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by sfpeter 6588 days ago
I like to believe that I can get a pretty good understanding of someone's technical abilities by asking thorough questions about his previous experience, and maybe ask them to explain a couple of basic patterns or programming concepts to me. I remember interviewing a senior java developer who claimed 5+ years of experience and had no idea what a Singleton was. What made it worse was that even after explaining it to her, she was unable to figure out how to implement one. Developers asked the strangest questions when interviewing other developers. I worked with a guy once who liked to ask his interviewees what the decimal value of 0xFE is. One candidate didn't know the answer so my coworker didn't think he could possibly be a good software engineer. I admit that (having done assembly coding in school) it seems odd that any software engineer wouldn't be able to figure out what FE is. But I still thought it was a bad way of testing technical skills. Would you rule out a candidate who doesn't know 0xFE ?
2 comments
icky 6588 days ago
> Would you rule out a candidate who doesn't know 0xFE ?

If they didn't know it after a moment's thought, I'd cut them some slack; If they couldn't calculate it, with pencil and paper, in 10 minutes (and that's giving them plenty of extra time for interview-nervousness), then I'd be seriously concerned.

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andrewcooke 6587 days ago
i read through some answers here and i nodded in agreement with raganwald saying that this only worked as a filter on failure.

but then i read this and i thought "would i really want to give a job to someone who needs a pen and paper to subtract 1 from 255?"

i'm not sure what the lesson is here - perhaps that programming tests are dangerous because it is very easy to over-interpret the results, even when you start with the best of intentions?

[edited for grammar]

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icky 6586 days ago
No, I would be very liberal in accounting for interview-nervousness.

Now, if it appeared that the candidate had no idea how to solve the problem, that would be a different story.

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comatose_kid 6587 days ago
Depends on the context. If this was a question posed for an embedded s/w eng position, I would not be inclined to hire.
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