I interviewed a candidate that had quite an alphabet soup and buzzword compliant resume. He was pretty much convinced he was the world's greatest programmer.
I asked him if he could talk through how he would write a function that showed if an unsorted-array contained consecutive integers with no gaps and no duplicates. He said he never claimed he was a math major and that such a problem was unfair to ask. In other words, he had no idea what to do.
But what was interesting was that this same guy could answer questions about the O(n) complexity of algorithms and explain how to write quicksort. Apparently, his pre-interview preparation involved memorizing that in hopes we would be dumb enough to mistake that for competence.
If you are hiring a baseball player, you don't hire someone that that can rattle off baseball statistics or that talks about how they read about baseball for 4 years at college, you hire someone that can play baseball. Well, I am hiring a programmer. I don't care if memorized the names of design patterns; I care whether you can you actually use them.
I asked him if he could talk through how he would write a function that showed if an unsorted-array contained consecutive integers with no gaps and no duplicates. He said he never claimed he was a math major and that such a problem was unfair to ask. In other words, he had no idea what to do.
But what was interesting was that this same guy could answer questions about the O(n) complexity of algorithms and explain how to write quicksort. Apparently, his pre-interview preparation involved memorizing that in hopes we would be dumb enough to mistake that for competence.
If you are hiring a baseball player, you don't hire someone that that can rattle off baseball statistics or that talks about how they read about baseball for 4 years at college, you hire someone that can play baseball. Well, I am hiring a programmer. I don't care if memorized the names of design patterns; I care whether you can you actually use them.