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Search - "challenge questions"
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Interviewer: Welcome, Mr X. Thanks for dropping by. We like to keep our interviews informal. And even though I have all the power here, and you are nothing but a cretin, let’s pretend we are going to have fun here.
Mr X: Sure, man, whatever.
I: Let’s start with the technical stuff, shall we? Do you know what a linked list is?
X: (Tells what it is).
I: Great. Can you tell me where linked lists are used?
X:: Sure. In interview questions.
I: What?
X: The only time linked lists come up is in interview questions.
I:: That’s not true. They have lots of real world applications. Like, like…. (fumbles)
X:: Like to implement memory allocation in operating systems. But you don’t sell operating systems, do you?
I:: Well… moving on. Do you know what the Big O notation is?
X: Sure. It’s another thing used only in interviews.
I: What?! Not true at all. What if you want to sort a billion records a minute, like Google has to?
X: But you are not Google, are you? You are hiring me to work with 5 year old PHP code, and most of the tasks will be hacking HTML/CSS. Why don’t you ask me something I will actually be doing?
I: (Getting a bit frustrated) Fine. How would you do FooBar in version X of PHP?
X: I would, er, Google that.
I: And how do you call library ABC in PHP?
X: Google?
I: (shocked) OMG. You mean you don’t remember all the 97 million PHP functions, and have to actually Google stuff? What if the Internet goes down?
X: Does it? We’re in the 1st world, aren’t we?
I: Tut, tut. Kids these days. Anyway,looking at your resume, we need at least 7 years of ReactJS. You don’t have that.
X: That’s great, because React came out last year.
I: Excuses, excuses. Let’s ask some lateral thinking questions. How would you go about finding how many piano tuners there are in San Francisco?
X: 37.
I: What?!
X: 37. I googled before coming here. Also Googled other puzzle questions. You can fit 7,895,345 balls in a Boeing 747. Manholes covers are round because that is the shape that won’t fall in. You ask the guard what the other guard would say. You then take the fox across the bridge first, and eat the chicken. As for how to move Mount Fuji, you tell it a sad story.
I: Ooooooooookkkkkaaaayyyyyyy. Right, tell me a bit about yourself.
X: Everything is there in the resume.
I: I mean other than that. What sort of a person are you? What are your hobbies?
X: Japanese culture.
I: Interesting. What specifically?
X: Hentai.
I: What’s hentai?
X: It’s an televised art form.
I: Ok. Now, can you give me an example of a time when you were really challenged?
X: Well, just the other day, a few pennies from my pocket fell behind the sofa. Took me an hour to take them out. Boy was it challenging.
I: I meant technical challenge.
X: I once spent 10 hours installing Windows 10 on a Mac.
I: Why did you do that?
X: I had nothing better to do.
I: Why did you decide to apply to us?
X: The voices in my head told me.
I: What?
X: You advertised a job, so I applied.
I: And why do you want to change your job?
X: Money, baby!
I: (shocked)
X: I mean, I am looking for more lateral changes in a fast moving cloud connected social media agile web 2.0 company.
I: Great. That’s the answer we were looking for. What do you feel about constant overtime?
X: I don’t know. What do you feel about overtime pay?
I: What is your biggest weakness?
X: Kryptonite. Also, ice cream.
I: What are your salary expectations?
X: A million dollars a year, three months paid vacation on the beach, stock options, the lot. Failing that, whatever you have.
I: Great. Any questions for me?
X: No.
I: No? You are supposed to ask me a question, to impress me with your knowledge. I’ll ask you one. Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
X: Doing your job, minus the stupid questions.
I: Get out. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.
All Credit to:
http://pythonforengineers.com/the-p...89 -
I tutor people who want to program, I don't ask anything for it, money wise, if they use my house as a learning space I may ask them to bring cookies or a pizza or something but on the whole I do it to help others learn who want to.
Now this in of itself is perfectly fine, I don't get financially screwed over or anything, but...
Fuck me if some students are horrendous!
To the best of my knowledge I've agreed to work with and help seven individuals, four female three male.
One male student never once began the study work and just repeatedly offered excuses and wanted to talk to me about how he'd screwed his life up. I mean that's unfortunate, but I'm not a people person, I don't really feel emotionally engaged with a relative stranger who quite openly admits they got addicted to porn and wasted two years furiously masturbating. Which is WAY more than I needed to know and made me more than a little uncomfortable. Ultimately lack of actually even starting the basic exercises I blocked him and stopped wasting my time.
