mtbc: photograph of me (Default)
From: [personal profile] mtbc
In being interviewed for coding jobs I'd been puzzled at how easily I was impressing people with the more technical/coding portions of the process, a lot of it felt like freshman undergrad computer science. This background helps to explain why, I guess maybe my typical competition really sucked!

One of my worst hiring mistakes was letting a less-technical (well, still with a math degree) colleague's very positive opinion plus a great-looking resume sway me in agreeing to the hire of a lovely guy who turned out to not easily understand the unremarkable code he was looking at. He didn't make it past the probationary period. On the flip-side the other worst mistake was hiring a guy who was very good but not quite as good as he thought.
jducoeur: (Default)
From: [personal profile] jducoeur
On the flip-side the other worst mistake was hiring a guy who was very good but not quite as good as he thought.

Reminds me of an intern we hired at a job about 20 years ago. *Very* smart guy -- totally aced these algorithmic questions, loved writing the most efficient possible code, and so on.

Problem was, he turned out to be *utterly* self-absorbed, and convinced that efficiency was the only thing that mattered. He couldn't write user-facing systems to save his life, and that super-efficient code turned out to be impenetrable and unmaintainable.

Suffice it to say, we didn't offer him a job at the end of that internship (to his loud dismay). And ever since, I've been a little suspicious of focusing too much on algorithms in interviews: I want to see evidence of code that is *good*, not just clever...

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