This is important for hiring experienced developers from different fields, specialties, and language backgrounds as well. Hire good people and they will learn or can be taught your domain and technology. I just passed a year transitioning from enterprise development to robotics. I absolutely love it, and am providing a lot of value, and it’s all because someone gave me a chance.
Just got back from an interview for a junior job and I’m wondering if I left the good impression.. I got really stressed during the interview and had trouble coding a simple function.. (Reversing a string on a word basis). The only way I could think of doing it was coding it from scratch in c. Its only when I stepped outside that I remembered that I could of done it all in one line of awk (Or any of a myriad of simpler solutions)…
This was my first interview, so now I’m just in front of my computer, wracked with stress and trying to read everything I can that covers hiring. Should probably just go out for a beer.
[…] only when I stepped outside that I remembered that I could of done it all in one line of awk
Don’t worry about it. Coding challenge interviews usually want to see your thought process, not that you can quickly type out memorised code for simple functions. Chances are the awk solution would have made you seem like a smart-arse.
I consider myself some level of ‘senior’ engineer and that happens to me too. Generally when I run an interview I try to give some warmup (generally the candidate is not aware of that fact, though). Hopefully your interviewer took such things into account.
Like stig said: we usually want to see how you handle the problem. How you go about solving it. If you’d go through the exercise perfectly we would hire you as a senior :-)
This is an interesting perspective to me, because i think it’s skewed the opposite way in the bay, where there are more jobs than people. It’s harder to find a team that has at least 2 seasoned developers, for the same root reason as this article discusses: nobody wants to be the only mentor in the room.
I agree with this quite vehemently. I manage a team of 6 engineers (3 senior and 3 intermediate) and we have had such good experiences mentoring 3 junior engineers that we are about to take on 2 junior engineers plus 3 interns.
We are building the backend for a new service in Go. It’s initially going to power a new mobile app and then a web app shortly after. The HTTP/2 server has a bunch of RESTful endpoints serving up protocol buffers as payloads. Additionally, we have a few batch processes to manipulate data. They’re not technically a pipeline because some of them run in parallel.
We have weekly or biweekly sprints (it has varied) at the end of which we demo what was built. We also have daily standups during which we update the status of each story for the sprint.
This is important for hiring experienced developers from different fields, specialties, and language backgrounds as well. Hire good people and they will learn or can be taught your domain and technology. I just passed a year transitioning from enterprise development to robotics. I absolutely love it, and am providing a lot of value, and it’s all because someone gave me a chance.
Just got back from an interview for a junior job and I’m wondering if I left the good impression.. I got really stressed during the interview and had trouble coding a simple function.. (Reversing a string on a word basis). The only way I could think of doing it was coding it from scratch in c. Its only when I stepped outside that I remembered that I could of done it all in one line of awk (Or any of a myriad of simpler solutions)…
This was my first interview, so now I’m just in front of my computer, wracked with stress and trying to read everything I can that covers hiring. Should probably just go out for a beer.
Don’t worry about it. Coding challenge interviews usually want to see your thought process, not that you can quickly type out memorised code for simple functions. Chances are the awk solution would have made you seem like a smart-arse.
I consider myself some level of ‘senior’ engineer and that happens to me too. Generally when I run an interview I try to give some warmup (generally the candidate is not aware of that fact, though). Hopefully your interviewer took such things into account.
Like stig said: we usually want to see how you handle the problem. How you go about solving it. If you’d go through the exercise perfectly we would hire you as a senior :-)
Maybe that’s true, but it’s not because of the age of the industry. Software development didn’t just pop into existence in 2001.
This is an interesting perspective to me, because i think it’s skewed the opposite way in the bay, where there are more jobs than people. It’s harder to find a team that has at least 2 seasoned developers, for the same root reason as this article discusses: nobody wants to be the only mentor in the room.
I agree with this quite vehemently. I manage a team of 6 engineers (3 senior and 3 intermediate) and we have had such good experiences mentoring 3 junior engineers that we are about to take on 2 junior engineers plus 3 interns.
Care to share some more on that? What are you working on, how do you work, etc?
We are building the backend for a new service in Go. It’s initially going to power a new mobile app and then a web app shortly after. The HTTP/2 server has a bunch of RESTful endpoints serving up protocol buffers as payloads. Additionally, we have a few batch processes to manipulate data. They’re not technically a pipeline because some of them run in parallel.
We have weekly or biweekly sprints (it has varied) at the end of which we demo what was built. We also have daily standups during which we update the status of each story for the sprint.