Comments on: I’m an Engineer, Not a Compiler

By: Michael Dorf

Michael Dorf — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 22:09:07 +0000

It’s time someone finally get this crap out from under the rug. These interview questions have become ridiculous in recent years as more and more “stock” interview question articles hit the space. Before you know, you forget the whole purpose this guy is here for and just want to GRILL, GRILL, GRILL! Thanks for a thoughtful post!

By: fangbianmian

fangbianmian — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 18:21:41 +0000

cannot agree more. for years I’ve been frustrated by so many nano-questions. I’ve been programming for years, and using dozens of languages. But I have a loose memory for syntax. The syntax is up to the compiler. The architecture is up to people. Don’t ask people to behave like a machine!

By: Ratking

Ratking — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 06:58:50 +0000

I’m an engineer, not a compiler, a grammar checker, a spell checker, a thesaurus, a dictionary, an almanac, or an encyclopedia. (Did I cover them all?) :-)

By: quess

quess — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 01:02:42 +0000

It all depends in the context of the conversation they were having i guess!

You can tell by the conversation that the person doesnt have technological background. Fallowing the conversation he could just answer with a question like: What do you mean with Strongly Type? Variables doesn’t have to be declare with a type like Int, Char, Etc. ex: Php, JavaScript? or the fact that the programming lenguage allows casting, ex: C, blah blah? Etc.

By: Hugo Estrada

Hugo Estrada — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 22:32:43 +0000

Good point on the favorite language. Depending on the problem, there are some languages that are better than others, either because of language features or due to its library ecosystem.

By: Developer Dude

Developer Dude — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 17:42:12 +0000

And good employees are hard to find, so it is up to the employer to not waste their time and the time of the interviewee by asking silly trivial questions that are not really an indicator of proficiency or skill. If such questions are the best you can come up with to weed out false positives then your workplace probably isn’t as good as you think it is.

I’ve never given an employer a false idea of my experience or skills, but they have often fooled me as to their competence – again, as you said, by talking a good game but not walking the walk. I now try harder to learn more about them, but they have the advantage; it is pretty hard to find out the truth about a workplace and the people you are going to work with – they don’t provide references like I often do.

Sometimes there are red flags in what they say in an interview, sometimes I catch them right away, sometimes it takes some thought, sometimes I miss them altogether (like the employer I went to work for that had not installed a VCS yet despite having a s/w dev group for over a year).

By: Developer Dude

Developer Dude — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 16:44:05 +0000

Yet another person who thinks knowing where a tool is equates to knowing how to use it. *sigh*

Then you compound it by calling people with poor rote memory for inconsequential details, liars. Nice. So you’re judgmental about silly things too. Thank you for not hiring me based on your silly test – I am glad I don’t work with or for you, life is just too short to deal with people like you on a daily basis.

As for my “favorite” language, I don’t have one, but I can suggest appropriate languages for different problems if you tell me what kind of problem you want to solve.

By: jaydelatorred

jaydelatorred — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 16:26:15 +0000

Absolutly true, I have had many interviews and test like this, instead of focus in real engineer. Skills … Pretty goood…..

By: Petr Jiricka

Petr Jiricka — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 15:15:51 +0000

Based on my experience as an interviewer, asking nano-questions is not necessarily bad, the important thing is how the answers are interpreted. E.g. if someone tells me that he’s been programming in Java 8 hours a day for the last 5 years, and then does not know that List is in java.util, then this tells me that he/she is a liar, as someone with that much experience would surely know it. On the other hand, if he/she tells me that during the last 5 years they’ve done some Java programming, but also a lot of JavaScript, .NET, Scala, Erlang and Ruby, and then does not know that List is in java.util, then I won’t hold it against them and make it clear that I am not making the decision based on this answer. And also, this person should be in a great position to answer the “favorite language” question, which I agree is a very good question.

By: Some Guy

Some Guy — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 12:08:25 +0000

Some idiot at LinkedIn insisted on giving me the kinds of interview questions you describe here, and he wouldn’t drop the script when I suggested we talk about my experience, and how it relates to what he needed to get done.

He was looking for an engineer to take over their iPhone app, and I’m a guy who’s been developing code in Objective-C since the NeXT days. He managed to offend me enough that I deleted my LinkedIn account.

These days, I’m at Apple, where I’ve never been asked a stupid question in an interview.