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Discussion on: Technical Interviewing is Broken, But We Can Fix It

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johndbro1 profile image
johndbro1

I like a lot of your thoughts, and as a 25 year veteran with a CS degree and masters, who did have to learn how pointers worked and write a simple interpreter, I probably would still fail some of those codewar tests.

Two things stand out as areas of lukewarm disagreement:

1) I find that having some decent familiarity with the way the low level architecture works (assembly, pointers, call stacks, etc) can be beneficial in solving some otherwise incredibly weird technical problems in business applications. And yes, even in the world of virtual machines. This is one of the areas where my education has resulted in savings of tens of thousands of dollars of debugging effort.

2) There are some "developers" who know how to google and fix syntax errors, and that's it. They appear to be developers, but are unable to produce almost anything non-trivial without a template. Those people are not common, but they exist, and I would prefer not to have to clean up after them. Having said that, esoteric coding tests are not the sensible fix.

Thanks again!

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ambroselittle profile image
Ambrose Little

I agree with you. The CS things I've learned do come in handy on occasion!

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dimitarkostov333 profile image
Dimitar • Edited

I agree with you to some extent, but in todays world knowing the basics is no longer enough. Knowing CS theory and a low level programming language well wont get you a interview, you have to know a myriad of frameworks and libraries as well that change every 5 years or so.

If you are hired to code vanilla C++ or Python then yes what you are saying is true but most of us need to know a whole bunch of extras on top of that its almost impossible not to open Google search, and you cant say that im not a true dev because I am not 100% familiar with the inner workings of a obscure framework that came out 5 years ago.