The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

no laughing matter · 2014-05-06 Reply Admin

Coyne:
That said, I've been used in a similar way: I've been told to interview people that the management had no intention of hiring because the individuals were blac... *ahem* inappropriate in some way. That way, if those inappropriate persons aren't hired, whose name is on the interview? Not the manager's.
Judith is using Chris to isolate her from the consequences of her obvious bigotry and miserliness. What she wants is a white male intern to work for a pittance: Skills aren't relevant; only color, gender, and cheap.

Wait where was discrimination by color in the story? The actual story had discrimination by gender, age and (probably) cheap - mentioning the bias to "kids fresh out of college".

2014-05-06 Reply Admin

TenshiNo:
C-Derb:
TRWTF is assuming only married women get pregnant.

No one said that only married women get pregnant. But, statistically speaking, getting married increases the likelihood of getting pregnant by several orders of magnitude.

Sexual activity increases the likelihood by several orders of magnitude more. Perhaps you should ask about that during your interview, instead.

2014-05-06 Reply Admin

I'm died.

no laughing matter · 2014-05-06 Reply Admin

TenshiNo:
In retrospect, I think my method name was entirely too sane, also ;)

How well does it handle Unicode surrogate pairs? http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/vstudio/8k5611at(v=vs.100).aspx

microsoft:
The key point to remember is that surrogate pairs represent 32-bit single characters. You cannot assume that one 16-bit Unicode encoding value maps to exactly one character. By using surrogate pairs, a 16-bit Unicode encoded system can address an additional one million code points to which characters will be assigned by the Unicode Standard.

No, i don't think that your method is sane. But it has every right to be presented on this page!

2014-05-06 Reply Admin

I wish, before I wasted my youth, someone had told me this simple fact, which, I admit, should have been obvious had I not been drowning in PC BS:

Males and females are fundamentally very different. They always will be. Anyone who tells you males and females are equal is either an idiot, or someone who thinks you are an idiot and is looking to exploit your stupidity.

2014-05-06 Reply Admin

Ken:
cellocgw:
How about instead mandating equal amounts of "new child" leave for both males and females?
And what about those of us who choose not to have children? When do we get our six month paid vacation with guaranteed right to return to an equal or better job?
And can I take that vacation every 9-12 months, like a breeder?

Why not? All 50 states allow you to give up your kid in the first 30 days, no questions asked.

2014-05-06 Reply Admin

Speaking only from the data that you know at that time, of course.

2014-05-06 Reply Admin

Kids are the world's most expensive STD.

2014-05-06 Reply Admin

You're Boss:
Speaking only from the data that you know at that time, of course.

You've already stated that there is statistical risk in hiring women.

chubertdev · 2014-05-06 Reply Admin

Carl:
I wish, before I wasted my youth, someone had told me this simple fact, which, I admit, should have been obvious had I not been drowning in PC BS:
Males and females are fundamentally very different. They always will be. Anyone who tells you males and females are equal is either an idiot, or someone who thinks you are an idiot and is looking to exploit your stupidity.

I love this podcast

2014-05-06 Reply Admin

anonymous:
You're Boss:
Speaking only from the data that you know at that time, of course.
You've already stated that there is statistical risk in hiring women.

Compensated for by appropriate reduction in pay.

2014-05-06 Reply Admin

uint i=0; do { printf("%u\n",--i); } while (i);

Coyne · 2014-05-06 Reply Admin

no laughing matter:
Coyne:
That said, I've been used in a similar way: I've been told to interview people that the management had no intention of hiring because the individuals were blac... *ahem* inappropriate in some way. That way, if those inappropriate persons aren't hired, whose name is on the interview? Not the manager's.
Judith is using Chris to isolate her from the consequences of her obvious bigotry and miserliness. What she wants is a white male intern to work for a pittance: Skills aren't relevant; only color, gender, and cheap.

Wait where was discrimination by color in the story? The actual story had discrimination by gender, age and (probably) cheap - mentioning the bias to "kids fresh out of college".

Ummm...yeah, my bad: I seem to have confused what I was writing with the story. Sigh. Delete racism, add ageism. (The first part was my experience, and definitely involved a blac...ahem inappropriate person.)