The second dude I spoke to for exactly 48 hours before he wanted to smash my face in. Now, he was Indian (the geographical India not native American) and this is important, because he was a friend of a friend and I agreed to tutor however he was more interested in telling me how the Brits owed India reparations, which, being Scottish, I felt if anyone was owed reparations first, it's us, which he didn't take kindly too (something about the phrase "we've been fucked, longer and harder than you ever were and we don't demand reparations" didn't endear me any).
But again likewise, he wanted to talk about politics and proving he was a someone "I've been threatened in very real world ways, by some really bad people" didn't impress me, and I demonstrated my disinterest with "and I was set on fire once cos the college kids didn't like me".
He wouldn't practice, was constantly interested in bigging himself up, he was aggressive, confrontational and condescending, so I told him he was a dick, I wasn't interested in helping him and he can help himself. Last I heard he wasn't in the country anymore.
The third guy... Absolute waste of time... We were in the same computer science college class, I went to university and did more, he dossed around and a few years later went into design and found he wanted to program and got in touch. He completes the code schools courses and understandably doesn't quite know what to do next, so he asks a few questions and declares he wants to learn full stack web development. Quickly. I say it isn't easy especially if it's your first real project but if one is determined, it isn't impossible.
This guy was 30 and wanted to retire at 35 and so time was of the essence. I'm up for the challenge, and so because he only knows JavaScript (including prototypes, callbacks and events) I tell him about nodejs and explain that it's a little more tricky but it does mean he can learn all the basis without learning another language.
About six months of sporadic development where I send him exercises and quizzes to try, more often than not he'd answer with "I don't know" after me repeatedly saying "if you don't know, type the program out and study what it does then try to see why!".
The excuses became predicable, couldn't study, playing soccer, couldn't study watching bake off, couldn't study, couldn't study.
Eventually he buys a book on the mean stack and I agree to go through it chapter by chapter with him, and on one particular chapter where I'm trying to help him, he keeps interrupting with "so could I apply for this job?" "What about this job?" And it's getting frustrating cos I'm trying to hold my code and his in my head and come up with a real world analogy to explain a concept and he finally interrupts with "would your company take me on?"
I'm done.
"Do you want the honest unabridged truth?"
"Yes, I'd really like to know what I need to do!"
"You are learning JavaScript, and trying to also learn computer science techniques and terms all at the same time. Frankly, to the industry, you know nothing. A C developer with a PHD was interviewed and upon leaving the office was made a laughing stock of because he seemed to not know the difference between pass by value and pass by reference. You'd be laughed right out the building because as of right now, you know nothing. You don't. Now how you respond to this critique is your choice, you can either admit what I'm saying is true and put some fucking effort into studying cos I'm putting more effort into teaching than you are studying, or you can take what I'm saying as a full on attack, give up and think of me as the bad guy. Your choice, if you are ready to really study, you can text me in the morning for now I'm going to bed."
The next day I got a text "I was thinking about what you said and... I think I'm not going to bother with this full stack stuff it's just too hard, thought you should know."23 -
Lads, I will be real with you: some of you show absolute contempt to the actual academic study of the field.
In a previous rant from another ranter it was thrown up and about the question for finding a binary search implementation.
Asking a senior in the field of software engineering and computer science such question should be a simple answer, specifically depending on the type of job application in question. Specially if you are applying as a SENIOR.
I am tired of this strange self-learner mentality that those that have a degree or a deep grasp of these fundamental concepts are somewhat beneath you because you learned to push out a website using the New Boston tutorials on youtube. FOR every field THAT MATTERS a license or degree is hold in high regards.
"Oh I didn't go to school, shit is for suckers, but I learned how to chop people up and kinda fix it from some tutorials on youtube" <---- try that for a medical position.
"Nah it's cool, I can fix your breaks, learned how to do it by reading blogs on the internet" <--- maintenance shop
"Sure can write the controller processing code for that boing plane! Just got done with a low level tutorial on some websites! what can go wrong!"
(The same goes for military devices which in the past have actually killed mfkers in the U.S)
Just recently a series of people were sent to jail because of a bug in software. Industries NEED to make sure a mfker has aaaall of the bells and whistles needed for running and creating software.
