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I feel a bit bad when I reject most people after interviews - they'll do alright, just don't have the knowledge we're looking for.

Other people who fail interviews just piss me off.

If you're applying for a *senior* position, yet you tell me a race hazard is "what happens when concurrent applications are working efficiently", a GET request is "only ever used in a REST API", a POST request is "when you use TCP directly" and you can't write a single line of code in a new project because "in the real world we always just modify what's there already", then please sod right off. There comes a point when you clearly know bugger all, have extensively lied on your CV, and you're just trying to con your way into a position while hoping no-one notices.

Argh.

Comments
  • 19
    @rutee07 The ridiculous thing is that's just the things that come to mind off the top of my head. Best one was probably the woman who said "I don't know that, but I can ask my husband and he'll know" to just about every question I asked.
  • 2
    @AlmondSauce Is a race hazard like a race condition? I’m too tired/lazy to do a terminology search.
  • 1
    @AmyShackles Yeah, same thing. Sometimes people only know one or the other, if not I'll mention both. This guy though...
  • 8
    @AlmondSauce I am just fascinated by the POST response. Like… how was that the answer he came up with? What have you been DOING that you can’t explain what a GET or POST is?

    Though, admittedly, if you were to ask me anything about the lower level shit I’d probably just say that I could ask my husband and he’d know. 😂
  • 4
    Tbh, when we interview, if your not a total loss we still hire you we give everyone a chance and train you up where you are lacking, but even then we still have a position open for the past 18 months.
    The biggest problem we have is that we can literally see you Google questions when we ask them or we ask about dependency injection and you start talking about SQL injection.. the amount of people who we get across that think they can get away with swinging it at any interview is insane
  • 6
    @AmyShackles I'd take "I don't know" any day over that nonsense. Admitting that you don't know something is a great quality to have. Bullshitting isn't.
  • 6
    @DarkMukke Yeah, we've had our fair share of cheaters as well. One guy even once muttered under his breath "hm this other laptop is slow..." "What's slow sorry?" "oh, um, err, yeah, nothing, that wasn't me, must have been some guy in the background"😬
  • 0
    > a race hazard is "what happens when concurrent applications are working efficiently"

    he's not entirely wrong, you know... :)
  • 2
    The other day I asked someone if they knew RxJs. They said yes. I asked them if they could explain the different between switchmap and flatmap, they got annoyed and said they never had to use operators and that my question was too advanced. He also did not understand what I meant by pass by value Vs pass by reference.

    These people are coming in looking for £50,000.
  • 1
    @Crost I have never used RxJx so have no idea how common those operators are in everyday use, but looking them up just now it seems that flatMap is deprecated, so you might want to rephrase your questioning in future to use mergeMap instead
  • 3
    @AmyShackles I think that is exactly the answer he is looking for, eg if you have been using RxJx for a while, eg coming in at £50k is like senior level, then you know the difference and why one is deprecated
  • 0
    @Crost Never had to use operators?! What on earth can you do if you don't use them?! Sounds like the guy was just hoping for some theoretical questions he could try to blag, and got fed up when you asked him something more concrete.

    That being said, I'm guessing you're not from around London, as 50k there is definitely not a senior dev salary 🙂
  • 1
    @DarkMukke actually I just always forget they changed the name, but w/e they can say they don't know it and I'd have remembered that. But to claim you know RxJs but have no idea what an operator is and ha e never heard of any.. well that was just the tip of the ice berg.
  • 3
    @JustThat Yeah I've started using "resolve concurrency issues", because every time I say "fix race conditions" people stare at me as if I just dragged a Klan uniform out of my backpack.
  • 0
    @JustThat

    Also, are you a fan of Formula 1 parallel car event, or would you prefer the NASCAR concurrency circle?
  • 1
    @JustThat

    Concurrent usage non-truthfulness situations...

    "Oh, don't worry, I'll deal with these nasty cunts"
  • 3
    @AmyShackles yeah I’m just imagining that in the company they used to work in they had invented their own application protocol alternative to http and it was their first Job so they don’t know any better
  • 1
    i have never before seen it called a race *hazard*.

    that would genuinely make me unsure whether you mean what i think you mean.
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