2014-05-06 Reply Admin

no laughing matter:
TenshiNo:
In retrospect, I think my method name was entirely too sane, also ;)
How well does it handle Unicode surrogate pairs? http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/vstudio/8k5611at(v=vs.100).aspx
microsoft:
The key point to remember is that surrogate pairs represent 32-bit single characters. You cannot assume that one 16-bit Unicode encoding value maps to exactly one character. By using surrogate pairs, a 16-bit Unicode encoded system can address an additional one million code points to which characters will be assigned by the Unicode Standard.
No, i don't think that your method is sane. But it has every right to be presented on this page!

The method was definitely not sane, just the method name. I should have made the name less obvious of what the method does, so it would be more of a WTF.

As for handling Unicode, I have no idea. I slapped it together in a couple of minutes, thinking with the intention of making it needlessly difficult to follow. Event tested to make sure it worked, but I didn't get crazy with that.

2014-05-06 Reply Admin

anonymous:
TenshiNo:
Reversing a string is easy. I even made it an extension method ;)
public static string ReverseString(this string tst)
{
    if (tst == null || tst == "" || tst.TrimStart().TrimEnd().Length < 1)
        throw new InvalidOperationException();
    else
        return new string(tst.ToCharArray().Select(c => (byte)c).ToArray().Reverse().ToArray().Select(c => (char)c).ToArray());
}
(It's a weird feeling sitting down with the thought of "how convoluted can I make this simple process?")
"" cannot be reversed " " cannot be reversed "11111" can be reversed WTF?
P.S. You don't need to trim spaces from both sides of a string that contains nothing but spaces. Trimming from either the beginning or end of such a string will result in an empty string. Trimming it again from the other direction will accomplish nothing more.

Good lord... Why are you people trying to "correct" my code? I know it's bad. That was the whole point. It's TDWTF! Geez. Lol.

Although, now I do wish I had made it recognize when the string was the same forwards and backwards and thrown a special "UnreversableStringException", just because :)

chubertdev · 2014-05-06 Reply Admin

Here's your method name:

r

chubertdev · 2014-05-06 Reply Admin

TenshiNo:
Although, now I do wish I had made it recognize when the string was the same forwards and backwards and thrown a special "UnreversableStringException", just because :)

no-op non-exception? hehe

2014-05-06 Reply Admin

Serious question here: does a company have to provide recently-returned women "milk-breaks" where they get a private room 4 times daily to pump for their kids?

2014-05-06 Reply Admin

Calli Arcale:
it would not be unusual to hire her to start in two months, by which time she could reasonably be expected to have had the baby and recovered from childbirth.

Wikipedia:
Many mothers face responsibilities at home with childcare, cooking, and cleaning. If mothers are storing their energy for later they are less productive at work.

Captain Oblivious · 2014-05-06 Reply Admin

Not Even Then:
Calli Arcale:
it would not be unusual to hire her to start in two months, by which time she could reasonably be expected to have had the baby and recovered from childbirth.

Wikipedia:
Many mothers face responsibilities at home with childcare, cooking, and cleaning. If mothers are storing their energy for later they are less productive at work.

That definitely deserves a big CITATION NEEDED.

I am willing to agree, but you must admit that it depends on the job and its responsibilities. At my last job (an easy one), I was saving my energies for projects at home and still the second most productive person in an office with 450 people in it. And it's not vanity -- they kept records of our activity down to the second.

That said, the job was easy, and most people there only aspired to not get canned. On the other hand, this is true of most people in most jobs. They do just enough to not get canned.

And that is why discussions about wages and discrimination need to be prefaced by the context of the job. It is utterly pointless to discriminate against a pregnant woman at an easy job. It is not so pointless if the job is physically demanding or is in a competitive field.

2014-05-06 Reply Admin

GWO:
I wonder what cognitive bias is causing neither of you to consider the possibility that the original submission was about the manager, and it was Billy's technobabble answer that was the added fluff?
That would be "experience of having read this site for a while, and seen the tropes that get dragged in to flesh thin stories out (HR, incompetent women [always women!], bad writing)"

You say that, but it's just not true. I guarantee that if you went through the backlogs of this site, you would find that the overwhelming majority of stories mentioning someone's incompetence are about men.

chubertdev · 2014-05-06 Reply Admin

Captain Oblivious:
That definitely deserves a big CITATION NEEDED.
I am willing to agree, but you must admit that it depends on the job and its responsibilities. At my last job (an easy one), I was saving my energies for projects at home and still the second most productive person in an office with 450 people in it. And it's not vanity -- they kept records of our activity down to the second.