During my masters degree, it fucking FASCINATED me how many mfkers were absolutely completely NEW to the concept of testing code, some of them with years in the field.
And I know what you are thinking "fuck you, I am fucking awesome" <--- I AM SURE YOU BLOODY WELL ARE but we live in a planet with billions of people and millions of them have fallen through the cracks into software related positions as well as complete degrees, the degree at LEAST has a SPECTACULAR barrier of entry during that intro to Algos and DS that a lot of bitches fail.
NOTE: NOT knowing the ABSTRACTIONS over the tools that we use WILL eventually bite you in the ASS because you do not fucking KNOW how these are implemented internally.
Why do you think compiler designers, kernel designers and embedded developers make the BANK they made? Because they don't know memory efficient ways of deploying a product with minimal overhead without proper data structures and algorithmic thinking? NOT EVERYTHING IS SHITTY WEB DEVELOPMENT
SO, if a mfker talks shit about a so called SENIOR for not knowing that the first mamase mamasa bloody simple as shit algorithm THROWN at you in the first 10 pages of an algo and ds book, then y'all should be offended at the mkfer saying that he is a SENIOR, because these SENIORS are the same mfkers that try to at one point in time teach other people.
These SENIORS are the same mfkers that left me a FUCKING HORRIBLE AND USELESS MESS OF SPAGHETTI CODE
Specially to most PHP developers (my main area) y'all would have been well motherfucking served in learning how not to forLoop the fuck out of tables consisting of over 50k interconnected records, WHAT THE FUCK
"LeaRniNG tHiS iS noT neeDed!!" yes IT fucking IS
being able to code a binary search (in that example) from scratch lets me know fucking EXACTLY how well your thought process is when facing a hard challenge, knowing the basemotherfucking case of a LinkedList will damn well make you understand WHAT is going on with your abstractions as to not fucking violate memory constraints, this-shit-is-important.
So, will your royal majesties at least for the sake of completeness look into a couple of very well made youtube or book tutorials concerning the topic?
You can code an entire website, fine as shit, you will get tested by my ass in terms of security and best practices, run these questions now, and it very motherfucking well be as efficient as I think it should be(I HIRE, NOT YOU, or your fucking blog posts concerning how much MY degree was not needed, oh and btw, MY degree is what made sure I was able to make SUCH decissions)
This will make a loooooooot of mfkers salty, don't worry, I will still accept you as an interview candidate, but if you think you are good enough without a degree, or better than me (has happened, told that to my face by a candidate) then get fucking ready to receive a question concerning: BASIC FUCKING COMPUTER SCIENCE TOPICS
* gays away into the night53 -
My favorite kind of interview question/challenge is anything that is highly practical for the job. At the current company I work, the coding test/interview challenge was to design and implement an API very similar to the core functionality of the actual product. It’s fair, tests for skills relevant to the job, and is much better than irrelevant silly brain teasers and cs questions, I feel.
In terms of specific questions, one of my favorites is one that one of my colleagues suggested I ask to potential candidates: describe what you think your biggest failed project/task was in your engineering career, and what happened/what you learned. I think it’s a good reflective question that can tell a lot about someone.3 -
A few interview tips from the other side of the table:
1. Bring a laptop
I mean come up man! Bring a laptop. Especially if there was some kind of project or challenge to present. I have seen so many people do a big UI design presentation and then come in like “can I use your laptop???”. Of course you can, but your looking very unprepared.
2. Ask for clarification
Communication problems happen in business every day. Different cultures and accents can cause issues. The important part isn’t wether you understand everything said but that you ask enough questions to make sure you eventually understand. Most people just wrongly assume things and start rambling.
3. Know what kind of company you and talking to
In my case, this is a startup. We aren’t IBM or Amazon or Google. We work hard and we play hard. Work life balance is important in life but if your very first question is “work/life balance???” then you played yourself. Wait a bit, pepper it in on the sly. Just don’t ask it right away, it shows us that you aren’t ready to work harder than usual if needed. Maybe try “so how do you like working here? How are the people, hours etc?” Or something besides the first question being a bad signal.
Just some random tips for an interviewer.
From me to you, don’t make me have to tell you like DJ Khalid would ...
Congratulations, you played yourself.23 -
Does anyone remember MUDs? Multi-User Dungeons — working on those in LPC was my first experience with real programming. Before that, I'd only made simple websites.
