Quora Feeds
Active Member
Robert Old
I recently suceeded in an interview for my first dev role. For context, my coding is entirely self-taught, and I only started studying Java seriously in about August, having previously dipped into C++ during my physics study to make get a job done.
To get to the interview I was given a multiple choice test, which I actually found reasonably tricky- lots of emphasis on finer technical points such as the order in which superclass and subclass constructors were called when creating a member of an inherited class, I.e. Stuff that just did not matter to me in the simple toy code I’d encountered.
I was told that this was imposed in response to a large number of time-wasting applicants who essentially had very little proficiency in the tools listed on their cv.
In the actual interview, I was given a laptop with an IDE open and asked to write a program that found the largest and smallest values in an array of integers. This seemed almost childishly simple. I got told later that the point was mainly to check that I wrote re-usable functions to do it, and didn’t just stick everything in main(), which some candidates had done. If you consider that this was for a Java role, I.e. using the object-oriented language par excellence, that’s a pretty shockingly low bar.
So yes, it’s clear that there are people out there who simply have no business applying for developer jobs. And this actually sort of makes sense at the entry level- software engineering is different from computer science in the same way physics is different from engineering. I have a PhD in particle physics, but my practical skills are taxed by wiring a plug. A computer science degree does not automatically mean you can code, from what I gather.
I’d also add that as some others have alluded to, my hands were shaking with nerves as I set to work on that interview problem, in spite of its relative ease. As I’d been messing around with Python as well, I found myself second -guessing whether arrays were declared with curly or square brackets, and other such trivia. So I’m quite sure that perfectly competent people have let themselves down coding under pressure in interviews.
See Questions On Quora
Continue reading...
I recently suceeded in an interview for my first dev role. For context, my coding is entirely self-taught, and I only started studying Java seriously in about August, having previously dipped into C++ during my physics study to make get a job done.
To get to the interview I was given a multiple choice test, which I actually found reasonably tricky- lots of emphasis on finer technical points such as the order in which superclass and subclass constructors were called when creating a member of an inherited class, I.e. Stuff that just did not matter to me in the simple toy code I’d encountered.
I was told that this was imposed in response to a large number of time-wasting applicants who essentially had very little proficiency in the tools listed on their cv.
In the actual interview, I was given a laptop with an IDE open and asked to write a program that found the largest and smallest values in an array of integers. This seemed almost childishly simple. I got told later that the point was mainly to check that I wrote re-usable functions to do it, and didn’t just stick everything in main(), which some candidates had done. If you consider that this was for a Java role, I.e. using the object-oriented language par excellence, that’s a pretty shockingly low bar.
So yes, it’s clear that there are people out there who simply have no business applying for developer jobs. And this actually sort of makes sense at the entry level- software engineering is different from computer science in the same way physics is different from engineering. I have a PhD in particle physics, but my practical skills are taxed by wiring a plug. A computer science degree does not automatically mean you can code, from what I gather.
I’d also add that as some others have alluded to, my hands were shaking with nerves as I set to work on that interview problem, in spite of its relative ease. As I’d been messing around with Python as well, I found myself second -guessing whether arrays were declared with curly or square brackets, and other such trivia. So I’m quite sure that perfectly competent people have let themselves down coding under pressure in interviews.
See Questions On Quora
Continue reading...
