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Comment by tene | Hacker News Reader

How long would you expect someone to need to write code that makes a few HTTP requests (or read files or whatever other data source is specified), some kind of parsing or decoding (probably JSON) to get the URLs for more requests, and spawns a couple of threads?

Nothing about that sounds tricky or time-intensive to me in any language I've used very often. An hour sounds perfectly reasonable to me.

I'm curious where you're coming from here. What part of this would you expect to spend so much more than an hour on?

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All your doing is testing if someone memorized the same APIs and libraries as you have, and has recently done whatever project you just did that's just like this (except it took you a week, and now that you know how to do it you think someone else should be able to do it in an hour). But your company already has one of you and doesn't need another.

I was including time spent reviewing documentation there. I definitely don't have any of those memorized. I almost never write code without frequently consulting an API reference.

Am I misunderstanding you, or are you really saying that you expect someone to take a week to write a program that spawns a couple of threads and makes a couple of HTTP requests?

In my case (the GP here) no I don't care WHAT framework/language the candidate users. But they DO have to know how to use a webclient of some sort. And any person with experience in any common stack should be able to perform a data fetch. If you can't do that, you're probably not a fit as that half of what our microservices do.

Regarding whether my company would like, or needs another me, you'd have to ask them. I believe they'd say they would like several more of me. And there's nothing wrong with that. I provide a good amount of value.

data fetch, in parallel: MOVDQA xmm2, XMMWORD PTR [esi+ecx]

data fetch, serial: REPNE SCASB

I also can use a webclient of some sort, which is handy for looking up instruction timings.

If it were only to take an hour then it's not a "comprehensive" exercise in the ability to solve problems as the OP desires.

It would then be an exercise with toy data that measures how smoothly the candidate conforms to the expectations of whatever framework they're using to solve hello-world-level problems.

"An hour" is a really short time!

> I'm curious where you're coming from here.

the GP is probably coming from some workplace that doesn't do exactly that same thing all day, every day, and doesn't know a framework for this from the inside out.

How to do a custom HTTP request on any language will probably take some good 15 minutes reading the documentation (if one is perfectly comfortable with its networking documentation), how to parse JSON will take at a minimum some good 30 minutes reading the docs even on Javascript (unless you are ok with eval). Discovering how to serve that endpoint is a multi-hour learning task by itself.

JSON parsing in JS is a single call to JSON.parse(), no eval required. It's been in the standard since ES5 IIRC.

Correct, I wrote it in Java, which was the most annoying implementation, but still about an hour's worth of work.

It would take at least an hour to manually test such functionality.

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