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by taurath 2958 days ago
Its not causation, but I'd say it correlates to being a thoughtful person. Drilling down on the architecture blabble to see how deep their understand goes will absolutely tell you whether they could code a solution.

Is there a person who claims to be a coder that has configured and launched a multi-environment microservice with several attached artifacts like DBs and queues, that knows in depth what each is doing, that can't code? At that point you're just testing whether someone has memorized syntax details that they might usually get from an IDE or a 3 second google search in regular development. I have been writing production JS for years but still have to occasionally look up Array.slice vs Array.splice parameters, especially if I haven't done a lot of data munging in a while. That may indicate to a person giving an interview that somehow I'm "faking" it, when in reality its just a momentary stall-out in my brain's lookup tables.
1 comments
varjag 2958 days ago
> Is there a person who claims to be a coder that has configured and launched a multi-environment microservice with several attached artifacts like DBs and queues, that knows in depth what each is doing, that can't code?

Funny that you mention it. I know a person who can't shut up about microservices, Kubernetes and CI and can't code their way out of paper bag. They had no problem passing one of those interviews.

And sure rote API memorization isn't the point. But if a candidate can't code say bubblesort (or any kind of sort) in 30 minutes they are not very good at coding - and it doesn't matter if they can quote their architecture patterns by heart.

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taurath 2958 days ago
> But if a candidate can't code say bubblesort (or any kind of sort) in 30 minutes they are not very good at coding

Thats bullshit. Sorry. Most developers will NEVER implement a generic sorting algorithm except in a code interview. You say you don't want rote API memorization, but you do want rote sort method implementation memorization. Yes you can be a system or tools developer and maybe have a higher chance of doing it, but its 99% likely even then that you just use a library for it for the language you're using, or copypastaing it from someone who's studied the specific implementation for your lang.

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