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by heartsucker 3664 days ago
I've had the same experience. Someone listed 2 years Scala experience on a resume, but couldn't explain Unit, None, null, and Nothing to me. Or the guy this week who had several years of ops experience and when asked "how can you tell what indexes are being used in a SQL query" didn't even know about EXPLAIN.

Basic technical interviews are a must, but someone people get hung up on "they couldn't explain a hash map implementation," because sometimes "you put a thing in the map and then get it back out later" is good enough for 99% of startup engineering tasks.

Somewhere out there is a sweet middle ground, but it seems not one agrees where it really is.
2 comments
coredog64 3664 days ago
That latter bit in the Amazon interview really pissed me off. They saw my resume, and it didn't include a degree in CS. They had a cheap opportunity to ask me questions about data structures (phone interview). So why the hell do they wait until the "fly me across the country" interview to ask questions about implementations of priority queue?
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Chris2048 3664 days ago
To be honest though, just because you can get by without knowing how hash maps are implemented, doesn't mean it isn't useful to know - and if another candidate does know, they would sooner hire them.

Further, they may be looking for factors that correlates with other, hard-to-measure factors. Even such as reading a "common interview questions" book - it correlates with focused pragmatism...

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heartsucker 3664 days ago
I'm not saying it's not useful to know or that having that knowledge might make someone a better candidate, but it seems like that alone shouldn't be reason enough to reject someone.

And I disagree that looking up the answers to common interview questions is focused pragmatism. I don't bother, even with the knowledge that it would help me get a job. I spend my time working on side projects or learning practical things. I think I will never in my life have implement a hash map, and that knowing it's all O(1) operations is sufficient. But also I guess I don't want to work for a company that is interested in my ability to jump through hoops. (shrug)

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