Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
Search - "interview practices"
-
My previous job I got by winning an Xbox Kinect hackathon. Not because the game I made was really good or anything. But because I was the only one who actually built something. (Apart from a guy who’s application would cheer louder as you raised your arms.) So that evening I left the hackathon with an Xbox one and a job.
My job was to build advert games, games whose primary goal is to advertise a company or event. This is the job where I learned I DO NOT like game development. So after about half a year I quit.
Because I still needed money I did some freelance work as a game developer (I developed 3 advert games for 3 startups).
I was still looking around for dev jobs but because I was a student I had no luck, they were all looking for full timers.
At some point I called this one (Dutch) company and spoke to a very odd French person on the phone. He invited me to come over for an interview. I had very little information about the job so I started researching the company. They are a small company specialized in complex content migrations. I wasn’t that into migrations but hell, I’m always up for something new.
Upon arrival I was greeted by the familiar French voice and saw a collection 6 diverse developers sharing a space. We did the usual interview dance and practices and that’s where I figured out this is a java job. They developed tools for the professional services team to perform these complex migrations I mentioned earlier. With me never having touched java before I was quite sure I wouldn’t get the job. But I took the test anyway.
About halfway through the test I was stopped and they started to ask me some conceptual questions, I did okay there but nothing special. That same day the architect took me to their CEO and told him I had:
- very little experience
- no migration experience
- was still a student so could only work 20 hours a week
- he saw some potential they could work with
Quite unexpectedly, they still hired my 20 year old ass.
Now the company has grown to a good 20+ developers with a nicely sized professional services team and we are launching our first out-of-the-box product in a couple of weeks.
So that’s how I got my job. If you read to this very end, my hat is off to you!8 -
Here's a recent interview I had for an Android Developer job:
I: Interviewer, M: Me
I: hello, welcome
M: hi, thanks
I: do you know Kotlin?
M: yes, I've been working with it for 1.5 years and have written 3 projects in it
I: do you know RxJava, Dagger, Retrofit, and how to make Custom Views?
M: yes, I'm comfortable with them *explains*
I: do you know Room?
M: yes I do, I've done a lot of practices in it, but unfortunately have never needed to use it in production
I: what architecture do you use? Do you know MVP?
M: I'm currently using MVVM, but not MVP. I've debugged projects in it so I know what's going on in it
I: ok, do you have any questions for us?
M: how did I do?
I: I'm sorry sir, but you're not even a junior here
M: what? Why is that?
I: well you don't know Room and MVP?
M: I said I know them, just haven't used them in production.
I: well you have 3 years of experience but you dont even know Kotlin!
M: Kotlin was your first question and I said I have 3 projects in it. Did you even check the samples you asked for in the job posting?
I: SIR YOU'RE NOT A GOOD FIT FOR US, THANK YOU FOR COMING.
:/56 -
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 -
I'm going for longest rant. TL:DR; version here:
http://pastebin.com/0Bp4jX9y
then:
http://pastebin.com/FfUiTzsh
Twat Client,
As per our conversation, here is an invoice for the work you requested on behalf of U.S. Bloom. I realize that you ended up going with another designer, but you did request samples of what my take on the logo design would be. The following line item is indicative of 1 hour of graphic design consultation as per your request via Skype.
As I recall, you mentioned that this is not how Upwork "works" but considering it was you who requested that I converse with you via Skype instead of via the Upwork messenger, and since there were no clear instructions on how to proceed with Upwork after our initial consultation, It is assumed that you were foregoing Upwork altogether to work with me directly, thus the invoice from me directly for my time involved in the project. I would have reached out to you via Skype, but it seems that you may have severed our connection there.
After spending a little time researching your company, I could not find current information for Basic Media Marketing, but I was able to reach out to your former partner Not A. Twat, who was more than helpful and suggested that he would encourage you to pay for the services rendered.
It is discouraging that you asked for my help and I delivered, but when I ask for compensation in return for my skills, you refused to pay and have now taken your site offline and removed me as a contact from Skype.
