Gabriel Sechan wrote:
You'd never hear back from me. First off, most of my code is owned
by my employer, I can't give it to you (BTW- I know a lot of good
programmers who don't write a damn thing off the clock).
I don't. Sorry. Every single programmer I regard as good has 1000
lines of personal code laying around somewhere that he could send.
This is true even for my students graduating from SDSU. It's a very
good filter.
What I do
have tends to be far from my best- code written for my own uses is
always sloppier, because I don't expect to maintain it- it just
needs to work well enough.
I'll be blunt, if that's the case, I wouldn't want you.
Good programmers have very little difference between their "best" code
and their "normal" code.
Yes, there are small differences--fewer test cases, fewer comments, less
strict about naming--but the code itself is going to look almost exactly
them same.
Your brain doesn't suddenly change the way it thinks.
This is like saying that a guitarist plays significantly better for a
crowd than himself. Yeah, he might play a little better. But a good
guitarist is still going to be good even for himself.
That's assuming I even wanted to give you
the project- I may have kept it secret for a reason, I have a
collection of "great ideas that would be worth money (given funding
and time)". And I'm not going to write a quick kloc.
I wouldn't expect you to send anything you consider valuable. You
should have some stuff lying around.
Thirdly- I don't like guessing games. And that's exactly what this
is- guess what he wants to see. I've known far too many morons
giving interviews who would ding me for stupid bullshit like brace
style or not using their favorite notation.
No, it's not a guessing game. That's your incorrect assumption.
For starters, isn't it good to know that the interviewer can't see past
the superficial? Do you really want to work there?
I would also point out that your personal opinion would keep you from
working for several departments in Google. It would also prevent you
from working with Guido van Rossum even before he went to Google. I can
name other names and companies.
This is actually a screening filter that many of the better companies
(both big and small) I know of from Silicon Valley use.
In this day and age, anyone who doesn't have 1000 lines of code to send
isn't a programmer. Sorry.
Fourthly- it isn't a fair competition. I'm fairly honest- if I was
to do this, I'd give you my code. Most people aren't. They'll find
1K on the web, already pretty and hand it in. I'm not going to waste
my time competing with that shit. I'd just move on to the next
interview.
You would rather compete with the BS artists on phone screening rather
than have the possibility that someone technical can see the difference?
Or on "Gotcha!" brain-teasers that seem to be all the rage? Then you
are a fool who feeds the broken system.
Do you *really* think I'm not going to catch someone who submits
somebody else's code? From my point of view, this is ideal. I will
catch this person in a phone screen and flush them away. Not only don't
they know how to program, but they're dishonest, too.
Some of us are trying to find the good people on the other side of the
hiring table. Your attitude ensures that we will not find you.
-a
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