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Only PHP programmers post something like this as an image! 😘
This actually gives me so,e confidence in my programming skill level.
I was thinking the same thing. I mean, I just did a coding test for a potential job, and I know I did at least as good as, and likely better than this.
Yeah, I use Python as a hobby and I my biggest project is a discord bot that does a bunch of things. Just for kicks I tried answering the questions without google and made working solutions. I don’t know if they are optimal but they work and I didn’t have to look things up.
You two are doing fantastic and I love you.
Still in university, never did an interview. Is that seriously the avarage difficulty of interview questions?
When I interview people, I don’t care how they get an answer, I want to see that they can get to the answer, ideally the correct one, but it doesn’t matter if it’s wrong. I want them to show me their problem solving skills and that they understand their own solution.
If you can read existing code and understand complexities you are already better than 80% of these hires.
This is our approach when we ask what is system, out, and println in System.out.println(). Just talk it out. Look at capitalization.
We eliminate half our candidates when they can’t even answer what is static in Java. Or what is object oriented programming. Ours is less coding tests and more explaining Java concepts.
Just to be sure (I haven’t done a lot of java and don’t exactly like it):
static in OOP means that we don’t need an Object of a class to call a static Method or access a static value, right?
Correct. It’s mainly used for quick helper methods where you don’t need an object context like the Math class. It’s also used for class variables like out stream in the System class.
So. Many. People think it means it’s a constant variable.
To be fair, the static keyword is overused in various languages and has various other purposes.
IIRC: C has both static functions and variables. Static variables keep their value for the next time a function is called, no idea what static meant for function declaration.
Rust has static variables, which are similar to constants but can be abused as global variables.
That’s true, but these are also the same people who say they are a 9/10 in Java at career fairs. I’ve been working in Java for 10+ years and I’d still only consider myself an 8/10 maybe.
You might get something harder after that. But there’s a reason one of the most common code interview questions is FizzBuzz. There’s a shocking number of applicants that can’t do it.
I always feel bad when I try out a new coding problem for interviews because I feel I’m going to offend candidates with such an easy problem (I interview mostly for senior positions). And I’m always shocked by how few are able to solve them. The current problem I use requires splitting a text into words as a first step. I show them the text, it’s the entire text of a book, not just some simple sentence. I don’t think I’ve had a single candidate do that correctly yet (most just split by a single space character even though they’ve seen it’s a whole book with newlines, punctuation, quotes, parentheses, etc).
I am curious how you’d deal with the ambiguity of contractions vs. ending single quotes. I guess that character between letters can be assumed to be part of the word, but not if it’s between a letter and a space, for example. If you ignore contractions, hyphenated words, and accented characters, you could just match on
/[a-zA-Z]+/.I am curious how you’d deal with the ambiguity of contractions vs. ending single quotes
That’s the thing, nobody even asks this question.
you could just match on
/[a-zA-Z]+/That would already put you in the top 10% of solutions I’ve seen so far on this problem.
My confidence in my job security and general programming abilities has skyrocketed after visiting this thread
That is totally a non-trivial problem, which requires a lot more conception before it can be solved. Even for English, this is not well defined: Does “don’t” consist of one or two words? Should “www.google.com” be split into three parts? Etc.
And don’t let me start with other languages: In French, “qu’est-ce que” is one word (what). In the German sentence “Ruf mich an.”, the “Ruf an” is one word (call) while mich is another word (me). In Chinese, you usually don’t even have spaces between words.
If I got that feature request in a ticket, I’d send it back to conception. If you asked me this question in an interview, I’d ask if you wanted a programmer, a requirements analysis, or a linguist and why you invite people for a job interview if you don’t even know what role you are hiring for.
In the German sentence “Ruf mich an.”, the “Ruf an” is one word (call) while mich is another word (me).
They’re both parts of the verb anrufen but I’ve never heard someone say they’re still a single word when there’s a space (or more) inbetween
There is no single definition, for what a word is, which is exactly my point. Some linguists even argue that “word” is inherently undefinable and refuse to use it as a category.
