vlbrown-mzydt

I think many engineers ask the wrong questions in interviews.

Instead of asking me to "name the four basic inbuilt data structures in Python" (translated: "have you memorized that standard question / sentence from chapter 1 of the book"), ask me: what would you use a dictionary for? How is the data stored in a dictionary? How is a dictionary different from a list? How does a set differ from those?

Instead of asking "what's the special feature of a tuple?" Ask me "how would you use a tuple? Where would you use one? What makes it handy?"

Instead of expecting me to memorize and regurgitate, ask what I can do.

Also, when you're talking to someone with 30 years of programming experience in C, shell, awk, and Perl, but only 4 months of Python, if I don't automatically type the %#&* colon on a function definition but I do use the proper keywords, remember the %#&* indentation, and put the : in as soon as my test run throws an error (which doesn't include the sentence "you forgot the :"), that should not be a show stopper. I wrote the function and the function worked. The : Is "syntactic sugar".

#IreallyMissPerl #LongLiveBraces

Once someone is in a company, managers think nothing of asking them to do something outside their immediate experience. And, it's true that "99% of what you need to do is figureoutable. The key is to focus on small digestible tasks so it is less intimidating to take the first step!"

The weird thing is how many people are utterly blind to this concept during an interview. In an interview, if you don't answer a question in precisely the way the asker wanted to hear the answer, or you forget the interviewer's favorite piece of syntax because your mind is full of syntax from 7 different languages, oops.

I'm very good at looking things up. In a coding portion of an interview today, I found a nifty, idiomatic, way to do something. I was told "no one else has done it that way before." Go me!

I was ingenious and creative and found a nifty quick way to write the function, but I forgot a : on my first go through and that was a show stopper.

So, interviewers go narrow and specific and then, when you have the job, managers and co-workers want you to be creative and stretch. But they don't hire for creativity and stretchiness.

How odd.