The technical interview is an ego trip
Man. I interviewed somewhere last week for a Scala position, advertising myself as a functional programmer.<p>In the interview, they asked me, &quot;What&#x27;s the difference between fold left and fold right?&quot; I said &quot;Um, one of them starts on the left side of the data structure, one of them starts on the right. I never remember which is which.&quot; They said essentially: &quot;okay. The answer I was looking for was that fold right is not stack safe.&quot; I protested weakly, and they dug in, so I graciously let it go.<p>But it&#x27;s patently not true. A naive implementation of fold right in Scala isn&#x27;t stack safe, but the actual implementation is stack safe. It&#x27;s been stack safe since like 2010. So rather than interrogating my knowledge of functional programming, they&#x27;re just asking me bullshit language trivia, and dinging me when I don&#x27;t come up with their arbitrary wrong answer.<p>I wanted to work there before that, but the interview made me a little ambivalent, and then they just ghosted me. So I guess I dodged a bullet. But man, that was frustrating.