{[CLIENT of CLIENT]},
I am sorry that I have bothered you with this email. I copied you on it merely for transparency's sake. I am sure that your logo is great and I am sure whatever decision was made is awesome for your decision. I just wanted to make sure that you weren't getting "samples" of other people's work passed off as original work by Twat Media Marketing.
I can't speak for any of the other candidates, but since Twat asked me to conduct work with him via Skype rather than through Upwork, and since he's pretty much a ghost online now, (Site Offline, LinkedIn Removed or Blocked, and now Skype blocked as well) one has to think this was a hit and run to either crowdsource your logo inexpensively or pass off other artist's work as his own. That may not be the case, but from my perspective all signs are pointing to that scenario.
Here is a transcript. Some of his messages have been redacted.
As you can clearly see, requests and edits to the logo were being made from Jon to me, but he thinks it's a joke when I ask about invoicing and tries to pass it off as an interview. Do you see any interview questions in there? There were no questions about how long I have been designing, what are my rates, who have I done work for in the past, or examples of my previous work. There were none because he didn't need them at this point.
He'd already seen my proposal and my Behance.net portfolio as well as my rates on Upwork.com. This was a cut to the chase request for my ideas for your logo. It was not just ideas, but mock designs with criticism and approval awaiting. Not only that, but I only asked for an hour of compensation. After looking at the timestamps on our conversation, you can clearly see that I spent at least 3 hours corresponding with Twat on this project. That's three hours of work I could have spent on an honest paying customer.
I trust that TWATCLIENT will do the right thing. I just wanted you guys to know that I was in it to do the best design I could for you. I didn't know I was in it to waste three hours of my life in an "interview" I wasn't aware I was participating in.
Reply from ClientClient:
Hello Sir,
This message is very confusing?
We do not owe your company any money and have never worked with you before.
Therefore, I am going to disregard that invoice.
Reply from TWATCLIENT's boss via phone:
I have two problems with this. One I don't think your business practices are ethical, especially calling MY client directly and sending them an invoice.
Two why didn't you call or email Jon before copying my client on the email invoice?
Me: Probably because he's purposely avoiding me and I had no way to find him. I only got his email address today and that was from a WHOIS lookup.
Really, you don't think my business practices are ethical? What about slavery? Is that ethical? Is it ethical to pass of my designs to your client for critique, but not pay me for doing them?
... I'LL HAVE TO CALL YOU BACK!
My email follow up:
http://pastebin.com/hMYPGtxV
I got paid. The power of CCing the right combination of people is greater than most things on Earth.14 -
Not really a recruiter but at interview at one place I was given a printed code example and told that there was 8 bugs and that I shield treat it like a code review.
I found 16 bugs and 4 bad practices and explained them all to the director of software engineering and team lead (that set the test), they agree that I was correct; the director turned to the team lead and said ... Are you are your a senior
I tried not to laugh lol1 -
Had a job interview for a front end dev (Involving a technical test). After couple of days, recruiter says - Unfortunately they say that you are too focused on best practices so they want to pass.3
-
Let me share a piece of advice to entry level devs that are getting ready for job interviews that I wish someone gave to me when I was first looking for work straight out of school. Do not focus making yourself look good to this company by trying to make your resume flashy or trying to oversell yourself. Although its important to present yourself sure, but it should not be the foundation for you to base your interview goals around. Rather focus on the company itself. Find out whether the company itself uses modern technology,practices and upholds to project management and the software development cycle, find out how they work,communicate and develop as a team. Simply put focus on whether they are worth working for instead of looking like your worth being hired. Can they collaborate,communicate and solve problems efficiently. Otherwise you may end up getting hired and hating your job. Just a thought and some advice on my own experiences. Hope it helps someone.3
-
I've been hunting for a new job for several months because my current company isn't growing my skills any further. There have been many setbacks, a few rejections, and that awful lingering imposter syndrome. So I finally dug myself out of my self pity and began learning things that my current company doesn't implement – JS frameworks, UX practices, etc. Today I had an interview that felt more like a conversation and collaboration than getting grilled about terminology and bug fixes. No matter what the result, I've been inspired to learn again 😌undefined and if you're in the same boat - keep going! just thought i'd share :) rekindled my coding love13
-
So about 3 weeks ago I was laid off from my dream job due to corporate bullshit. From the feedback received since then it is clear that the company made a mistake hiring a brand new React dev while they really needed an experienced one. Because the consultants who were supposed to be weren't. And the other in-house front end dev was an elitist asshole. And I never received proper feedback until it was too late. Actually I still don't have proper feedback save for some vague stuff which really sounds like the kind of feedback you'd give someone in the middle of their learning process. They even said eventually given more time I could have made it. But alas they felt they had to make a call in the best interest of the company.