That said, the job was easy, and most people there only aspired to not get canned. On the other hand, this is true of most people in most jobs. They do just enough to not get canned.

You're comparing yourself to others, not to what you would produce if you weren't saving your energy for projects at home.

2014-05-06 Reply Admin

Andrew:
Judith being concerned about the woman getting married is hardly a WTF. A key developer going on leave for a year has the potential to destroy a project's viability.
Whether it sets off your PC sensitivities or not, the fact of the matter is that young, fertile women are much riskier hires than young, fertile men. Judith was just being brutally honest.

But the rest of the story is a complete WTF on Judith's part.

You know what else can destroy a project's viability? The boss getting fired and the company sued into oblivion because of illegal hiring discrimination.

2014-05-06 Reply Admin

Rudolf:
Andrew:
Judith being concerned about the woman getting married is hardly a WTF. A key developer going on leave for a year has the potential to destroy a project's viability.
Whether it sets off your PC sensitivities or not, the fact of the matter is that young, fertile women are much riskier hires than young, fertile men. Judith was just being brutally honest.

The real WTF is that due to PC oversensitivity, you're not even allowed to ask the question. In my view it's perfectly legitimate for an employer to ask 'are you planning on having kids soon?' (both to men and women), just as you can ask 'do you have any holidays already booked?'

(Hopefully the employee will realise that them taking 6-12 months leave will be inconvenient to the employer. If they don't care, then that shows something about the employee's attitude).

But, because you can't ask, it just means that ALL young women are 'silently' discriminated against - even if they have no intention of having kids, or even can't.

The discrimination may not be as overt as Judith's, but it is there.

The ONLY reason one would ever ask that question is so they can discriminate against the person on the answer. Hence, it is not a legitimate question to ask.

2014-05-06 Reply Admin

Tom:
MrFox:
Nice, perfect way of resolving the problem. Let the idiot sink in their own shit.
This, exactly. We don't need massive bureaucracy to second-guess every hiring decision (or every other management decision) we simply need to let the bad ones fail so they can be redeployed somewhere harmless. Janitors perhaps.

The problem is, that usually doesn't happen for a long, long time, if ever. During which time the incompetent person generally has enough time to get together some kind of safety net, and a network so they'll have the next job lined up later that day.

2014-05-06 Reply Admin

Ken:
cellocgw:
How about instead mandating equal amounts of "new child" leave for both males and females?
And what about those of us who choose not to have children? When do we get our six month paid vacation with guaranteed right to return to an equal or better job?
And can I take that vacation every 9-12 months, like a breeder?

Sure. Just have a medically debilitating event happen to you, or to a loved one.

Captain Oblivious · 2014-05-06 Reply Admin

s73v3r:
Rudolf:
Andrew:
Judith being concerned about the woman getting married is hardly a WTF. A key developer going on leave for a year has the potential to destroy a project's viability.
Whether it sets off your PC sensitivities or not, the fact of the matter is that young, fertile women are much riskier hires than young, fertile men. Judith was just being brutally honest.

The real WTF is that due to PC oversensitivity, you're not even allowed to ask the question. In my view it's perfectly legitimate for an employer to ask 'are you planning on having kids soon?' (both to men and women), just as you can ask 'do you have any holidays already booked?'

(Hopefully the employee will realise that them taking 6-12 months leave will be inconvenient to the employer. If they don't care, then that shows something about the employee's attitude).

But, because you can't ask, it just means that ALL young women are 'silently' discriminated against - even if they have no intention of having kids, or even can't.

The discrimination may not be as overt as Judith's, but it is there.

The ONLY reason one would ever ask that question is so they can discriminate against the person on the answer. Hence, it is not a legitimate question to ask.

Naive. The entire purpose of an interview is to discriminate the qualified people from the unqualified. You do that by asking materially relevant questions.

The point people here are trying to make is that pregnancy can be materially relevant. I agree, but it depends on the job. A hard job in a competitive industry will require the employee's full attention, or else they will wash out or be replaced by somebody better, at a cost to the business. An easy job, eh, not so much.