One common (but still ambiguous) definition is though, that a word is the smallest unit in a language that can stand on its own and conveys a meaning. By that definition, “Ruf … an” is one word, as “an” is not a word by itself. It might not be too obvious, as “an” can also be a word by itself , just not in this context. Another example, where it’s more obvious, is “innehalten”. “Inne” is not a word, it has no meaning by itself, it cannot be used on its own, so in the sentence “halte kurz inne”, “halte inne” is one word. Another example would be “Stelle etwas dar”, where “dar” is obviously not a word by itself.
Fun fact: Verb literally means word in Latin, so saying they are the part of the same verb, but not the same word is kind of an oximoron.
That is totally a non-trivial problem, which requires a lot more conception before it can be solved.
Most candidates don’t realize that. And when I say they split by single space I mean
split(' '). Not evensplit(/\s+/).Does “don’t” consist of one or two words? Should “www.google.com” be split into three parts? Etc.
Yes, asking those questions is definitely what you should be doing when tackling a problem like this.
If I got that feature request in a ticket, I’d send it back to conception.
If I got it, I’d work together with the product team to figure out what we want and what’s best for the users.
If you asked me this question in an interview, I’d ask if you wanted a programmer, a requirements analysis, or a linguist and why you invite people for a job interview if you don’t even know what role you are hiring for.
That would be useful to. Personality and ability to work with others in a team are also factors we look at, so your answer would tell me to look elsewhere.
But to answer that question, I’m definitely not looking for someone who just executes on very clear requirements, that’s a junior dev.
Also not looking for someone perfectly solving that problem, because it doesn’t even have a single clear solution. It’s the process of arriving to a solution that matters.
This is on the easier end of the scale to be sure, but as someone who’s interviewed candidates with similar questions, it eliminates a surprising number of people…
My theory is that modern coding bootcamps stuff their students full of buzzwords instead of letting them learn the basics
I find the experience of the applicants to be hilarious lies.
Which shouldn’t be surprising. The company I was interviewing at only feed me the top ~1% of CVs to interview… Of course half of them were stuffed with bullshit
Yeah, this is the problem. Someone who has legitimately built a basic application or website from scratch may know everything you need, but HR will filter it out.
They don’t really understand what they are looking for, so someone who says they are an AI Researcher with 8 years of experience in the language “Zendaya” and work experience at five moon rocket startups will be at the top of the pile.
Companies need to beef up their training programs so they can literally take in whoever and teach them what they need to know. Forget trying to get the top people. Just take the first 20 who can make it through an interview without drooling on the floor. You will probably get at least 9 ok developers and 1 good one.
That’s like stage one where you filter out the obviously incompetent ones.
You wouldn’t believe how many candidates with years of experience can’t figure out those simple problems. Or even the super well known fizzbuzz.
It’s insane, people will claim like 2-3 years of experience with Ansible, they can’t even get a file copied. Couple years of Python, they don’t understand async, generators and other pretty basic features.
People have always been lying a bit about their experience but it’s getting way, way out of control.
Knowing specific features of a language is one thing, but not being able to even pseudocode a FizzBuzz shows they lack the basic logical problem solving ability that programmers need.
Depends if you’re working for a good company or one trying to hire people in a third world country for a dollar a day.
I knew a dude who got a job for a programming language he never wrote. Not only that, the guy was hired to be the experienced / lead programmer to give guidance on how to use the language. In fact, I knew multiple people like this. Some were actual programmers and good at other programming languages, but some had decided it was time to switch from another field (geology, marketing, database engineer, …).
It’s still puzzling how they got their jobs.
Marketing… How?
Through good marketing, aka bullshitting their way all along
Sometimes, aptitude and an ability to learn and grow is more valuable than having specific technology knowledge. It suggests a more generalist take on one’s career, which means they are always going to be useful. There’s also something to be said for “soft skills” and a person’s overall attitude. All this can make the balance for a lack of technical experience, provided they have demonstrated talent an ability to close such gaps.
Other times, the whole hiring process is just completely broken. Your friend may have had to contend with co-workers that were utterly incapable at their jobs.
These are the “developers” that will be replaced by AI lol
Holy fuck that last one was literally me in my first interview fresh out of college. Full on panic attack.
I hope these aren’t real. I, and most people here, could probably write these codes top to bottom on paper without an eraser or strikethrough parts because we have it fully solved before the interviewer finished the sentence.
I mean, it’s a hard problem to solve if you never worked with moduli before.
