• Cano@lemm.ee
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    17 hours ago

    All fun and games till the PO requests some new feature or change and some poor soul has to add that into your code trying not to break it

    Bonus points if the poor soul is you

    • palordrolap@fedia.io
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      13 hours ago

      Given the engineer’s amendment to “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” is usually “If it ain’t broke, it doesn’t have enough features yet.”, I can only surmise that COBOL must be one of those languages that are so terrible that they deter their programmers from wanting to do that.

      • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
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        13 hours ago

        I once had to modify some COBOL code. It’s a highly organized language, not terrible. But because it’s old there’s a shortage of people now who are good at it or want to learn it. You pretty much have to decide your career is going to be working on old code.

  • Björn Tantau@swg-empire.de
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    17 hours ago

    My boss once asked me whether their entrance test was too hard after several candidates sent him something that wouldn’t even run.

      • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
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        10 hours ago

        Classic write-up!

        Although, now that I’m an interviewer, I kind of despise FizzBuzz, because nobody thinks clearly during a high pressure interview.

        Whenever possible, I love to talk with a candidate about some concrete past source code they claim to have written. I’ve better luck putting the candidate at ease and then talking through their contributions to the code.

        Of course, when I get enough candidates who shared source code, I don’t even invite the ones who didn’t share source code for an interview.

    • Cousin Mose@lemmy.hogru.ch
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      14 hours ago

      I thought my entrance test was far too easy, I only had to create a blog in my web framework and show doing the basics like validations, secure parameters, etc.

      I learned later on that most couldn’t pass because they came from other languages and thought they could get by without knowing anything.

      • mosiacmango@lemm.ee
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        17 hours ago

        Should working code even be part of an interview? Seems like a situation rife with abuse.

        Need free contractors? Just put your code issues up as a 4hr take home interview test.

        • Björn Tantau@swg-empire.de
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          43 minutes ago

          It was a very easy proof of concept. Back then they used XSLT to convert clients’ homepages to an intermediary HTML-dialect that would then be rendered out to mobile phones and other devices according to their capabilities. That was before everyone had a smartphone just around the time the first iPhone was released.

          The test was to write an XSLT that would convert one very simple HTML file into their dialect. They knew that almost no candidate would have ever touched XSLT before that. So they needed people who could learn quickly. My own entry was plenty suboptimal but at least it achieved the task. That was about two hours of work.

        • Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.de
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          16 hours ago

          Pseudocode/general thought process walkthrough should be the only thing imo. Oh no, the interviewee forgot a semicolon, so he is trash at coding and is a no-fit is complete bullshit.

        • Dudewitbow@lemmy.zip
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          14 hours ago

          how the applicant thinks breaks down problems and handles how to answer them matters more than if the code is actually functional on the spot

  • NudeNewt@lemm.ee
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    15 hours ago

    I wrote “some code” back when I was a child, if you asked me to explain how it works all I could tell you is “through the power of santa’s little helper”.

    • fxomt@lemm.ee
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      7 hours ago

      You’ve been naughty this year! you’re getting a sack of coal template errors!

  • fxomt@lemm.ee
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    17 hours ago

    It worksish, but look at it the wrong way and it’ll collapse entirely.