2014-05-06 Reply Admin

Fred:
True story: after the interviews we all agreed that one candidate was clearly more qualified. Even though the team was all male no one ever commented on the fact that she was female. We offered her the job and she accepted. We sent our thank-yous and condolences to the others. You know, although we were impressed blah blah we selected someone we felt had better qualifications.
The Friday before her Monday start date, she called to tell us she had gotten pregnant and decided not to start the job.

OK, now what? Do we start the interview process over? (If you've been through this from the hiring side, you know you'd rather have a tooth pulled without pain meds.) Or do we call up one of those other candidates "yeah we didn't like you so much but will you come muck through our code anyway"? They will forever know that you set them aside for someone else.

Now I appreciate that she didn't come in, suck up training resources for two months, qualify for benefits, and then leave. But still, how are we supposed to suppress the natural human instinct to learn from such an experience?

What the hell is there to learn about? How is that situation any different than someone accepting the job, and then before they start, call you up and say they've accepted a better job? That happens all the time.

2014-05-06 Reply Admin

I_Get_It:
Serious question here: does a company have to provide recently-returned women "milk-breaks" where they get a private room 4 times daily to pump for their kids?

No, but some companies do for the same reason they provide a break room with microwaves and toasters and a refrigerator. Because it's good for the employees, and employees that like their environment are more likely to stick around.

2014-05-06 Reply Admin

Captain Oblivious:
Not Even Then:

Wikipedia:
Many mothers face responsibilities at home with childcare, cooking, and cleaning. If mothers are storing their energy for later they are less productive at work.

That definitely deserves a big CITATION NEEDED.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motherhood_penalty

chubertdev · 2014-05-06 Reply Admin

s73v3r:
Ken:
cellocgw:
How about instead mandating equal amounts of "new child" leave for both males and females?
And what about those of us who choose not to have children? When do we get our six month paid vacation with guaranteed right to return to an equal or better job?
And can I take that vacation every 9-12 months, like a breeder?

Sure. Just have a medically debilitating event happen to you, or to a loved one.

Like getting kicked in the testes? Proven to be more painful than childbirth.

Captain Oblivious · 2014-05-06 Reply Admin

srch tulz r tuff:
Captain Oblivious:
Not Even Then:

Wikipedia:
Many mothers face responsibilities at home with childcare, cooking, and cleaning. If mothers are storing their energy for later they are less productive at work.

That definitely deserves a big CITATION NEEDED.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motherhood_penalty

Is that where you stopped reading? I know what the motherhood penalty is. And I said that whether it "should" apply depends on the job and its responsibilities.

Also, using Wikipedia as a citation, even on Wikipedia, is not acceptable scholarship.

2014-05-06 Reply Admin

chubertdev:
Captain Oblivious:
That definitely deserves a big CITATION NEEDED.
I am willing to agree, but you must admit that it depends on the job and its responsibilities. At my last job (an easy one), I was saving my energies for projects at home and still the second most productive person in an office with 450 people in it. And it's not vanity -- they kept records of our activity down to the second.

That said, the job was easy, and most people there only aspired to not get canned. On the other hand, this is true of most people in most jobs. They do just enough to not get canned.

You're comparing yourself to others, not to what you would produce if you weren't saving your energy for projects at home.

Does it really matter? Clearly the job itself didn't inspire them to produce more, so even if they weren't saving energy for projects at home, they still likely wouldn't have put in much more, if any additional effort.

2014-05-06 Reply Admin

s73v3r:
chubertdev:
Captain Oblivious:
That definitely deserves a big CITATION NEEDED.
I am willing to agree, but you must admit that it depends on the job and its responsibilities. At my last job (an easy one), I was saving my energies for projects at home and still the second most productive person in an office with 450 people in it. And it's not vanity -- they kept records of our activity down to the second.

That said, the job was easy, and most people there only aspired to not get canned. On the other hand, this is true of most people in most jobs. They do just enough to not get canned.

You're comparing yourself to others, not to what you would produce if you weren't saving your energy for projects at home.

Does it really matter? Clearly the job itself didn't inspire them to produce more, so even if they weren't saving energy for projects at home, they still likely wouldn't have put in much more, if any additional effort.

