Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by invalidname 1264 days ago
You would need to debug but can you tell if a person just printed to the console or used advanced tooling?

Can you tell how long they wasted on the debugging aspect?

Nope. That's the problem. These are soft skills that are hard to teach but much harder to test.

1 comments

Yes, I can tell, because in the interview situation I'm sitting next to them.

And print statements are sometimes the superior choice.

This ties into my other comment that these things can be heavily subjective. As long as it gets the job done, I prefer print statements used by somebody who uses them as a sharp knife to gain understanding of what's going on over somebody just clicking buttons in a fancy UI but has no clue. (And vice versa, obviously.)

I'm talking about universities not interviews.

Print debugging is sometimes useful but sometimes indicate the person doesn't know about tracepoints/logpoints.