Asklemmy

50915 readers

1506 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 6 years ago

MODERATORS

Programming exercise during job interview (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by i_am_a_cardboard_box@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

24 comments fedilink hide all child comments

How do you guys do it? I just had my first encounter yesterday for a data engineering job and I sincerely fucked up. My mind went completely blank, I was thinking along all the wrong lines and I think I didn't even correctly understand the question, because there were all these words that I've never heard of.

How do you even prepare for something like that?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] planish@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago

One thing that might help is having a broader background in the field and its concepts. If an interview question can feature a bunch of concepts you've never heard of, you might have missing bits of background you could learn more about to fill in gaps. You could go from "I have no idea what a hadoop is or what it's for" to "I know people like to use Hadoop for X and it works basically like Y but I've never used it myself" pretty quickly.

Anyone useful as a computer-related employee is still going to encounter problems they don't immediately understand on a daily basis, though. You need to be able to happily and confidently say "I have no idea what X is, what is that?". An interviewer will be happier to get a clear idea of what you don't know than to see you struggle to pretend to know things, because someone who pretends to know what they don't is a danger in a real workplace. And maybe they'll actually teach you enough to let you solve the problem, or, failing that, to be able to answer the next interviewer who asks you about that thing.