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Comment by n4r9 | Hacker News Reader

> Bug hunter

> Intentionally introduce some logical flaw or defect and see if a candidate can spot it. A good idea is to go back and find recent bugs that were solved and pull the source before the fix was applied. Can the candidate identify the root cause? How would the candidate suggest resolving the defect?

I've had this exact idea on the back-burner for years! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18794465

The example bug that gave me the idea initially is this one I reported on the "Satsuma Graph" dotnet package: https://sourceforge.net/p/satsumagraph/tickets/2/

Very keen to hear from anyone that has experience with this, from either side of the interview fence.

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I had a bug hunt as part of an interview once (or, I should say, once that I remember). It was different from that proposal in that the code was not part of the company's actual codebase - it was entirely fabricated for the test. It was fun, though; I enjoyed that more than livecoding and live-whiteboarding.

I had one that wasn't fabricated when I worked at Strip. There was an old bug in the requests library for Python where it was sending wrong data when posting a stream and the response had to be retried. The bug had already been fixed upstream.

We cloned a repo, ran they tests, it failed, and the task was to identify why it failed.

It was a tough process for me, since I've never really used Python debugging tools, so I actually had to learn during the interview, but I was able to reason well and picked things up quickly enough that I found the cause, and we had time to discuss ways it could have been fixed.

It was different. I do well during Leetcode questions, so stepping out of that framework was uncomfortable and stressful. I got an offer, but I felt like it was closer than it should have been.

Thanks for relating your experience. I'm sorry to hear that it was uncomfortable and stressful, but it sounds like you must have reacted pretty well in those circumstances to get an offer. Do you feel like the skills assessed by the interview were reflective of what you ended up doing on the job (assuming you accepted) ?

There are always going to be parts of life that are uncomfortable and stressful. This one wasn't terrible, and I appreciated a new outlook on how to assess skills. The interviewer was very understanding and we meshed well, so I don't think it came off as negative.

Were they indicative? shruggie. I mis-typed, I interviewed there, didn't work there. And I haven't used the python debugger since, but I also haven't worked on much python code.

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