Wow. Reddit comments contains a company name. First step felt familiar so i just found an email from them in my inbox. Looks like i dodged a bullet 2 months ago. In the first step they wanted me to turn on a camera and do some live programming while being recorded. All without any human contact, all automated emails. It rubbed me the wrong way and ignored them. After reading what the next steps are I'm glad i trusted my intuition.
Years and years ago I went for an interview at Computer Associates, who were still doing accounting software at the time.
They gave me a test with idiotic questions about C, where the examples obviously had undefined behavior. Like what is the output of code that takes the address of a variable of type short, next to another such a variable, and then casts it to a long * pointer and retrieves the value.
I had a printed copy of ISO C in my briefcase and showed them chapter and verse how that is undefined behavior. I was told I'm not "doing very well here".
No hire!
They just wanted people to know what the Microsoft Visual C compiler (or whatever they they were using) does with various undefined behavior, because they have such stuff in their codebase. I could have guessed "right" on most of it, but homie don't play dat.
If I recall, that question required naming the value that would be produced, not just articulating some speculation about what it might be.
I was taken aback, so I went to the interviewer: how am I supposed to answer this, is it a trick question about undefined behavior? The compiler is allowed to just flag that with a diagnostic and even terminate after that.
He was like, what do you mean, undefined? It's just straightforward: what is the value? He had no idea what undefined means, or what is a language standard.
> No css preprocessors or js pipeline, no virtual/docker environment.
Where can I sign up? Only somewhat joking. Does anyone still remember how fast things could be when we weren't waiting for multiple layers of build processes and container deployments?
TBH this makes more sense than typical automated coderbyte evaluation.
The only caveat here is the required level of "readiness" for this deployment. In 4 hours (and PHP) it's going to be a PoC that will do what they asked, without extras that make it production-ready.
Wow. Reddit comments contains a company name. First step felt familiar so i just found an email from them in my inbox. Looks like i dodged a bullet 2 months ago. In the first step they wanted me to turn on a camera and do some live programming while being recorded. All without any human contact, all automated emails. It rubbed me the wrong way and ignored them. After reading what the next steps are I'm glad i trusted my intuition.
The social contract of employment is broken. People name and shame all the time - which is fair.
The company is alleged to be Better Stack, for anyone curious.
That name confirms it: they are running on PHP.
not sure why that was so hard to say
Agreed. Name and shame.
Since I see name and shame threads ...
Years and years ago I went for an interview at Computer Associates, who were still doing accounting software at the time.
They gave me a test with idiotic questions about C, where the examples obviously had undefined behavior. Like what is the output of code that takes the address of a variable of type short, next to another such a variable, and then casts it to a long * pointer and retrieves the value.
I had a printed copy of ISO C in my briefcase and showed them chapter and verse how that is undefined behavior. I was told I'm not "doing very well here".
No hire!
They just wanted people to know what the Microsoft Visual C compiler (or whatever they they were using) does with various undefined behavior, because they have such stuff in their codebase. I could have guessed "right" on most of it, but homie don't play dat.
So you bothered to print 500 pages instead of just saying "you can't do that but most likely it will grab value of neighboring variables"?
If I recall, that question required naming the value that would be produced, not just articulating some speculation about what it might be.
I was taken aback, so I went to the interviewer: how am I supposed to answer this, is it a trick question about undefined behavior? The compiler is allowed to just flag that with a diagnostic and even terminate after that.
He was like, what do you mean, undefined? It's just straightforward: what is the value? He had no idea what undefined means, or what is a language standard.
> No css preprocessors or js pipeline, no virtual/docker environment.
Where can I sign up? Only somewhat joking. Does anyone still remember how fast things could be when we weren't waiting for multiple layers of build processes and container deployments?
That’s actually interview heaven.
You found out very quickly to drop out of the interview process, saving yourself a lot of time.
Well not really, since it was on the 4th stage.
Oh I missed that bit.
Even so it’s good to get a nice clear “do not proceed with us, dragons be here” message from the employer.
TBH this makes more sense than typical automated coderbyte evaluation.
The only caveat here is the required level of "readiness" for this deployment. In 4 hours (and PHP) it's going to be a PoC that will do what they asked, without extras that make it production-ready.