To get permission to program in one MUD, you had to prove that you knew the world, by reaching a certain level in the game. Death had consequences, with a level being lost, as well as risking loss of your items if someone looted you or your corpse was lost. This alone was hard enough to make most players give up. I played (and played wisely) to get there, being the first of my friends. It was hard work and fun.
After months of playing every day, finally, I was a wizard! Well, first, I had to convince someone else to take me as an apprentice, which was it's own challenge, because I was a 13 y/o girl. I ended up having to wait for an older male friend to get to the proper rank and get made a full wizard himself, because anyone else was reluctant (thinking that I'd just screw up or make them look bad), and no one was very happy about it. After some more weeks, I started programming my own content for the MUD, to share with others. It was a great opportunity to learn and express myself, seeing how creative programming could be.
I got called all kinds of names for asking questions and making mistakes, and I questioned why I even wanted to work with these people who hated my guts and didn't want to teach me anything, but I kept going. As I wasn't allowed to take computer classes in school, being able to do projects on my own like this was the only way to learn. I also became more stubborn, patient, and independent, which has always been necessary for this career.
Most importantly, I saw what could be done with programming, and was inspired to keep going with my own projects, no matter how much hate that I got for it. I went on to work on more games and software, often on my own. I always explore new technology, ignore the haters, and forge ahead with my own vision.4 -
Background: I work at a small startup company in Canada who makes simple FAQ Chatbots for companies who waste a lot of resources on the same Customer questions over and over.
So we were making this one bot for a provincial government who wanted a bot for students to be able to ask questions regarding the upcoming election and how to vote, etc. and get the answers they were looking for. Since it's Canada and a government bot, it had to be in both English AND French.
These bots take some time to train (we use Wit.ai mostly) in english so it was a challenge to train it in French. However I am bilingual (not very strong in French but can manage) so I did my best and the bot didn't turn out too bad. (English was great, French was, Id say, "not terrible").
HOWEVER, now that it is done (The company loved it, even with the less than perfect french version). The sales team (who know nothing of the process of making/training these bots) is now telling companies we support "SEVERAL LANGUAGES" and are currently about to sign a contract with a company overseas that wants a bot done IN JAPANESE!!.
To make matters worse.. when we (the dev team) brought up that it would be EXTREMELY difficult to do this, their answer was ... "You did it in French so you can just do the same but in Japanese"
HOW DOES THAT EVEN MAKE SENSE.
Oh well, Rosetta Stone here I come, I guess it's time to learn Japanese.11 -
The worst part of being a dev
My social dilemma
In a fast paced world where the average human spends at least 6 hours a day with technology, deriving basic entertainment, pleasures and engaging in various activities.
Here we are the developers that have to engage with technology for longer hours for a living , having to keep up with deadlines, immersing our minds in complicated algorithms and then the endless possibilities of entertainment from the machine in so few human hours a day , you wonder how you’d get off, and to top it up, I personally work from home.
And then the dilemma of overcoming different suggestions from various parties in taking a break off, a break off to what you later ask yourself, thus creating the shadow of doubt, splitting the fragile programmer’s mind , trying to solve this imaginary puzzle, “this bug of the mind”.
Then the challenge often arises in creating a balance, telling yourself, just catching up with people with this same technology takes a whole day, or then again quitting my Job, but from my little experience of life, nobody likes a poor visitor, this is actually worse than a “bug” and as I bask in this quagmire, “a little voice in my head keeps singing keep doing what you love doing”.
Like an infinite loop of crazy, spiralling back to these machines, trying the find and fix the balance of normalcy. Always remembered the cool years of college tho, with so much people around and then again that was college.
An then the thought arises, maybe something else might be worth doing, but after so much time spent in building your skills and the enormous joy of programming even typing without looking at the keyboard is a real pleasure, and yeah sure the days are short with the reality of a constant need to survive, remain sane, compete and make the best of life in such short time.
Then how do we know if we have fallen off the so-called “social track”, when we have only lived so little to really comprehend the most parts of life? with such constant stream of unanswered question, you’d realise you shouldn’t have burdened the mind creating such questions in the first place
But then again maybe it gets better, one of the above, the disturbed mind or the situation as whole and yes I try oh I try, I place calls, do some visiting, no relationship tho but with a good perspective in mind.
