Absurdities of Technical Job Interviews | January 27 2025, 23:03

Here’s your text translated into English, with the HTML markup preserved:

I was thinking this morning about how to explain what a programmer’s job interview is like. I think I came up with a great analogy. It’s as if, when hiring a cook for a cafeteria, they were asked to describe the process of protein denaturation in a chicken egg at the molecular level. When hiring a salesperson, it would be essential to know how a reduction in the refinancing rate would affect aggregate demand in the long term.

You can’t just hire a welder. He needs to know how many valence electrons are in an iron atom and be able to derive the equation for the chemical reaction during welding.

A plumber must definitely know Bernoulli’s law and be able to calculate the water flow through a pipe using the Navier-Stokes equation.

Undoubtedly, you can’t just hire a hairdresser—you need one who can explain in detail how disulfide bonds work in the structure of hair and why, on a molecular level, a perm is a crime against keratin.

A carpenter should be asked about the ideal number of hammer strikes per minute to secure a nail considering the thickness of the wood. Even if he cannot name the exact number, he must demonstrate a thought process in the right direction (towards the interviewers).

Of course, once a programmer is hired, the very first task will involve reversing a string without using built-in functions. By recursion. Right after writing a module where two 100-digit numbers are added without using the addition operation. And the result is displayed in the console, formatted like a diamond. And certainly, a Java programmer will be using volatile, transient, strictfp at least every other day.

You should hire someone whose eyes sparkle with passion, or if not, someone who, like a tank, confidently plows through to a solution. Someone who understands exactly where to hit the code with a sledgehammer to make it work and keeps duct tape in their pocket in case that doesn’t help. Someone capable of fixing a bug and explaining to the client why the bug is a “feature” and not a mistake. Someone who says “that’s an interesting problem, I’ll think about it” instead of “it’s impossible”, and is already Googling how to do it. Someone who writes patches with such inspiration that they look like part of the architecture. And most importantly — you should hire someone who isn’t afraid to ask during the interview: “Why do I need to solve problems reversing strings, when in real life I have reverse()? Like in Python s[::-1] or ”.join(reversed(s)).”