!rant

Interviewed a guy for a senior technical job. I worked hard on making my own questions that hopefully make the interviewee think instead of useless gotchas.

He told me at the end that they were fun questions and this interview was loads better than the rest who just ask questions off of Google.

Having had my share of shitty interviews, this makes me feel so good 😊

Just curious. What kind of questions? Like problem solving or questions regarding one's past projects?

@NullReference they're problems, more strategic. Places where I've had to think a lot myself. So they don't need someone to be able to know syntax per se. At the same time it isn't commonly known algorithm from a book either

For example, if you had a module with two children and both has 100 levels of sub children each, how would one 100th child pass a message to another 100th child without traversing 200 modules along the way.

@hashedram Forgive me if I am wrong... I am just gonna try solution for your challenge..

By calling the module

another.200thchild("hi")

Or by circular linked list?

@hashedram Thanks for the quick reply. I'm curious about the answer. Would you use something like a Data Bus Pattern?

@NullReference I guess that would be too easy of an answer.

@NullReference @raghulm those work. There's more than one way. A singleton to pass messages. Make an abstract class that passes a message to a direct parent and extend it 100 times.

I don't really look for a right answer. Just whether the interviewee is comfortable enough to not let lack of syntax or some other knowledge disrupt the flow of ideas. If you can't think fluidly enough, you know you're not an expert. If you can throw in 3 or 4 solid ideas, you're good even if they don't work.

I too made a test like this once. Was really fun!

I threw in a SQL query using a textbox input as a parameter and asked something about SQL to see if they would point out the gaping injection flaw hehehe

They failed :D

Nice one on the original test!

Was he actually a Junior that needed senior experience to get paid minimum wage by any chance?

This is not a rant.

I expected the interviewee to fuck up some how. He did not. This was a happy ending.

Congratulations. You have reached the level of the enlightenment.

@hashedram my answer to that question would be "well, firstly, if you need to send a message like that, you architected your code wrong"

then i would start to think about a solution... and come up with "i'd probably do some singleton with an object dictionary to which anything can subscribe directly and anything else can prod it directly to pass on a message to specific object, if it's subscribed"

@Midnigh-shcode well most people seem to understand what "let's assume" means and have enough common sense to know nobody writes a hundred children and don't need to explicitly mention it, but hey that works too