Plot Twist: The other 450 people were mothers too.

2014-05-06 Reply Admin

Captain Oblivious:
srch tulz r tuff:
Captain Oblivious:
Not Even Then:

Wikipedia:
something...

That definitely deserves a big CITATION NEEDED.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motherhood_penalty

Also, using Wikipedia as a citation, is not acceptable scholarship.

Sicne when does a TDWTF comment constitute a scholarly article?

Captain Oblivious · 2014-05-06 Reply Admin

chubertdev:
Captain Oblivious:
That definitely deserves a big CITATION NEEDED.
I am willing to agree, but you must admit that it depends on the job and its responsibilities. At my last job (an easy one), I was saving my energies for projects at home and still the second most productive person in an office with 450 people in it. And it's not vanity -- they kept records of our activity down to the second.

That said, the job was easy, and most people there only aspired to not get canned. On the other hand, this is true of most people in most jobs. They do just enough to not get canned.

You're comparing yourself to others, not to what you would produce if you weren't saving your energy for projects at home.

Being at the 99.925 percentile in a normal distribution with high variance is good enough. They were lucky to have me, and it's why all the managers wanted me on their team. To help prop up their productivity stat. The question shouldn't be "why is Captain Oblivious working 4 more hours after working 10 hour days, and the working 16 hour days on his days off?" It should be, "Why can't the other guys work half as hard as Captain Oblivious?" And, that, too is a question the managers were asking.

2014-05-06 Reply Admin

TenshiNo:
Reversing a string is easy. I even made it an extension method ;)
public static string ReverseString(this string tst)
{
    if (tst == null || tst == "" || tst.TrimStart().TrimEnd().Length < 1)
        throw new InvalidOperationException();
    else
        return new string(tst.ToCharArray().Select(c => (byte)c).ToArray().Reverse().ToArray().Select(c => (char)c).ToArray());
}
(It's a weird feeling sitting down with the thought of "how convoluted can I make this simple process?")

Why did you choose to not allow reversing an empty string or a string of all spaces? I can see failing for null, but I'd also expect a message in the Exception.

chubertdev · 2014-05-06 Reply Admin

s73v3r:
chubertdev:
Captain Oblivious:
That definitely deserves a big CITATION NEEDED.
I am willing to agree, but you must admit that it depends on the job and its responsibilities. At my last job (an easy one), I was saving my energies for projects at home and still the second most productive person in an office with 450 people in it. And it's not vanity -- they kept records of our activity down to the second.

That said, the job was easy, and most people there only aspired to not get canned. On the other hand, this is true of most people in most jobs. They do just enough to not get canned.

You're comparing yourself to others, not to what you would produce if you weren't saving your energy for projects at home.

Does it really matter? Clearly the job itself didn't inspire them to produce more, so even if they weren't saving energy for projects at home, they still likely wouldn't have put in much more, if any additional effort.

Yes. They could have possibly been the most productive person in the office, not just the second most productive. I don't think they'd get fired for that, but not everyone will perform at that right.

If someone is middle of the pack, and then they falter to the bottom 10% because they are not devoting their effort to work, they should certainly be reprimanded.

Not only that, but the exception to the rule being productive doesn't prove anything.

chubertdev · 2014-05-06 Reply Admin

conventio:
s73v3r:
chubertdev:
Captain Oblivious:
That definitely deserves a big CITATION NEEDED.
I am willing to agree, but you must admit that it depends on the job and its responsibilities. At my last job (an easy one), I was saving my energies for projects at home and still the second most productive person in an office with 450 people in it. And it's not vanity -- they kept records of our activity down to the second.

That said, the job was easy, and most people there only aspired to not get canned. On the other hand, this is true of most people in most jobs. They do just enough to not get canned.

You're comparing yourself to others, not to what you would produce if you weren't saving your energy for projects at home.

Does it really matter? Clearly the job itself didn't inspire them to produce more, so even if they weren't saving energy for projects at home, they still likely wouldn't have put in much more, if any additional effort.

Plot Twist: The other 450 people were mothers too.