In this race of life, you sometimes ask yourself would you rather be in a different position, or maybe already put exactly where we belong. For this illusionary fight with self is a fight with reality as a whole and true bliss comes from actually letting go as time and people pass you by.
And my greatest achievement to date aside family and my work is getting into the 1000 club on devRant.2 -
When I was in 11th class, my school got a new setup for the school PCs. Instead of just resetting them every time they are shut down (to a state in which it contained a virus, great) and having shared files on a network drive (where everyone could delete anything), they used iServ. Apparently many schools started using that around that time, I heard many bad things about it, not only from my school.
Since school is sh*t and I had nothing better to do in computer class (they never taught us anything new anyway), I experimented with it. My main target was the storage limit. Logins on the school PCs were made with domain accounts, which also logged you in with the iServ account, then the user folder was synchronised with the iServ server. The storage limit there was given as 200MB or something of that order. To have some dummy files, I downloaded every program from portableapps.com, that was an easy way to get a lot of data without much manual effort. Then I copied that folder, which was located on the desktop, and pasted it onto the desktop. Then I took all of that and duplicated it again. And again and again and again... I watched the amount increate, 170MB, 180, 190, 200, I got a mail saying that my storage is full, 210, 220, 230, ... It just kept filling up with absolutely zero consequences.
At some point I started using the web interface to copy the files, which had even more interesting side effects: Apparently, while the server was copying huge amounts of files to itself, nobody in the entire iServ system could log in, neither on the web interface, nor on the PCs. But I didn't notice that at first, I thought just my account was busy and of course I didn't expect it to be this badly programmed that a single copy operation could lock the entire system. I was told later, but at that point the headmaster had already called in someone from the actual police, because they thought I had hacked into whatever. He basically said "don't do again pls" and left again. In the meantime, a teacher had told me to delete the files until a certain date, but he locked my account way earlier so that I couldn't even do it.
Btw, I now own a Minecraft account of which I can never change the security questions or reset the password, because the mail address doesn't exist anymore and I have no more contact to the person who gave it to me. I got that account as a price because I made the best program in a project week about Java, which greatly showed how much the computer classes helped the students learn programming: Of the ~20 students, only one other person actually had a program at the end of the challenge and it was something like hello world. I had translated a TI Basic program for approximating fractions from decimal numbers to Java.
The big irony about sending the police to me as the 1337_h4x0r: A classmate actually tried to hack into the server. He even managed to make it send a mail from someone else's account, as far as I know. And he found a way to put a file into any account, which he shortly considered to use to put a shutdown command into autostart. But of course, I must be the great hacker.3 -
I miss psychological safety. I'll define it as the willingness to be vulnerable to criticism and the belief that contrary opinions are embraced and judged on their merit.
When I first entered the startup scene my manager had exceptional candor. He had no qualms talking about how kids and personal projects caused his investment in his work to wax and wane.
He always made time to talk to me when I was frustrated and made me feel like he truly listened to what I had to say, even if he didn't act on it.
At the time, I attributed the safety to the company culture created by the CTO. The startup failed and eventually, I found my way to that CTO's next startup.
Completely different experience. I find myself in despair as I hear "I'm more senior and therefore am right and don't have time or interest in your ideas" blatantly stated.
When I disagree with people, I try to ask clarifying questions to identify where the divergence occurs. Sometimes I'm surprised and learn something new, sometimes my questions prompt reconsideration.
With the CTO (now CEO), we go in circles where he squirms, deflects, and outright refuses to respond to my questions. He cancels 75% of 1:1's and when we do talk he suggests that if I disagree I "should introspect which of my beliefs is holding me back from embracing his superior way of doing things"
Multi-hour slack wars suck the life out of anyone trying to ask questions. It's so exhausting to ask questions it's often cheaper and faster to wallow in despair for an hour and hack something together than descend into people shouting preferences at each other and shaming me for not already knowing the answer.
