Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by guitarbill 1900 days ago
You can teach that. You can even pass most tech interviews without having ever touched version control or knowing how to use it. Maybe that's an easy thing for candidates to pick up once hired, but then so are algos you never need in day-to-day programming (like sorting), because you can simply look them up should you ever need to implement that.

It's all a bit broken. Best method I've seen so far is to sit down with candidates and pair on some code, and it's still got issues.

1 comments

I have nearly 2 decades of experience and when I was asked to write a console log hello world app by a teenager and the CEO , who stared at me silently - well - I just couldnt bring myself to do it, fear of failure at such a simple task in such an OTT scenario mean I quit the interview on the spot as I did not want to know what the judgement could be.

Im not saying its right, just that it didnt come naturally to me to be in that situation.

You should not be taking an interview so seriously that you freeze under such a situation.

If you feel it's out of your control, it could've just been a bad day, but you may be suffering from something like generalized anxiety or a similar problem, you might want to look into that with a health professional.

It wasn't anxiety as much as knowing that if I faltered even a little that this particularly interviewer would say no. I had not written fizz buzz in a few years and decided that the fact I thought about it for a few seconds meant I had already thrown the interview away.

Im just saying its thanks to my instinct that I have been so successful in my life, and I have never lost anything by refusing fizz buzz, yet have attained good things.

Maybe its survivorship bias.

It goes against my rules to proceed in interviews I think don't lend themselves to the situation.