448, actually

one was the president's sick daughter

chubertdev · 2014-05-06 Reply Admin

Captain Oblivious:
chubertdev:
Captain Oblivious:
That definitely deserves a big CITATION NEEDED.
I am willing to agree, but you must admit that it depends on the job and its responsibilities. At my last job (an easy one), I was saving my energies for projects at home and still the second most productive person in an office with 450 people in it. And it's not vanity -- they kept records of our activity down to the second.

That said, the job was easy, and most people there only aspired to not get canned. On the other hand, this is true of most people in most jobs. They do just enough to not get canned.

You're comparing yourself to others, not to what you would produce if you weren't saving your energy for projects at home.

Being at the 99.925 percentile in a normal distribution with high variance is good enough. They were lucky to have me, and it's why all the managers wanted me on their team. To help prop up their productivity stat. The question shouldn't be "why is Captain Oblivious working 4 more hours after working 10 hour days, and the working 16 hour days on his days off?" It should be, "Why can't the other guys work half as hard as Captain Oblivious?" And, that, too is a question the managers were asking.

That only makes you an outlier, not proof that there is no performance hit.

2014-05-06 Reply Admin

faoileag:
Kabi:
faoileag:
even a complete dummy should be able to produce some pseudo code.
Seems like I can crush someones faith in humanity, yay..

DaveK:
faoileag:
even a complete dummy should be able to produce some pseudo code.
Again, don't bet on it
Now I feel depressed.
Of course I've heard / read the stories but so far I haven't met wanna-be programmers that bad in the wild.

Although I must admit I haven't been on the employer's side of the interview table so far...

Yeah, take the guy who had C++ on his resume, but could not tell us anything about Object Oriented principles. What, if not OO, distinguishes C++ from plain C? (If you put it on your CV, you will be asked about it - fair game.)

Claims: "I have designed this <insert some IP>." Question: What did it do? What was it used for? Answer: No idea, just worked from a spec....

Interview question askes for a simple implementation, requiring a 3 liner at best. PHD provides highly convoluted design, not even getting close to what was asked. (First question in the interview, common sense might indicate we start with a simple question to warm up. Hint: DO NOT overthink the problem.)

The clever emphatic one: Read the interviewer's expression to see if you get closer or further away from the answer. Getting to the answer by the interviewer's "guidance". Got it mostly right in the end, still did not hire...

2014-05-06 Reply Admin

s73v3r:
Ken:
cellocgw:
How about instead mandating equal amounts of "new child" leave for both males and females?
And what about those of us who choose not to have children? When do we get our six month paid vacation with guaranteed right to return to an equal or better job?
And can I take that vacation every 9-12 months, like a breeder?

Sure. Just have a medically debilitating event happen to you, or to a loved one.

So if I choose to get so damn drunk every weekend that it takes 4 days to sober up, my employer should be forced to keep me supplied with a steady job for those days I can manage to be there?

2014-05-06 Reply Admin

s73v3r:
Fred:
True story: after the interviews we all agreed that one candidate was clearly more qualified. Even though the team was all male no one ever commented on the fact that she was female. We offered her the job and she accepted. We sent our thank-yous and condolences to the others. You know, although we were impressed blah blah we selected someone we felt had better qualifications.
The Friday before her Monday start date, she called to tell us she had gotten pregnant and decided not to start the job.

OK, now what? Do we start the interview process over? (If you've been through this from the hiring side, you know you'd rather have a tooth pulled without pain meds.) Or do we call up one of those other candidates "yeah we didn't like you so much but will you come muck through our code anyway"? They will forever know that you set them aside for someone else.

Now I appreciate that she didn't come in, suck up training resources for two months, qualify for benefits, and then leave. But still, how are we supposed to suppress the natural human instinct to learn from such an experience?

What the hell is there to learn about? How is that situation any different than someone accepting the job, and then before they start, call you up and say they've accepted a better job? That happens all the time.

I had that happen to me once! Now, I make it a point never to offer a job to someone who could possibly get hired elsewhere.

2014-05-06 Reply Admin

John Appleseed:
rekcuf rehtom uoy siht esrever:
TRWTF is that I was actually asked to reverse a string in a job interview once - because that comes up some often in real world programming.

I always ask candidates to reverse a string. It's normally the first technical question I ask, and the questions get progressively more difficult, but about a quarter of the people I interview can't perform this trivial task, and it's a good way to terminate that interview early.

