Comment by joenot443
Comment by joenot443 13 hours ago
This is a really good article.
There's a quality in strong developers which is difficult to select for in an interview but wildly valuable once they're up and running; maybe the best word is "scrappiness".
When I interview juniors or interns, one of the questions I like to ask is something like this-
"You've got two computer, one Linux one Windows. There's 50gb of files on the Windows machine which need to be moved to the Linux one, but you've only got 1h to do so. What's your strategy?"
Anyone with some experience knows it's a bit of a silly question - there are a tonne of unknowns and countless "correct" answers, but that's just the rub - it's not about the academically optimal answer, but about coming up with an answer that would probably work, given the constraints I'd be arbitrarily throwing at them. It's about realizing that the vast majority of decisions we make in software engineering have costs and tradeoffs, and being able to discuss them with a colleague is 10x more valuable than graph traversal.
More than anything, I try to select for people that I know spent a good chunk of their formative years behind the computer, just like many of us did. The maze-traversal skills you learn as a child installing Ubuntu on your parents' computer stay with you forever. Given the option, I'd take the self-taught-indie-dev-state-college-grad over the honor-roll-ivy-league-leetcoder any day.
This is a fun question.
But the fact that "move a medium sized file from one machine to another" is still a fun question is also a pretty damning indictment of our industry :P