judging them by their approach, not end result, should be fair.
Yup, that’s the approach. It’s okay if they don’t finish, I want to know how they approach the problem. We absolutely adjust our decision based on the role.
If they can extend existing code and design a new system (with minimal new code) and ask the right questions, we can work with them.
I’m just getting started on my third attempt at changing careers from sys-admining over to coding (starting with the Odin project this time). I’m not sure the questions you ask, while interesting, will be covered. Can you point to some resources or subject matter to research to get exposure to these questions? The non coding, coding questions are interesting to me and I’m curious if my experience will help or if it’s something I need to account for while learning.
We stay away from riddles, and instead focus on CS concepts. We’ll rephrase to avoid jargon if you don’t have a formal education, or it has been a while. Here are a few categories:
OOP concepts like SOLID
concurrency vs parallelism, approaches for each (generators, threads, async,’ etc), and tradeoffs
typing (e.g. is a Python strongly or weakly typed? Java? JavaScript?), and practical implications
functional programming concepts like closures, partial application, etc
SQL knowledge
types of tests, and approaches/goals for each
And some practical details like:
major implementation details of our stack (Python’s GIL, browser features like service workers, etc)
git and docker experience
build systems and other dev tools
That covers most of it. We don’t expect every candidate to know everything, we just want to get an idea of the breadth and depth of their knowledge.
Yup, that’s the approach. It’s okay if they don’t finish, I want to know how they approach the problem. We absolutely adjust our decision based on the role.
If they can extend existing code and design a new system (with minimal new code) and ask the right questions, we can work with them.
I’m just getting started on my third attempt at changing careers from sys-admining over to coding (starting with the Odin project this time). I’m not sure the questions you ask, while interesting, will be covered. Can you point to some resources or subject matter to research to get exposure to these questions? The non coding, coding questions are interesting to me and I’m curious if my experience will help or if it’s something I need to account for while learning.
We stay away from riddles, and instead focus on CS concepts. We’ll rephrase to avoid jargon if you don’t have a formal education, or it has been a while. Here are a few categories:
And some practical details like:
That covers most of it. We don’t expect every candidate to know everything, we just want to get an idea of the breadth and depth of their knowledge.
Love it. So much to look into. Appreciate your time.