Things moved fast since then, I took a week to recover and then I spent time updating my resume before getting back in touch with the recruiter who got me my last job. Great guy and he was happy to help me again. Applied to some positions, got some replies, first in person interview I go to they are immediately willing to take me on.
So now I'm supposed to start tomorrow but somehow I'm having my doubts. The company isn't an IT company but rather a fashion company. They believe in developing in house tools because past attempts with external companies resulted in them trying to push their vision through. Knowing who they worked with I agree, they tried to oversell all the time. But after talking with their developers I noticed they are behind on their knowledge. But so am I. So there was no tech interview which means I am getting an easy way in. And if they honour their word I'll be signing tomorrow for around my old wages.
So you'd think that sounds good right? And yet I'm worried it's going to be another shit show working on software without proper analysis or best practices. I mean the devs aren't total idiots, they are mediors like me and I think their heart is in the right place. They want to develop a good project but it will be just us 3 making a modern .net wpf application with the same functionality of the old Access based system currently in use. I was urged by the boss to draw on my experience and I think he wants me to help teach them too. But I'm painfully aware for my decade since graduating I'm a less than average .net dev who struggles with theory and never worked a job where I had someone more experienced to teach me. I coasted most of the time in underpaid jobs due to various reasons. But I'd always get mad over shitty code and practices. Which I realize is hypocritical for someone who couldn't explain what a singleton class is or who still fails at separation of concerns.
So yeah my question for the hivemind is what advice would you give a dev like me? I honestly dislike how poor I perform but it often feels like an insurmountable climb, and being over 30 makes it even more depressing. On the other hand I know I should feel blessed to find a workplace who seems to genuinely believe that people grow and develop and wishes to support me in this. Part of me thinks I should just go in, relax, but also learn till I'm there where I want to be and see if these people are open to improving with me. But part of me also feels I'm rushing into this, picking the first best offer, and it sure feels like a step backwards somehow. And that then makes me feel like an ugly ungrateful person who deserves her bad luck because she expects of others what she can't even do herself :(4 -
So technical interview today but woke up (6am) and started thinking about it and it led to this rant about algorithms. This is probably going into a Medium post if I ever get around to finishing it but sort of just wanted to share the rant that literally just went off in my mind.
*The problem with Algorithms Technical Interviews Is They don't test Real skills*
Real world problems are complex and often cross domain combining experience in multiple areas. Often the best way is not obvious unless you're a polymath and familiar with different areas, paradigms, designs. And intuitively can understand, reason, and combine them.
I don't think this is something a specific algorithm problem is designed to show. And the problem is the optimal solution to some of these and to algorithm design itself is that unless you train for it or are an algorithm designer (practice and experience), you can only brute force it in the amount of time given.
And quite frankly the algorithms I think we rely on daily weren't thought of in 30 minutes. The designers did this stuff for a living, thought about these problems for days and several iterations… at least. A lot were mathematicians. The matrix algorithm that had a Big O of 7N required a flash of insight that only someone constantly looking and thinking about the equations could see.
TBA
-system design
-clean readable coding practices
...
TLDR: I could probably go on and on about this stuff for hours jumping from item/example/area to the next and back again... But I don't think you can test these (~20) years of experience in a 1 hr technical interview focused on algorithms...8 -
Week 1 of the new job, and it seems I have some pretty low expectations to meet.
Seriously, I just did the math. Let's say one works an average of 48 hours per week, 50 weeks per year. Just as an average. That's 2400 hours in a year.
