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Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

Beats me - but the "skills" demonstrated in the interview process you're defending -- "suck up; just keep going online until you memorize enough canned answers to most of these dang questions; suck up, suck up, suck up" -- certainly aren't going to help.

Right. People who don't think of Comp Sci knowledge as a set of substantive first principles, just as meaningless tokens they need to memorize and regurgitate to get the job -- those are precisely the people who should be weeded out. Each one of those questions is not merely a chance to "collect" an arbitrary thing. It's also an opportunity to practice applying basic knowledge and techniques.

If anything, they're basically orthogonal to the set of competencies needed to deal with that kind of a situation.

You may well need to spot a deadlock or a race condition in code. You may well need to spot code that is inefficient by construction, in precisely that kind of situation.

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People who don't think of Comp Sci knowledge as a set of substantive first principles, just as meaningless tokens they need to memorize and regurgitate to get the job -- those are precisely the people who should be weeded out.

And yet - those are the people who are not weeded out, but selected for by the default interview process.

Certainly, there are lots of problems with interviews.

That said, the interview should be designed to specifically weed out the ones who hope to pass by regurgitation. The answer can't be just a pattern match for a particular algorithm. The emphasis shouldn't be on dazzling recall of something obscure. The purpose should be to look for actual experience implementing something.

You may well need to spot a deadlock or a race condition in code.

The thing is - if your production system really ends up going haywire and losing $10 million every second or whatever, then then the root cause isn't some race condition. It's the whole human and organizational process (or lack thereof) that allowed that defect to slip in undetected (and in a position to cause so much damage without proper safeguards) in the first place.

> You may well need to spot a deadlock or a race condition in code. You may well need to spot code that is inefficient by construction, in precisely that kind of situation.

How is that relevant to the practice of "memorizing enough canned answers to most of these dang questions"?

How is that relevant to the practice of "memorizing enough canned answers to most of these dang questions"?

It's not. Instead, ask something not particular tricky, a bit open ended, and just a little bit involved (at least 3 things interacting) with the purpose of seeing if basic skills can be applied. Instead of looking for an answer that can be memorized, you're looking for evidence to see if people have actually designed, implemented, and debugged something at a level beyond gluing libraries together.

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