I don’t have any interview stories. Alas, I’ve only given a couple of interviews. (Or maybe rather fortunately I’ve only given a couple of interviews, depending how you look at it.)
But I do remember a first code review for one guy. Dude implemented his own bubble sort rather than using a sort method from the standard library. Aside from that one interesting choice, he was a good coder as I recall. He’s a manager now.
I did a review of someone’s code submission once where they pretty much wrote a bespoke JQuery implementation to handle the super-complex task of incrementing a number in a div when a button is pressed. I don’t think they got the job. I felt a little bad for them, but a valid part of those coding interviews is “Will this person go off and do something crazy like write their own half-baked React instead of just using React?”. Showing that you know how to write code as simply as possible is a big plus.
I have yet to administer or discuss interviews where using an api was an acceptable answer. Granted my experience is more on the engineering side but it seems odd to me to not expect someone to implement their own algorithm. If they had 60 seconds to answer a multiple choice technical question on a prescreen online test, maybe. But it seems that person demonstrated their understanding on a technical level that should have been expected and explored?
Oh. Oh no. You misunderstand. My story was about one of the first pull requests a guy opened after he was hired. He put his home-grown bubble sort in code that would have ended up in production in an e-commerce application had I not pointed him to the sort functionality in the standard library.
I don’t have any interview stories. Alas, I’ve only given a couple of interviews. (Or maybe rather fortunately I’ve only given a couple of interviews, depending how you look at it.)
But I do remember a first code review for one guy. Dude implemented his own bubble sort rather than using a sort method from the standard library. Aside from that one interesting choice, he was a good coder as I recall. He’s a manager now.
I did a review of someone’s code submission once where they pretty much wrote a bespoke JQuery implementation to handle the super-complex task of incrementing a number in a div when a button is pressed. I don’t think they got the job. I felt a little bad for them, but a valid part of those coding interviews is “Will this person go off and do something crazy like write their own half-baked React instead of just using React?”. Showing that you know how to write code as simply as possible is a big plus.
I have yet to administer or discuss interviews where using an api was an acceptable answer. Granted my experience is more on the engineering side but it seems odd to me to not expect someone to implement their own algorithm. If they had 60 seconds to answer a multiple choice technical question on a prescreen online test, maybe. But it seems that person demonstrated their understanding on a technical level that should have been expected and explored?
Oh. Oh no. You misunderstand. My story was about one of the first pull requests a guy opened after he was hired. He put his home-grown bubble sort in code that would have ended up in production in an e-commerce application had I not pointed him to the sort functionality in the standard library.
Oh my, I definitely missed something when reading lol. That’s insane behavior! I hope he learned from the mistake.