5
Earu
2y

Am I the only one to think companies asking questions such as those for technical interviews don’t understand what software engineering/development is about ?

- How many layers does a webservice have?
- What framework do you use for unit testing ?
- How do you do dependency injection ?

Essentially questions that they deem black and white but really aren’t. Besides isn’t the core of the work to just adapt and learn while being smart about what things you implement ? I don’t get these questions for me it’s a sign that a company doesn’t understand the work I’ll be doing.

I think for a technical interview I’d much rather spend my time on a difficult algo question in the language of my choice for 30mins - 1h than 20mins answering close minded questions that don’t have to be.

This rant is mostly due to the fact I’ve done a few interviews with two companies and both behaved like that, I’m 100% certain I had the skills to do the jobs they were offering me (they both contacted me first) but both ended up denying me because my knowledge on their specific questions wasn’t detailed enough. I could have learnt their stack in about a week so I don’t know why that mentality exists.

I might be wrong about the core of the work though… what do you think?

Comments
  • 0
    Being able to code something does not imply that you understand the ideas behind what you are coding.

    I have done interviews in the past, and this is my take:
    Juniors just code - they test new idea by coding first, thinking never.
    Middle can code, and understand the ideas they are using. New ideas confuse them, and they usualy stick to old ideas bc they work.
    Seniors can evaluate new and current ideas and decide which ones to use. Then implement them from scratch.
  • 2
    @magicmirror I do agree with your categories, I usually just take into account everything that I know look for new techs and stuff before doing anything. Can’t say I’ll implement everything from scratch unless there is something like heavy workloads or a specific demand that can’t be used with other existing techs though. Not sure if it’s an exaggeration but surely there’s no point in reinventing the wheel each time unless needed.
  • 1
    @Earu You probably did not understand the "from scratch".
    Nobody wants you to rebuild mysql, mongo, kafka/rabbitmq or nginx/apache. But you can use those, plus something like nodeJs + angular and then build a Fullstack Custum Web App.
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