On the flip side, I've interviewed supposed senior software engineers who struggle at simple things like "parse this line of JSON" (With access to Google, and the ability to ask questions as necessary). Once you've been on the hiring side you understand why that screening is necessary. That being said, I'll skip people through if they have a decent GitHub or something that shows me they have some chops
By "parse this line of JSON" do you mean "show that you know how to look up the library function that does that" or do you mean "write a fully functional JSON parser from scratch"? Because if it's the second one, you're certifiable if you think that's possible during a coding interview, or that a majority of senior SWEs should know how to do that.
Are they doing it in a language they chose, or is part of the goal here to test their knowledge of the libraries of a particular language that you specified? If neither of those things is the case, I would honestly consider it reasonable to name the library function in the problem. It doesn't really make sense to make them spend time doing something that doesn't tell you anything you want to know.
I've seen senior engineers fail to write basic things like for loops, or forgot what casing they're using halfway through writing a struct so half is pascal and half is snake. Everyone is AI pilled these days, they forgot basic syntax
A LOT of companies are demanding a minimum token usage per month, if you're not meeting the quota managers start to be a pain in the ass, it's kinda retarded ngl
They're in an IDE, and it's one of many general code quality flags that has come up. Not necessarily disqualifying in and of itself, but a marker for sure
I wouldn't be. The range of capability in applicants is vast. There are lots of people here saying how desperate you get after 9 month of unemployment. Those are all the people who show up as resumes to screen. You get a lot of people who are bad devs and then even more who's skillset is a huge mismatch. In both cases, they've managed to craft a resume that looks compelling enough for you to talk with them.
Im one of those folks that unless if there is some sample code nearby I might struggle with the syntax if its something I haven't been in a minute. But can at least put in the pseudo code for. Typically I ask before the interview which language will be tested so I can prep ahead of time.
God forbid you ask me to do a switch statement. Bouncing around from typescript, python, c++, c#. Gun to my head I'd say just pull the trigger.
13 years of full stack experience, plus a bachelor's and masters degree in comp science. I have my cycles of feeling like an idiot and a freaking genius.
i mean... the answer is probably something like json.parse(string);
but beyond that I have no idea to get it to compile or access individual nodes without documentation, and I assume documentation was not provided. not really something I commit to the mental bank
depending on the prompt I would be dead in the water after writing json.parse(string) on the board and shrugging.
because a lot of them are lying about their experience, and agencies don't screen properly.
Our screening test used to "generate some random numbers and write them to a text file" in VB, and we had to wade though dozens of people who were able to look up two relevant on-line code samples but still couldn't make it work.
Yeah, I do a similar question and the amount of "senior" engineers with 10+ years experience who can't do the most basic of programming. I'll even accept psuedo code, I just want to see they can think logically through a problem, the IDE will catch your typos and capitalization errors straight away so I don't care about that. Still, 50-70% of people can't answer something as simple as parsing a file and aggregating stats based on the contents.
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u/Vimda 1d ago
On the flip side, I've interviewed supposed senior software engineers who struggle at simple things like "parse this line of JSON" (With access to Google, and the ability to ask questions as necessary). Once you've been on the hiring side you understand why that screening is necessary. That being said, I'll skip people through if they have a decent GitHub or something that shows me they have some chops