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0 pointslawnchair_larry7y ago0 comments

I think it depends how you do it. When I interview, part of what I do is try to find quirks that they know about, but not count the ones they don’t know about against them.

I think you can quickly get a sense of depth, potential, curiosity, and passion if you can get them talking about quirks and their opinions on those quirks.

For example, if someone says that they once attached a debugger to the JVM to confirm a pathological issue arising from benign looking Java code and found that the JIT compiler falls apart when a certain construct is used, I’m probably going to hire that person, even if we have no Java code in the company - assuming I can also confirm that they are productive and don’t just waste time going down deep rabbit holes.

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chillacy7y ago· 2 in thread

How has that been working out for you? I used to think the same and I'd ask a "programming passion question" right before a simple coding question, and then I'd run into these amazing bullshitters who could talk shop but couldn't write fizzbuzz. But they'd come up with a bunch of excuses as they were writing the code as to why ("oh my company uses this other framework so I forgot how to write a for loop"). So sadly I stopped paying attention to that part. I only ask it to make the candidate comfortable before we dive into code.

lawnchair_larryOP7y ago

Nobody who can go into that level of detail doesn’t know what a for loop is.

chillacy7y ago

It seems you're doubting my story. Maybe you think my threshold for "that level of detail" isn't sufficient, or whatever candidate sourcing we use doesn't filter these people out.

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