12
drewbie
3y

Yesterday I had a phone screening with a hiring manager and was expected to talk about more of my expertise and just my experience overall. With four years of experience, I thought I could tell her everything she needed to know.

However, this interview was just kind of... weird. Literally every question she asked was defintiions. It was as if I was doing a short answer quiz.

"What is object-oriented programming?"
"What is a hashmap versus a list?"
"What is class inheritance?"

Like... What the fuck. These are questions that give no insight into who I am or how I work. This is shit you see on a second-year midterm exam. What a waste of time.

Comments
  • 3
    Sounds like she watches Jeopardy.
  • 4
    Coding trivia is the worst.
  • 3
    @N00bPancakes My thought exactly. Just don't understand the importance if I know what a term means. I can code and do problems you throw at me.
  • 5
    Hiring managers usually have no idea about how to screen for developers, they probably just found these questions by googling "develop interview questions" or something.
  • 0
    These questions serve only to weed out the totally incompetent ones quickly because time is money.
  • 2
    Exactly the reason why I told the hiring manager in my previous company to give each candidate a quick online coding test that was solving problems we had in the company. Test was intended to take no more than 30 minutes of your time if you know what you’re doing. This was how we weeded out candidates that weren’t going to be a good fit. After that we had the phone call to dig deeper into knowledge and cultural fit followed by a face to face. Once we changed the process we were able to save time and found exactly what we needed at the time.
  • 2
    @drewbie

    I'm particularly allergic to coding trivia as I'm the camp / self taught / not deep in CS kinda coder.

    Throw a term at me and I maybe don't know it.

    I google it and "OHHHHHH yeah that's what I do... didn't know there was a word for that."

    Granted I'm learning, but still bad at coding trivia.
  • 1
    @N00bPancakes That's hard for team work because you won't understand what others are saying, and you can't explain properly what you are doing. Learn the terms.
  • 2
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