Gave a coding interview today on Coderbyte. The portal didn’t allow me to print anything (could only return from function). Had a hard time debugging code without using print statements 😤

What language were you using?

That's how you filter out devs who would be unable to do meaningful code reviews because they cannot even read and understand their own code.

@Fast-Nop meh dude, you try writing ML code without any kind of debugging. The purpose of debugging is to understand the difference between your mental model of execution and what's actually happening.

And, please, tell me how reading code will help if the inputs are wrong?

@atheist Sure, writing ML code in an interview on some online platform. Totally probable.

Also, I routinely debug without letting my code run because the bug reports are vague, at best with some error logs, and runtime access to production is impossible. Read the source, Luke!

@Fast-Nop most of the coding interviews I do are mathsy stuff, some passes as *simple* ml.

If you *have* to connect to prod to debug, you've got a problem with your dev environment. Ideally, it should mirror prod, more realistically, be a small scale version of prod.

And if your bug reports are vague, get better metrics.

@atheist Python

@Anakata Huh, I had a play with their "practice" problems, prints worked fine. I know sites usually do some "hidden" tests, but there should be some that are public.

@atheist The dev environment cannot match production if that involves a large array of machinery control with real physics and stuff involved. Even connecting to prod is impossible because there is no connection after roll-out. That would be called "backdoor" and would be completely unacceptable.

Simulations, including the ones for testing, can only take you so far. It's also why the bug reports are naturally vague.

My record was two full weeks of investigation with a combined hardware/software race condition that would hit in rarely, but then fuck up the system operation. Even devising a test case was only possible AFTER I had found the issue.