Meanwhile I in school practiced Diffie-Hellman on paper with classmates
Sure, programming is hard if you’ve never worked with programming language features before… Modulus isn’t some obscure esoteric operator, it’s literally CS 101
I fell backwards into programming and did it for years before ever needing or encountering a mod operator. It never really came up in statistical programming (SAS) and since I wasn’t a CS major I don’t think I even learned about it until taking online programming classes for fun. But I know I was a pretty damn good SAS programmer. I never had any issues solving any problems in my field programmatically, but I took a few leet code tests and was completely puzzled before taking said CS classes. The algorithms and common problems just never remotely came up. I never found fizzbuzz particularly relevant in statistics and data CRUD.
Now maybe since SAS is procedural and not OO you’d say it doesn’t have typical “programming language features”, but I could easily see that experience being common in all kinda of business side programming like R, VBA, maybe JavaScript or Python, etc.
…but anyway obviously I’m not saying its not a good thing for a dev shop to interview on, and if they want someone classically trained then it’s probably a perfect question. My quibble is just that you might need to widen your definition of who programs.
Is it? I would expect someone to come up with either toggling a variable back and forth for even/odd, or counting by 2s, heck, treat it as a floating point, divide by two, and search the string representation for a period or something!
Shouldn’t people familiar with integer arithmetic should be able to struggle to something like
x == 2 * (x/2)to test if it is odd or even? Or just bitwisex?
“I am trying to test your programming skills, not your Google-search skills.”
But they are the same thing.
I feel fortunate that the image is fried and I can’t read it.
If your client has an HD picture button (like Boost) you need to click it to actually receive the proper image
I used to work at a company that used XSLT. They know that it’s an obscure language that probably none of the potential candidates have ever worked with. But it’s easy enough to learn the basics in an hour or two.
So the entry test was to strip some tags from an XML file. You had a day or two (maybe more) to do it. My solution wasn’t ideal, I didn’t use several of the shortcuts available in the language. But at least it did what it was supposed to.
A few weeks after I had started working there my boss came up to me, visibly frustrated and asked me whether the test was too hard. Thinking back on my problems I replied that maybe having the desired output ready so that you could test your own solution against it might be nice. But my boss’s problem was that none of the last 5 candidates could even send in a solution that would run.
You had so much time, and running an XSLT script is really easy and takes no time at all. And for some inane reason these people couldn’t even manage to test their code and still decided to send it in.
And I thought I was an idiot when I didn’t know if it was spelled grey or gray in CSS during the in-person interview.
XSL is like that, I guess.
Some shit still use XSL at my workplace, and once I got a task with them, so… I hit up some online resources and fixed the issue.
I kid you not, from there on, I was (and still am) the XSL guy and gave me more XSL designing and work.
I mean, it’s not hard, a tiny little bit complex, but I really just spent half hour researching and some googling during work to complete these tasks, it in its own way makes sense.
But they just… aren’t willing to maintain those XSLs, because they indeed looks really ugly and scary in a way.
You had a day or two […] none of the last 5 candidates could even send in a solution that would run.
As harsh as this sounds, this test was doing its job. Assuming you’re not hiring junior candidates, that is.
One day is enough to research XSLT enough to get the gist, and two is enough for a polished solution. And since we’re just stripping tags, we’re really just selecting for all the inner text, which is weird but not hard to do with the right selector expression. The task also selects for people that understand XML processing as programmatically manipulating a DOM, which is crucial to wrapping your head around more advanced tasks.
It is very good test for the ability to research, I think. The amount of people who painstakingly went through some video tutorial on PHP and are now developers is insane. I’m sure there’s place in the market for them (writing Wordpress themes/plugins, for example), but it’s hard to find a programmer with ability to think these days. Not because people are more stupid, but because every other person is a programmer now.
I would just use #888888 anyway, but which way is it spelled, out of interest?
I wanted to answer “grey”, full of confidence. Then I decided to look it up to be sure and found out that it’s “gray”.
The test was to spot mistakes in a simple html file. So I couldn’t substitute anything. And my favourite gray color is #666.
GrAy for Americans and grEy for Europeans. I used to basically flip a coin but I read that mnemonic once and have never forgotten since.
referrer, meet referer.
probably the easiest way to spot someone that’s spent a decent amount of time messing with HTTP/1.x headers.
