Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.
Lately I’ve been preaching about meritocracy and how actual skills and experience matters more than pieces of paper though I’ve never really directly talked about them yet.
And so I decided to take some time and summarize my thoughts on what people from the last century thought are absolute requirements in getting a job.
With April being the graduation month here in the Philippines, you’ll be seeing fresh graduates in various forums and discussion groups looking for advice on how to pass technical interviews. Here’s one posted over at the PHP Users Group forum earlier today:
Can you help me with this? I’m going to take a technical written exam for a job i’m applying. Here is the list of what are expected on the exam:
-Basic Programming
-OOP
-recursive programming and variables in programming
-? statement
-conditional statements
-loop statements
-flowcharting
-pseudocodes (strings,odd/even)
Can you guys give me tips and heads up on where to focus and what to expect on the exam? The exam will be next week and I want to be prepared for it. Thanks in advance.PS: Hindi ko alam kung anong programming language ung eexam. (I don’t know what programming language will be used in the test)
Whenever I see these type of questions, the first thing I do is give a ಠ_ಠ to my monitor. The listed coverage above is so basic that every 2nd year college student should have no problem with it.
It’s like a carpenter asking what tool to focus on when applying for a carpenter position: screwdrivers, hammers, saws, or measuring tape? Yes, it’s that basic.
Unhelpful snarkiness aside, what advice would I give to these fresh grads?
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions!” Now they have two problems.
– Jamie Zawinski
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll quote Jamie Zawinski!” Now they have two problems.
– anon
Just to show that I practice what I preach, I headed over to TopCoder a few hours ago to try my hand at some simple TCHS problems. By my surprise, the problem I opened was very similar to one of the technical interview questions in my previous company. I know this because as a technical interviewer, I’ve already given this problem to a couple of potential employees.
Now this isn’t surprising. Basic algorithm-related questions are good filters for weeding out so-called “developers” who never really had much programming practice in college, but there’s only a few types of questions you can ask at this level–go any higher and you’ll likely be stuck with Complicators instead of pragmatic programmers.
Anyway, what struck me with this problem is that it can also be solved with regular expressions. This has never occurred to me before, mainly because I didn’t expect even the top students from the top universities in the Philippines to approach the problem that way. From my experience, I would expect applicants to play around with loops instead.
This made me ask myself the question:
If you were a technical interviewer, how would you rate an applicant who used regular expressions in solving the problem?
Continue reading “Technical Interviews and Regular Expressions”