[commandlinefan]

Reminds me of a comic I saw:

Interviewer: How do you swap two variables without using a temporary variable?

Candidate: x = x + y; y = x - y; x = x - y!

Interviewer: You're hired!

... two months later ...

Boss: What the hell is this code you wrote?

Programmer: I swapped two variables without using a temporary variable!

Boss: You're fired!

[marcus_holmes]

This is so true.

I've been looking around at jobs, and was advised to start practising on HackerRank for the technical interviews.

I've been coding professionally for 30-ish years. There is very little that I've seen on HackerRank that comes anywhere close to a "real" software problem that I've faced developing actual software.

Why is this being used to do technical interviews? What's the thinking here?

[lordnacho]

My guess is that people who can't code can't pass, but people who can code might pass. It's a kind of extreme fear of false positive. Then the firm that does the testing needs to look like they're doing something beyond fizzbuzz and you end up with crazy tests.

It never made sense to me, I always just do a technical conversation and if for some reason a muggle has gotten an offer it's easy to detect and deal with. People don't last long in coding jobs if they can't do it anyway.

[marcus_holmes]

hehe, I have a war story about that...

Back during Y2K I was working as a contractor for a large organisation. I was hired by a recruitment company, who were hired by the customer to provide a large number of contractors. Evidently someone messed up, and we had a guy join the team who couldn't code. He'd heard about the money to be made in Y2K, had done some simple exercises, and slipped through the screening process. But once he started it was obvious he had no idea what he was doing. We pushed back at the recruitment company, but apparently they couldn't fire him because they'd have to admit to the customer that they'd hired someone who couldn't code, and politically that wasn't acceptable. We were told to cover for him. So this guy clocked in every day and did nothing, literally nothing, all day, earning really good money for it. We disabled his login, so he couldn't do anything on the PC sat in front of him. If anyone from the customer organisation came by he had to look busy somehow - it was on him if he failed to do that and the customer started asking questions about him. He couldn't even read a book at his desk in case he got caught doing it. It must have been hell for him. We ended up feeling that he deserved the money just for being able to do that day in day out for months. I would have gone crazy. In the end, I moved on before he did so I don't know how it ended. I often think of that guy when pondering how life in a stable-but-boring job would be.

[jmull]

LOL, I had forgotten about this, but I actually sort of lived this decades ago in college. I thought I "invented" this variable-less swap technique and used it when answering a CS class quiz question. The prof dinged me on it. I thought I was wonderfully clever and the prof just didn't get it. But of course, he was right and I was wrong.

[jesusohchrist]

a,b := 1,2 a,b = b,a