Perks, pay, and tech-stack are all cool. It feels selfish to be unhappy because I can't innovate or challenge the status quo. Having tasted that safety though, I'm left with an unquenched thirst that grows stronger with every conflict.1 -
Had a coding challenge for an interview. 2 questions and I passed all the tests on both questions. But I got an email from the recruiter saying that one of my questions didn’t have a working solution??? Wtf it passed all the tests, am I retarded?3
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Just remembered that I still had a foobar invite link in my email inbox 😋
The challenges are odd though, first challenge was super easy (basically an idiot check), but while I was able to convert 3 cans of energy drink into a functional solution in half an hour, the verification utility is not very verbose at all. So in Python 3.7.3 in my Debian box it worked just fine, yet the testing suite in Foobar was failing the whole time. After sending an email to my friend that gave the link (several years ago now, sorry about that! 😅) asking if he knew the problem, I found out that Google is still using Python 2.7.13 for some reason. Even Debian's Python is newer, at 2.7.16. To be fair it does still default to Python 2 too. But why.. why on Earth would you use Python 2.7 in a developer oriented set of challenges from a massive company, in 2020 when Python 2 has already been dead for almost a whole year?
But hey now that it's clear that it's Python 2.7, at least the next challenges should be a bit easier. Kind of my first time developing in SnekLang regardless actually, while the language doesn't have everything I'd expect (such as integer square root, at least not in Debian or the foobar challenge's interpreter), its math expressions are a lot cleaner than bash's (either expr or bc). So far I kinda like the language. 2-headed snake though and there's so much garbage for this language online, a lot more than there is for bash. I hate that. Half the stuff flat out doesn't work because it was written by someone who requires assistance to breathe.
Meh, here's to hoping that the next challenges will be smooth sailing :) after all most of the time spent on the first one (17.5 hours) was bottling up a solution for half an hour, tearing my hair out for a few hours on why Google's bloody verification tool wouldn't accept my functioning code (I wrote it for Python 3, assuming that that's what Google would be using), and 10 hours of sleep because no Google, I'm not scrubbing toilets for 48 hours. It's fair to warn people but no, I'm not gonna work for you as a cleaning lady! 😅
Other than the issues that the environment has, it's very fun to solve the challenges though. Fuck the theoretical questions with the whiteboard, all hiring processes should be like this!1 -
Seeking a new school to continue studying..
Finally found a good one, with a programming planning, a rare things in programming school...
Ok let's go, here is a challenge to be accepted.
Friends : i bet you to fails the challenge and get accepted.
-me : .... well ok I'll only do the programming part and don't answer the rest of the test.
30% of the test was logic and programming, the rest were stupid culture questions.
- the school actually hired me.. thanks 😂😂😂2 -
Challenge questions are so goddamn stupid.
Apparently I have an account with a certain online organization though I don't remember setting it up.
So naturally I had no idea of my username or password, so they asked me challenge questions.
It asked me the city of my birth, which is a place with a weird spelling. Because of that weird spelling, I never remember if I'm spelling it right (I was only there as a newborn infant) And I'm also supposed to remember if I capitalized it or not.
I hate challenge questions. And anyone doing any remotely simple research on me shouldn't have trouble learning what city I was born in so it seems to me it's a security vulnerability, nothing more.
And maybe I'm giving things away by saying it asks me that question, but it's a common security question any hacker would anticipate anyways.3 -
Today I had a full-day job interview for a junior data scientist position.
First I met the team which was only like half of everyone because apparently everyone was gone on Fridays. However the few there were really nice.
First task is to do some basic data analysis stuff even though I already spent a week on the coding challenge and sent them all my code/tasks. I log into my machine and create a new virtual environment but can't for the life of me figure out how to use the command line in windows to install packages. Turns out there is some problem with their proxy and they have to log me in on that. Then I am struggling on the keyboard because it's for a language different that my mother tongue and it takes me 3x as long to so the most simple things. All my shortcuts are out the window. Haven't a hard time typing parentheses and brackets. Start freaking out and have a panic attack mid task. I'm sweating bullets. I didn't even make it to the simple visualization tasks much less the models at the end. Time gets called and we all go to lunch and I'm freaking out on the inside the entire time. Angry at myself because I know I am better and just couldn't think.
After lunch I present my code and results from a coding challenge I did weeks prior. People from other teams get invited and I end up getting grilled for 2 hours by 15 people. Questions are flying in from all sides. They ask me almost everything I know about machine learning and some more. Under stress I forgot the name of the optimizer I used and couldn't answer some easy stuff because my mind was racing.
Right now I am on the train home and my body physically hurts. I am disappointed with myself and wish I could have shown up better. Never really froze up like this before.2 -
Why are the challenge questions that they use while changing your password so difficult? Is that why they call them "Challenge" questions?
