Technical interviews

[darmstadt]

I've only ever had 2 and they were for positions that I never applied for but the companies contacted me and really wanted to go ahead and talk to me. One was RedHat and the other Google and I know that my skill range is not what they wanted but what the hell. They went through the questions and I replied, correctly I might add, how I would do it but quite often the answers were marked down as wrong because the person at the other end of the phone was either a low level techie or an HR weenie and was reading from a piece of paper. I wasn't bothered though...

[suityou01]

Got interviewed back in 2006 for a role in London. They got their top MS consultant in from another gig just to interview me. He started pressing me on ADO.Net, then SQ l server, then concurrency, then locking mechanisms. I really knew my tulip, so really enjoyed it.

I remember the one question about locking mechs, he only wanted 2. I gave him the remaining 3 anyways. AdBatchLockOptimistic confused him.

Anyway ps I got the gig. I was held aloft as the shiny new star, who had fended off 250 other applicants and outfoxed their Top MS consultant.

In the 7 weeks I was there, I learned a lot about bullying in the work place from my colleagues. Was given the cryogenic ally frozen shoulder from day 1.

This is one of the reasons I went contracting.

If the technical interviewer was a total bellend, self importatant knob stain who did not know the subject matter well enough to test you then you could have politely called the meeting short, given feedback to your agent and then moved onto the next interview.

You have to balance your hunger for the next role, with when something smells bad. A kind of look before you leap mentality. If you have zero warchest, then you just have to leap and suck it up while you rebuild.

Either way you dodged a bullet and should be relieved. Also you received some excellent training in how not to conduct a technical interview so should you find yourself in a hiring capacity you should draw on the experience positively and become a better person from it.

[eek]

Either way you dodged a bullet and should be relieved. Also you received some excellent training in how not to conduct a technical interview so should you find yourself in a hiring capacity you should draw on the experience positively and become a better person from it.

Yep, don't do technical interviews and see what people can do once they are in situ. After all you can just find no work for them if they are crap.

[d000hg]

the nominated "senior technical guy" betrayed a complete and fundamental misunderstanding of how object references are passed around (something you learn in chapter one of any book on said development language, and that is common across Java, C# and JavaScript).

In the spirit of full disclosure you need to explain what he said and what you think the right answer is, in case we can mock you horrendously.

[wonderboy]

In the spirit of full disclosure you need to explain what he said and what you think the right answer is, in case we can mock you horrendously.

Happy to do so. Given the following code (JavaScript), the interviewer claimed that "appVar2" needed to be returned from the function expression (using a "return" statement) to make "MyConstructor" available outside the scope of the closure created by the function expression. He claimed that by injecting appVar1 into the function expression it was being copied, implying that appVar2 referred to a separate object, hence the need to return.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the way JavaScript uses "pass reference by value" (described more commonly as "pass by reference") when dealing with objects.

var appVar1 = {};

(function(appVar2){

appVar2.MyConstructor = function() {
//...
};

})(appVar1);

Mock me all you want!

[suityou01]

Holy feck, in my day you passed either by reference or by value. Now we can pass by reference value?

[wonderboy]

Holy feck, in my day you passed either by reference or by value. Now we can pass by reference value?

I simply mean pass by reference, but I personally find the term "pass reference by value" to be easier to understand. It means the same thing. The important thing is that the value of the reference is what is copied (and not the object pointed to by the reference).

[suityou01]

I simply mean pass by reference, but I personally find the term "pass reference by value" to be easier to understand. It means the same thing. The important thing is that the value of the reference is what is copied (and not the object pointed to by the reference).

I'm mystified by javascript nowadays.

Wtf does line 1 do? Set a loosely typed var equal to a set of braces! I mean wtf is that?

[wonderboy]

I'm mystified by javascript nowadays.

Wtf does line 1 do? Set a loosely typed var equal to a set of braces! I mean wtf is that?

Yes, where "set of braces" is a shorthand for "new Object();".

[suityou01]

Also line 2 starts with an opening parentheses. How can a statement begin with an opening parenthesis?

I need a lie down.