Gray, the 'murican way.
Both work typically
grey and gray are both in CSS. If you’ve worked with CSS long enough there’s a chance you’ve seen both. :)
I would prefer your kind of test a hundred times over the one on top here.
That said, why would they expect you to know the css color values by heart? I see no usecase for that.
It just came up in a discussion. The test was to spot mistakes in some HTML code. I marked the “gray”. The guy I did it with said that that’s not a mistake. At least he thinks it’s not. We were musing about that for a minute and later found out that I was wrong. Nothing major. I just felt stupid about it.
I felt especially stupid because he seemed to be rather important. While everyone’s e-mail address was firstname.lastname@company.tld his was joe@company.tld.
But he was just a nice guy and apparently I did well and got my rather high salary approved.
I once knew a “developer” with 20 years of “experience” who could not write a foreach loop by hand
Some people are really good at bullshitting their way through life
I jump between languages so much I can never remember the structure.
for item in items? Or item of items or items as item?
Best to just have the IDE auto complete it.
Same here. I’m blue collar so I only do it at work if someone fucks up and gives me access to an interpreter. Or I suck it up and use powershell or excel then drink vodka and cut myself when I get home.
Knowing about and having met multiple such “senior Devs” has made me feel so much better about my work and my own set of skills, not gonna lie.
“Introductions and a bit of smalltalk” - I would shit myself if an interviewer stated asking about smalltalk… /s
The fuck kind of programming language is “smalltalk”?
It inspired python’s syntax iirc
U liek sneks?
I knew this tickled something
It was an old object oriented language before Java. I think Apple made a lot of use of it?
I don’t believe these are genuine interview answers.
The previous candidate to me at a job a few years ago left the room in tears after not being able to write Fizzbuzz. On a laptop with Visual Studio installed, on their own in a an empty room with nobody looking over their shoulders. The same company said they’d had so many candidate, including university graduates, who simply couldn’t code, that they were almost giving up on it.
Suddenly I feel like a fucking accomplished programmer, despite only doing some questionable stuff on Godot lately, but never messing up my loops… Not too badly anymore, anyway.
A fizzbuzz type of question I know I would mess up on the
modulooperator. I know the logic isif the division of the current_number by 3 has a remainder of zero, write fizz, but I always look up the operatorYeah it always feels like “negative logic” to me. If it’s not this and not that then don’t do the other… Does my head in. Next time I’m going to use a lookup table “x…f.bf…fb.f…” then mod15 the index. f=Fizz, b=Buzz, x=both. Nice thing about this is that it’s easier to change with the requirements. Want to shift the second fizz right one? No problem “x…f.b.f.fb.f…”. Good luck doing that with the standard approach. Add Gronk which collides with Fizz, Buzz or both at various times? Also no problem - just extend and modify the LUT accordingly and change the mod.
I can already hear people asking why x is at the start. Arrays are indexed from 0. FizzBuzz starts at 1. 15 mod 15 is zero. Loop N from 1-100, switch on lookup[N%15], case ‘f’ print Fizz, case ‘g’ print Gronk, case ‘p’ print FizzGronk and so on. The only “nice” original feature you lose is when both %3 and %5 fire at the same time and it prints FizzBuzz without any extra code.
Same, fizzbuzz was one of our tests. Nearly everyone messed it up. The telling part was how. We had a guy with 20 years of experience who demanded ample compensation write code that not only didn’t compile, but it made little sense. A lot of people were pretty good bullshitters - then after the test they went “Yeah, well… That went bad huh?”. We had a different, more difficult test that people could choose. We had one guy who did somewhat poorly on that… But asked to take the assignment home for his own sake. He was a very god hire. Not because he worked overtime or anything but because he cared.
I hope not…
They do seem to be a bit absurd. I had a nice chuckle though.
This makes me feel bad for the candidates but gave me the confidence boost I need right now
Are remote interviews still viable in the days of gpt?
Clearly yes, as this post outlines, these candidates weren’t smart enough to use ChatGPT
in the company, i’m employed in, yes. it allows to hire people far off for remote work.
The last interviews I wrote the job posting for and conducted, I made it clear we give you a GPT4 subscription for the job so I expect you to demonstrate your ability to use it as a tool during the interview