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So I see posts about an interview question/challenge of inverting a binary tree. I don't use trees very often (mainly file related or parsing server nodes), but I thought I would learn how to do this.
I saw a page that started talking about different ways to invert enough to understand that one type of inversion is swapping left and right nodes. So I stopped before they showed how.
Then I created a test program that has a tree structure and also can display a tree before and after modification. This was kind of fun.
So then I wrote the inversion function. It was less than 10 lines of code. Wtf? I thought it would be harder than this.
Then I started wondering where trees were used. So today I have been learning how they are used and why I might need one to solve a problem. One use I intuited was parsing regex or a language. Apparently it is useful there.
What I am learning is that a lot of these interview questions are really test to see if you can comprehend instructions when stressed. Or you will ask questions to clarify the task. It doesn't necessarily test your ability to solve hard problems.
One thing that perplexes me. If inverting a tree is swapping nodes left<->right, then why not leave data in place and just swap roles in the functions. Maybe I completely misunderstood what inversion means or why it would be done. I guess if this is not inverting I have the structure to try other methods now.2 -
I wonder how many github issues have been closed by asking the author to implement the feature they've requested for. In the past, I was confident my issue will be resolved by opening a new one when there's no answer in earlier questions. I can't tell whether the nature of my questions advanced or whether it's a new trend. But I've opened maybe 4/5 issues in recent memory, and each time, the collaborators suggest the feature is one I should contribute to their project by implementing. Isn't this their job as maintainers? I'm already working on something that barely gives me breathing space. I encountered a challenge using your library, and your idea of helping is that I dissent from my own trajectory, acquaint with your project /how to implement what I want, wait for it to get merged etc, before continue what I originally intended. Do they think that's worth it?
Is it just me or is this a common occurrence, lately?17 -
I have a guy that will come in a few hours to discuss about an e-commerce website he wants to start his business. I've accepted to do it freelance.
Things are a little quick for my taste, but I know myself enough to know that if I don't jump head first, I'll back out and miss on an opportunity to add something valuable to my resume (and get a bit of money).
The thing is : I have nearly zero experience in 1) e-commerce websites and 2) client relationship and managing. So that will be a great challenge to me, but that's precisely what I need right now.
Anyway, I'm coming to you to ask a few questions : assuming his requirements are simple and common for an online shop, should I create it from scratch or would it be wiser to use a dedicated framework (Prestashop, Wix, etc.). If the latter, which one would you recommend, cost and efficiency-wise.
Still assuming simple and common requirements, how much time would it likely take, for an average developper (I'm no Linus Torvalds) working on average 8h a day ? More like 2-3 months, or more like 5-6 months ? I'm leaning more towards 2-3, but since I don't have experience in these kind of websites, I find a lot of user stories that might take me time to figure out.
Last but not least, what would be approximately an honest price, technical costs aside (domain, host, potential framework, etc.) for that kind of work. And for maintenance ?2 -
So technical interview time but whenever I look at algorithm, data structure questions now I feel demotivated... it sort of feels like boring pointless work.
But if i remove the context of preparing for an interview and say I have as much time as i need, it feels like a logical puzzle, challenge, something interesting I could use to kill some time, learn something new...
It feels like there's a divide like how I can go on and on about my personal projects but if you ask about work projects, I give you the boilerplate or have to really think about what to say...
And so now I'm feeling fucked for the phone screens and algo interviews that I'm supposed to be having soon... and let's just say one of them may be with a really really big tech company... -
There are alot of questions in the job industry I'm not aware of. job gaps, lying, job hopping, hr and little details I didn't even notice.
I have a job gap for 2 months.(Nov and December) and planning to land a job on January.
For 2 weeks, I got burned out and need to recover my motivation to move on because my employer told me the job industry of not being honest, but being a dick and slave is what it gets to keep the job.
This December, I'm just going to do my side projects and little coding challenge(not the fizzbuzz). I don't plan to create short term side projects. I have to keep on practicing.
I'll be a slave in January. But I don't want to work 48 hours a week.1 -
You work in a team, for a team to move forward successfully the team should work in sync. A team always has a goal and a plan to get to it. There are times when the team needs to take a different direction therefore the set path should always be available for change because our environments dictate it.
