On Algorythm During Interview

I was recently into an interview process for a big company. I did 2 “in person” interview with the CEO and the CTO, I was looking for an Engineering Manager position.

And I Ended by doing a Algorithm test on hackerrank.com. Few hours on a chair, trying to find the more optimize way to sort lists.

Wait, really?

I know, you want to test my tech skills, you want to check if I’m techie enough. But, my job is about building API, produce readable and bug-less code.

My job is about teamwork, trying to create an unified piece of code.

My job is also to set up best practices and do thing to be sure that everybody works on the same code rules.

And you test me………on math?

Developers are broken

We are nerds, we love the tricky shit — i’ll write a post about why i Looooooove Vim in the next few days hopefully. But, please, keep your perversion at home.

We are in 2018, and I’m a Web Developer not a super tricky kernel/drivers whatever development in a very constraint environment. Nobody gives a shit if I sort your f*cking array in the most efficient way. Even my phone has 8 cores bro, and 3Gb of RAM!

So, give me a break with your optimization illness and test me on real thing.

What about a test on Git? On API architecture? On how I resolve conflicts? What kind of technical choice I made on tricky issues?

The best piece of code is one working on production

This kind of behavior is not harmless. It’s why there is a lot of guy afraid to ship their code into production “because it’s not beautiful/optimal/perfect”.

Of course you need to ship the best code possible, of course it’s important to take care of the performance. And, yes, algorithm is sometimes important.

But, in real life, when I face a very hard issue I ask my coworkers to think about it with me, we work on it together and we solve it and ship it this way.

So yeah, ok, test my tech skills, but please, don’t spend your whole recruitment process on it. It’s far from the reality of our work!