In the Micro-scale, a manager would mess up their team once every 2.4 hours (2h24m) or about 4 times per day (assuming 5 working days per week).
That is a pretty low bar to clear. It easy not to be an antsy brat that are-we-there-yet's a professional dev four fucking times a day.
And yet... that is what the complete moron who previously sat on my chair used to do.
Seriously, apparently he used to remote access the team's dev envs *while they were working* and even mess up some of their code. Just as a "monitoring measure". He logged their "keystroke time" in a day (using a primitive windowing method, I must add).
At least 7 requests for updates per person per day. I have his slack history, I checked. Dude literally did nothing else but be an annoying anxiety death pit.
And then there is his bulshit planning...
He created tasks out of his stupid whims, no team review or brainstorming, not even a fucking requisites tallying interview.
He prioritized those out-of-nowhere tasks using panic-driven-development practices and assigned them by availability heuristics.
No sizing method, just arbitrary deadlines for tasks.
I think I will need to have daily standup meetings and an open door policy (that is to say, do no actual work) for a couple months until I can instill some sense of autonomy on my new team. Shit.
Someone has another idea? How do I bring some confidence&autonomy back to devs that are used to be treated like dogs?!?7 -
Was once interviewing for Ops support roles looking after multiple websites wrote in java, rails, php with some rest apis, apache, varnish and more....
We were also starting moving towards automation and devops practices so we needed to expand...
We have a great CV from someone who had all of the technologies and chef mentioned on their CV so we were positive....
Invited to interview and something wasn't right..... I dropped a "so you mentioned a few different languages on your CV, can you talk me though some of the applications you've looked after and what languages they were written in, etc?"
His reply.. "yes I looked after a lot of applications and helped people with them in English"
Me "oh.. Okay.... So those apps which software languages were they... You mentioned things like Java and Php and automation tech like chef?"
Him "well yes they were all sorts of things but I predominantly looked after the apps that were wrote in English... Didn't deal with any wrote in java or chef... Just English"
Me ".... Does anyone else have any questions?"
Safe to say we didn't offer him the job.... -
(Questions below.) At this point I probably just whine about job search in IT w/o much commitment. It's because I don't learn stuff from interviews and have no willingness to prepare for primitive questions from HR's book. You know, stuff like: "What was your experience on previous jobs and why you quited them?" and "What are your advantages and cons?"
Even though I see them a bit discriminatory. I barely find words and make them audible alrite, and so rush to the stack questions. I answer 50% of them in average, 20% ideally. As a result, I get no conclusive offer. Fair... probably not. Doesn't matter.
All of a sudden, idea chimed in to make a personal website with all of the frequent questions answered in advance. At last, I've got some time to make the decent replacement of the CV into a landing page that communicates my professional and emotional ability to headhunters.
TL;DR: I wanna make my personal website portfolio and I need your word about the following.
1) Can I make up for the absence of my own live projects with OSS commitments or other smooth talk?
2) Is there a merit in answering the common interview questions right off the bat in written form?
3) So, I already prepared 4 conclusive theses with thoughtput choice of words, that I wanna place as a grid in first scrolling section. I call it "Principles", but perhaps there is a synonym to this one or it's good as it is?
4) I don't want to represent myself as a blunt set of "features". How do I transite into explaining the usage of my stack in these circumstances? Less text better, right?7 -
Anybody heard anything about this?
First Video:
https://youtu.be/csP4z8dR6X0
Second Video:
https://youtu.be/g1VeElBAeas
Its a interview with a senior google software engineer who leaked information about Google's machine learning bias, censorship, hiring practices, and much more. I think that Google's censorship based on the company's own political standing is disgusting. While I do not associate with either political parties (I feel like I don't know enough politics to have an opinion), I do detest any censorship of speech and information. Maybe unbiased search engines like duckduckgo will rise in the future.
p.s. sorry if there's bad formatting, I am on mobile.1 -
Is interview preparation and competitive programming the same thing? If they are different which one should one focus on?
🤔🤔🤔1 -
Hello everyone!