Question 2 is generally to ask them to print out all the unsigned integers from the highest possible down to 0. Some things that go wrong here:

the loop increments rather than decrements (!)

getting the step wrong, normally by having 2 decrements per loop, I just don't...

using an int not an unsigned int

starting from some arbitrary value (eg: 100) - apparently higher numbers don't exist ?

looping infinitely because they just used while(i-- > 0). This is very common

I'm not anal about whiteboard code. I don't care if you use printf() without #including stdio.h I don't care if you miss a semicolon at the end of a line. I do care if you use an int when I asked for unsigned ints though because your code's logical structure doesn't do what I asked.

I've asked that loop question over 100 times. Maybe 5 people have got it right first time. 5. [sigh]

If you have them test on just a whiteboard you are probably eliminating a lot of good candidates. I've done a ton of interviews and whiteboard tests are not a good indicator of programming ability IMHO. Give somebody an actual IDE and compiler and a more difficult problem to solve (along the lines of FizzBuzz, although that is too common to be useful) and you will get to see how somebody actually works in real life.

2014-05-06 Reply Admin

abarker:
DaveK:
faoileag:
Chris said:
Walk me through a method that reverses a string
I have the feeling that that interview question is missing something. Like "in place", "without a loop" or "without a temporary variable".
Don't bet on it.
faoileag:
Asked as it is (without some restriction), even a complete dummy should be able to produce some pseudo code.
Again, don't bet on it. Unless you've done a lot of interviews yourself, you wouldn't believe the "quality" of some of the hopefuls who show up. Even an utterly trivial question like this can serve as a valuable screener.
+1.
As the head of a developer team, my boss expects me to fill any open positions. I've seen the need for easy screen questions like this more times than you can count.

One question I've found handy for weeding out potential candidates is "What are your strengths and weaknesses?". This is one of those questions that you would think would be quite common in interviews and therefore the candidate would have thought about it beforehand, but I was surprised at how many have not and so given me a bad answer. My favourite answer (and most bizarre) was the young chap that said his weakness was that his wife gets upset with him for going out drinking with mates.

2014-05-06 Reply Admin

Then adopt, and take the leave then. The purpose is to encourage/allow people to have children. You know... the ones that will keep paying your Social Security after you check out of the work force.

2014-05-06 Reply Admin

rekcuf rehtom uoy siht esrever:
TRWTF is that I was actually asked to reverse a string in a job interview once - because that comes up some often in real world programming.

The value of asking someone to reverse a string is not that it often comes up. It's that the question is easy to explain, has multiple correct answers of increasing complexity, and easily leads to follow-up questions.

chubertdev · 2014-05-06 Reply Admin

Been on both sides of the interview table:
Yeah, take the guy who had C++ on his resume, but could not tell us anything about Object Oriented principles. What, if not OO, distinguishes C++ from plain C? (If you put it on your CV, you will be asked about it - fair game.)
Claims: "I have designed this <insert some IP>." Question: What did it do? What was it used for? Answer: No idea, just worked from a spec....

Interview question askes for a simple implementation, requiring a 3 liner at best. PHD provides highly convoluted design, not even getting close to what was asked. (First question in the interview, common sense might indicate we start with a simple question to warm up. Hint: DO NOT overthink the problem.)

The clever emphatic one: Read the interviewer's expression to see if you get closer or further away from the answer. Getting to the answer by the interviewer's "guidance". Got it mostly right in the end, still did not hire...

But he didn't have plain C on his CV. It was just a...V.

2014-05-06 Reply Admin

TenshiNo:
chubertdev:
Maternity leave by country
(food for thought)

Why, exactly, should companies be required to pay women for maternity leave? It was their choice to get pregnant (or at least to engage in the activity that got them pregnant).

Sometimes it's not their choice

DrPepper · 2014-05-06 Reply Admin

QJo:
TRWTF is why Judith has not been dismissed from her position for breaking every single possible anti-discrimination law in the book. Or is TRWTF that Chris didn't act as the dessperately-needed whistleblower?

You NEED qualified people in your organization. If Judith rejects obviously qualified people, and hires non-qualified people, then Chris NEEDS to go above her head and get her off the job. Otherwise the entire company will suffer, and it won't be just Chris looking for a new job.

Disqualified Candidates

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