught. I have spoken to people who are claiming to have developed software for nearly 20 years in some cases and make a big song and dance about all the hardware they've programmed for, and all the fancy IDEs, static analysis tools, industry standards they've followed etc. and about their wonderful C and C++ skills.
But what really beats me is how anyone can have been coding for longer than a fortnight and not know what an array is, or to have been doing C++ for 15 years and not know about parameterised types.
Heck (Score:2)
Heck, I'm no programmer at all (more a PHB), but I could fake my way through explaining both of those.
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Terminology (Score:1)
Ok, for the array, that's weird... I've done my share of C and C++ programming and reading this I was like "I don't know what parametrised types are". So, I googled it and it seems you talk about templates. See, there... failed your interview already. I know about them, don't particularly like them because you never know who will maintain your code and this stuff isn't exactly simple.
Anyway, just wanted to say that.
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You wouldn't have failed my interview :-)
This was an interview for a senior software engineer (so one step below team leader) and this guy claimed to have been doing C++ since the early 1990s. I was trying to gauge how much he knew. I didn't say to him, "So what are parameterised types?" I tried to get him to tell me some of the features in C++ that help with code reuse etc. and I was trying to be diplomatic and lead him into answering the question. When I basically explained it, he looked amazed and when I
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I'd love to work in that industry. Any openings in Luxembourg? ;-) 1MB of RAM still considered a luxury? I like challenges like that. Mean and lean data structures, if you can use them at all. Last time I did something f
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I'd love to work in that industry. Any openings in Luxembourg? ;-) 1MB of RAM still considered a luxury?
Unfortunately not..
We have stuff that runs on PIC chips with 14-bit address buses and other stuff with 64-bit CPUs running Linux. It's pretty cool.
Me, vi, my C compiler and valgrind. Hours of fun.
You'd fit right in :-)