We all have different styles of working and different opinions on how things should work. Sometimes one is wrong and the other is right, and sometimes both are wrong, or actually sometimes both are right. However, at the end of it all, the next step is a decision for the team, not an individual, and moving forward means doing it together. #KickAssTeam
The end result can not come in at the beginning but only at the end of an implementation and sometimes if you’re lucky, during implementation you can smell the shit before it hits the fan. So as humans, we will make mistakes at times by using the wrong decisions and when this happens, a strong team will pull things in the right direction quickly and together. #KickAssTeam
Having a team of different opinions does not mean not being able to work together. It actually means a strong team! #kickAssTeam However the challenging part means it can be a challenge. This calls for having processes in place that will allow the team members to be heard and for new knowledge to take lead. This space requires discipline in listening and interrogating opinions without attachment to ideas and always knowing that YOUR opinion is a suggestion, not a solution. Until it is taken on by the team. #KickAssTeam We all love our own thinking. However, learning to re-learn or change opinions when faced with new information should become as easy to take in and use.
Now, I am no expert at this however through my years of development I find this strategy to work in a team of developers. It’s a few questions you ask yourself before every commit, When faced with working in a new team and possibly as a suggestion when trying to align other team members with the team.
The point of this article, the questions to self!
Am I following the formatting standard set?
Is what I have written in line with official documentation?
Is what I am committing a technical conversion of the business requirement?
Have I duplicated functionality the framework already offers?
I have introduced a methodology, library, heavily reusable component to the system, have you had a discussion with the team before implementing?
Are your methods and functions truly responsible for 1 thing?
Will someone you will never get to talk to or your future self have documentation of your work?
Either via point number 2, domain-specific, or business requirements documentation.
Are you future thinking too much in your solution?
Will future proof have a great chance of complicating the current use case?
Remember, you can never write perfect code that cures every future problem, but what you can do perfectly is serve the current business problem you are facing and after doing that for decades, you would have had a perfect line of development success.1 -
Hello, everybody,
I would like to support self-employed software developers in the future to increase their efficiency and at the same time attract their desired customers.
In order to be able to offer first-class support, I need an impression of the current problems in software development.
Therefore I am happy about every answer you can give me to the following questions.
What is currently holding you back most in development?
What is currently the biggest challenge with or at your customer?
Where do you see your biggest challenge as an self-employed software developer?
How much time do you invest in your further education?
Which techniques, working methods and/or principles do you already apply?
Briefly about me: I have been a software developer for 19 years out of passion. Starting as a hobby, I have made it my profession. I have spent many years developing system and technically driven solutions. I lost a lot of time until I actually developed on a professional level and therefore efficient, sustainable and process-oriented. Only 5 years ago I gained this knowledge and increased my efficiency in development enormously within a very short time. Since I myself lost a lot of time before I actually developed professionally, I would like to help you with this knowledge and increase the efficiency in your development.
I look forward to your answers and thank you in advance.
Kind regards
Alex1 -
I have never seen core coding questions here so this is one of my shots in the dark-- this time, because I have a phobia for stackoverflow, and specifically, discussing this objective among wider audience
Here it goes: Ever since elon musk overpriced twitter apis, the 3rd-party app I used to unfollow non-followers broke. So I wrote a nifty crawler that cycles through those following me and fish out traitors who found me unpleasant enough to unfollow. Script works fine, I suspect, because I have a small amount I'm following
The challenge lies in me preemptively trying to delete some of the elements before the dom can overflow. Realistically, you want to do this every 1000 rows or so. The problem is, tampering with the rows causes the page's lazy loader to break. Apparently, it has some indicator somewhere using information on one of the rows to determine details of the next fetch
I've tried doing many things when we reach that batch limit:
1) wiping either the first or last
2) wiping only even rows
3) logging read rows and wiping them when it reaches batch limit
4) Emptying or hiding them
5) Accessing siblings of the last element and wiping them
I've tried adding custom selectors to the incoming nodes but something funny occurs. During each iteration, at some point, their `.length` gets reset, implying those selectors were removed or the contents were transferred to another element. I set the MutationObserver to track changes but it fetches nothing
I hope there are no twitter devs here cuz I went great pains to decipher their classes. I don't want them throwing another cog that would disrupt the crawler. So you can post any suggestions you have that could work and I will try it out. Or if it's impossible to assist without running the code, I will have no choice but to post it here4 -
Feels like I'm stuck in an escape game.
The more I go, the more complex it gets.
When clues lead to greater questions...
But the challenge has just begun !