I read Programming Interviews Exposed (http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Interviews-Exposed-Secrets...) - which covers lot of topics that come up during interview.
26 karma · joined March 18, 2012
6 weeks ago, I left my job and here's my share of the search experience. 1 week after leaving the job, I got a cold email by a company who is 25-min drive away in Foster City. I did initial call with the HR on Dec. 1. On Dec. 2, I did my first phone interview. I was asked to rate my competency in Python and JavaScript on the scale 1-10. Then the interviewer asked me questions that were targeted at that level. I did badly, but not horribly, with the Q/A on technical parts and ok on some of the basic ones. On Dec. 3, I did second phone interview, which went great in the first half and badly in the second half. In the later part, I just started to get nervous and lost my cool. They still felt I was competent, so on Dec. 4 I did a full day of interview. I did 5 different interviews from engineers to CTO and CEO. By the end of the day, I was offered the position @ 135K. This is where you expect the typical ending of me accepting the salary and living happily ever after. Not so fast there, reader. I pressed for higher salary - 25K more than they were offering. They didn't budge and neither did I, so no cigar.
In parallel to interviewing at that company, I also created my profile on Underdog.io. I spent Dec. 5 to Dec. 16 talking with 7 different companies in New York. I saw that their Salary range is lower than in Bay Area so it did not go far.
On Dec. 13, I created my profile on Hired.Me. Since then I have had 5 offers. I have made strong connection with one of the company and will be having in-person interview in a month (I have 3 week family wedding planned in Jan :)).
From my experience, there are so many companies looking for quality engineers. If you are having hired time getting hired, I am open to talk with you. I personally don't pursue working at big companies for the sake of them being big. I am looking for a company where I fit in based on my programming design sense and culturally.
I'm 27/M/Single/SF - so I don't have much constraints as someone who may be older with family or in non-tech savvy part of the county.
His argument is not to abolish tests and use asserts, but rather to define a set of cases for which you would not need to test because the framework, by its nature, makes it unnecessary.
His example was SQL injection. (a) If I were to write my own MySql queries which directly talk with the DB, then I would need to write tests around those query to make sure it is not possible to execute SQL injection. (b) If I am using an ORM that comes with feature so I don't write the sql queries, it creates it on its own and also comes with the feature to handles possible use-cases which would normally lead to SQl injection, in such case, there is no need to write the test.
I, personally, used to do it all by myself as a PHP developer, where I wrote raw sql queries and handled the raw HTTP request. Once I figured out ORM in django and its custom templating system, everything becomes so much less code and easy to implement.
Presentation, along with content, is a better experience than just having good content.
I do prefer using reST for writing articles. I had found an existing blog which provides it. After using it, I realize the lack of preview option of the editor. My preference is to use https://www.stypi.com for writing the article and simply use blog to post it.