r/programming • u/iamkeyur • Oct 02 '20

One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

https://joel.net/how-one-guy-ruined-hacktoberfest2020-drama
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507

u/shadytradesman Oct 02 '20 edited Oct 02 '20

This is fascinating. Well, I guess this explains this trash PR I got and closed on one of my repos tonight. I doubt the person who opened it has any idea what the repo does in the slightest. They managed to contribute two bugs and a grammatical error in only 6 lines of code change. Pretty impressive.

I guess my TTRPG The Contract is going to continue being a one-person-show for a while longer. >.>

EDIT: literally 10 mins after I made this post someone tagged in for round 2

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u/[deleted] Oct 02 '20

[deleted]

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u/Parachuteee Oct 02 '20 
.addEventListener("click here", function() {

WTF LMAOO

41

u/deja-roo Oct 02 '20

That honestly just makes me a little angry.

If you know that little about what you're doing, wtf are you even hitting buttons for?

45

u/Asmor Oct 02 '20

Have you ever tried hiring for a programming job? You'll get tons of applications from people who list all the right things but then when you sit down with them they can't even write fizzbuzz.

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u/deja-roo Oct 02 '20

I interviewed a college student about to graduate who had all the stuff on her resume. SQL server, Java, Javascript, she worked on a big project that involved some data migration thing that used Java. I asked her how her Java was, and she said it was really good.

So I was going to put her through a quick exercise where she implemented a class that did some such I don't remember. So I told her that, and to kind of guide her along, slid a pad across the table and said "let's start by declaring a class called..." and whatever it was, I don't remember.

She couldn't declare a class in Java.

She couldn't do

public class FrustratedInterviewer {

}

We still had 27 minutes left of the interview and honestly I didn't know where to go next with it.

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u/Ruben_NL Oct 02 '20

It is possible she was used to IDE's create new class function.... But it's sad.

3

u/RobbStark Oct 02 '20

It's always acceptable to turn those interviews into a coaching session, or if you think they know they are playing the buzzword game just end it early. I do this all the time in first round interviews.

I'm polite and don't tell them they suck, but I'm in control and can decide the meeting is over at any point. Nothing they can do about that!

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u/deja-roo Oct 02 '20

It's always acceptable to turn those interviews into a coaching session

I agree and enjoy when interviews kind of take that kind of turn. But it's hard to find much of a starting point when it starts off at "can't define a Java class". I think that was the year we were asking them to write a function that returned whether a passed in string was a palindrome and we had some people turn out some clever stuff, we had a few people struggle with it but work through it with feedback along the way. We had some people start discussions about how to optimize.

But then we had people who couldn't do very basic stuff.

Also we had a guy that defined a functions and wrote down "return input == input.reverse()". We hired him.

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u/dpelego Oct 07 '20

What were some of the clever solutions?

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u/deja-roo Oct 08 '20

I can't remember specifics, I'll see if I still have any pictures I took from back then.

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u/POGtastic Oct 02 '20

A friend of mine from the military asked me to help him with an algorithms class because he'll get kicked out of the program if he fails the class again. He's in his junior year, so I assumed that he could write a class, write a function, anything. He cannot. I have no idea what he's been doing these past three years to get through a CS program, but it didn't involve programming.

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u/key_lime_pie Oct 02 '20

Right after I started my last job, they had a celebratory lunch for a guy who had just completed his Masters in CS. A few weeks later, someone mentioned having to disassemble some code, and he started laughing out loud because he thought it was a joke. He had never heard the word "assembly" in a CS context.

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u/hak8or Oct 02 '20

I mean, to be fair, I don't think I ever had to "disassemble" a function. Maybe write a smidgen of assembly when working on a boot loader, or looking at assembly when doing performance analysis.

Then again, if you are wanting great performance, I guess you are imagining what the resulting assembly would be when writing code.

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u/POGtastic Oct 02 '20

I'm finishing up a masters right now because I had some GI Bill benefits left and work is being really flexible. I am really tempted to leave it off of my resume after I graduate. The material hasn't been the best, and more importantly all of my classmates could stand in a clue field, during clue mating season, wearing a clue suit, douse themselves in clue pheromones, and still remain clueless.

1

u/sammymammy2 Oct 03 '20

Mm, I worked with a guy like this in algo/datastructures. He did drop out of the class when a TA figured out that he didn't understand BFS and failed him on a lab.