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by VLM 3464 days ago
The problem is its possible to run a B-tree implementation and see if the unit tests pass or non-technical interviewers can compare the official solution to what the candidate is talking about fairly easily.

I've never used Go, don't really plan to unless I have to, nothing wrong with it just not my area of expertise and I'm busy with other toys although I'm sure its a very nice language, and if I went up against a non-technical or technically weak interviewer (aka almost all of them) I could probably BS my way thru based on what I do know about concurrency in general. Although after decades of experience, the reason why I'm not still programming in 6502/Z80 assembler is I'm good at that whole "BS my way thru till I'm an actual expert" thing, so maybe I'm talking myself into agreeing for non obvious reason!

BSing skill is under-rated. If you can't BS your way thru something that you don't entirely understand (because you're lazy), then when you're at the cutting edge developing or debugging you'll have trouble BSing about stuff that no one on the planet understands. Not all the worlds problems have a stack overflow question or a script reader at a support hotline, and how you deal with that gut check says a lot.

1 comments

Actually BSing in tech makes you look very poor if you don't come out with a convincing answer.

(I listened to a training video given by a Marketing Cloud consultancy at my work. Someone asked "what is FTP" after seeing that as an option to upload files. Lots waffle including "the cloud" and no actual answer. The person asking the question was no wiser, and my opinion of the consultant went way down).