Instructor, author, developer. Creator of Beej’s Guides.
openpgp4fpr:CD99029AAD50ED6AD2023932A165F24CF846C3C8
It never happened–since they knew in advance, they had time to whip up something cool if there wasn’t anything else. It didn’t have to be massive. I just wanted to see some clean non-trivial code and a clear understanding of how it worked. Fizzbuzz wouldn’t have impressed. :)
One of my classmates years ago loved bash. They wrote a filesystem for their OS class in Bash. It was a really, really impressive and bad idea.
But how do you handle candidates who say something like “look, there’s heaps of code that I’m proud of and would love to walk you through, but it’s all work I’ve done for past companies and don’t have access (or the legal right) to show you?”
It never once happened. They always knew in advance, so they could code something up if they felt like it.
I asked candidates to bring me some code they were proud of and teach me how it worked. Weeded out people really quickly and brought quality candidates to the top. On two separate occasions we hired devs with zero experience in the language or framework and they rocked it. Trythat with your coding interview, eh? 🙂
I don’t think it’s bad–it’s impossible to make error-free material, and it’s more error-free than not, for sure.
But other people are right: you’ll “graduate” to MDN and not look at W3 Schools again.
You can absolutely write a Star Wars knockoff, though. You just can’t call it that. There’s some gray line in there somewhere.
A shell script can be more concise if you’re doing a lot of shell things. Keeps you from having os.system() all over the place.
Things like “diff the output of two programs” are just more complex in other languages.
I love rust, but replacing my shell scripts with rust is not something I would consider doing any more than I’d consider replacing rust with my shell scripts.
I hypothesize the failure of AI in this arena will be due to the fact that English is a shit programming language. It can take many times the amount of English to be precise compared to the equivalent computer code.
What’s the backup login mechanism when you lose your biometric sensor? How do you pair with the new sensor?
Every time I find a site like this, I assume the programming is bad and the security is poor. (They don’t know how to sanitize input? They don’t know how to hash passwords?) It’s a good reason to use random passwords on every site for when that one is compromised.
I did this with a BASIC game called Wizard’s Castle that I played a lot of as a kid. The first step was to “reverse engineer” the manually-compressed BASIC code and write up a spec. Then I rewrote it in Rust as a learning exercise. 🙂
There’s a whole game that is being played when it comes to intra-corporate relationships, and it pays to know how to play it at least a little bit. We’ve all seen people who have risen up the ladder with basically zero functional skill–who are maybe even damaging to the company. They know how to play it.
I see new workers there struggle a lot because they don’t try to understand what’s wrong and just want a fed copy paste solution to make the problem go away.
I see that in my students a lot, as well. I’ve been hammering away that the goal (in school, but frankly in general) is not actually to solve the problem. It’s to learn to solve the problem. And that every experience you have, success or failure, is learning to solve problems. The 10 ways you failed to solve this problem all are solutions to other problems that you now know.
“The expert has failed more times than the beginner has even tried.”
I fear, however, the pervasive Pride in the Craft that existed 30 years ago is now something observed only by a minority.
Programming pays well because it’s hard. Just keep in mind that if AI is making it easy for you, it’s making it easy for a lot of people who could easily replace you.
Use it as a tool, but know what it’s doing, and be able to do it yourself after you learn from it.
Personally, I generally struggle through on my own first and then ask it to critique. Great teachers don’t just give you the code to copy.
By analogy, you need to be able to hand fly this plane when the autopilot dies; those are the pilots who get the jobs.
I always left it open-ended and that seemed to work. Part of the interview was seeing what they’d come up with. I’m pretty sure people always brought things they’d already written.