Comment by mhss | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mhss | Hacker News Reader

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I get what you mean I think. However if you’ve been doing C dev for several years and you “don’t remember” what a static variable is and when to use it (or not) is not a great sign. Cumulative signals is what determines hire or no hire, not a single “wrong answer”. Even when a candidate doesn’t know an answer you can get useful signals. If you give them the answer or hints and see how they react or a follow up question after giving them the answer.

You can google many things easily. Understanding the answer and knowing how to apply it to different problems matters a lot more. I still expect some concepts and definitions to be remembered if you’re claiming expertise in a topic.

Static variable sure but there are many other examples, like returning a C fixed-size array from a function. I had this question asked and they specifically insisted on being compliant with the standards and not using an out-argument. This is a ridiculous question.

Agreed. I’ve been doing C development for the last 10 years and I’ve never seen that. I would have put it inside a struct and returned that.

I hate those types of trick questions.

I guess my point is that what you really dislike are niche pedantic gotcha questions, not 'very specific questions you can Google an answer to in 3s'. I fully agree with that btw.

> they specifically insisted on being compliant with the standards

that's wrong?

Being pedantic about standards and expecting people to recite them perfectly as a way to assess skill or seniority is what is wrong. Even when you are implementing a 'standard' there's room for robustness principles (liberal in what you accept, strict with what you send) that should be weighted instead of blindly following a 'standard'.

No, but this is a very niche thing to know and if I remember correctly gcc has a widely used specific extension for that which would not be accepted in that case.

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