Together with colleagues from Eindhoven University of Technology, Sandia National Laboratories, and Microsoft we want to better understand experiences of LGBTIQ+ software managers and engineers related to mentoring.
During the study we want to ask you a few questions on what mentorship means to you, and whether you have any experiences to share as a mentor, mentee, or both. Through this research, we seek to identify effective mentorship practices and to develop methods to help policy-makers and team leads promote a more inclusive workplace culture.
Participants must be 18+. Your participation in this study is voluntary and confidential. Only the researchers involved in this study will see your responses. If you are interested in participating, you can click the link below to schedule a time slot for an interview; when you book an interview with us, we'll contact you to set up a video conferencing solution.
Book a slot for an interview https://mentorshipstudy.youcanbook.me/...2 -
Fair / Not Fair
I hate when an interviewer would ask me to code something for them for technical interview.( happy to show non propitiatory previous work) So now that I am the one doing the interviewing, I am doing what I would have wanted, and I have to say it is working out. I thought I would share my experience so far and find out if the community at large sees this practice as fair or not fair.
People reply to the job post then I call and do quick phone interview ask a few key questions. After I find somone I think should go the next level I direct them to freelancer site and give them a paid project.
most recent project: Build simple(i mean really simple) ASP.net Core MVC web application (code first) that remotely connects to SQL server and can be published in linux ubuntu.
bla bla user accounts/ subscription bla bla. But it must me completed in 10 days. reward $1000.00 us dollars.
I build the SQL server for them and put blank database in and provide connection details.
To be fair
I have already built this app my self it and it took me 5 days.
So, Fair / not Fair11 -
{TL:DR/ a super non web dev non frontend non interested person aka me somehow cracked the interview(through wrong practices i guess) landed into an internship that would have gone to a better person.I cracked the interview but am shit scared if i could stand the job}
- So 3 days ago i was talking to my friend regarding random stuff, when he told about needing a front end dev for making static template based html pages for their company.
- (I haven't ever worked in deep with web dev, just generated a few websites using mardown to html convertors, and was recently trying to learn flask/bootstrap/js) I was in need of some work so immediately requested him to talk about me in their company.
- yesterday i get an interview call from the hr of that company . She ask what i know, what they want and if i could do. I honestly tell them about my experience with web dev( with some maybe's)
- moments later , she adds me to a group with another guy, and gives us both a task to use create a clone of same website in 2 days.
- The website is a super graphically designed web page with lots of animations, custom mouses and what not. I could sense the basic elements out of it , like the nav bar and the carousals, but those animations were way beyond my knowledge. yet i start working on it
- I try with taking the clever top down approach of cloning the website and fixing its structure. It has such long code files of 10k+ lines, but i was still able to clean the css and html files and some of js code to make the website work
- later my friend calls and tells me that the other guy is a 1st year student / his brother and he doesn't know much stuff so he's kinda like me.
- He shows me a video of his code that he sent to him. That guy took the honest, bottom up approach, used the design as inspiration and was trying hard to create the similar design and animations via js.
- among other things, he also tells me that this challenge is super difficult and the level of difficulty in the work is certainly going to be lesser than this.
- In my task, I was super stuck at js because i haven't learned it much, therefore after spending 1.5 days, i made a submission without the main thing, i.e one particular carousal working
- later I get a call from another friend (B) of mine and while discussing random things, i show him my code over anydesk and ask him if he could somehow get my code to work. He asks for some time and sends me a complete refactored version of code with the same design but fully working carousal and other stuff.
- meanwhile i get to see the other guy's code and he had legit made all the designs and functions by himself, but his code looked less polished and different from the design.
- I pushed my friend(B)'s refactored version and added a comment on the group the carousal in mu code is now working.
- later at night my friend1 calls and tells me that their company was considering my submission and i would be getting the selection call
- I feel like a crazy fraud who somehow cracked the interview but is going to get his ass whipped. Where and how can i learn js, and jquery?5 -
Botched the technical interview with the CTO he got me with fucking left joins x,) I'm forever stuck at my dead end job, I'm destined to wither in that wilderness of spaghetti and poor practices2