I Am a Bad Developer
On Friday I had a remote interview where I was asked to search for the value closest to X in a sorted 2D array (columns and rows are both sorted in increasing order). I came up with a trivial solution to find a specific value, but got tripped up modifying it to find an unknown value that could be higher or lower than the target. I have not heard back from the company.<p>On Saturday/Sunday, I went to AngelHack SF and did a solo-project that ended up placing 2nd amongst +80 teams and netted me a $2500 credit from Firebase and an invitation to AngelHack's accelerator.<p>Am I a bad developer, too? Or is the hiring practice of reducing someone's technical competence to a handful of esoteric questions arbitrary and broken?<p>I am much more proud of the things I have built and the reputation I have with the other developers I have worked with than I am of my ability to find the longest common subsequence between two strings.<p>I'm guilty of asking these kinds of questions, too. The truth is it is incredibly hard to gauge a programmer's skills and figure out whether they fit into your team over the course of a half-hour interview, and nobody really has figured out a good way to do it. We're stuck with arbitrary questions that yield false negatives (and positives) simply because there isn't a better solution.<p>Edit: Aaannd in the course of writing this I received an offer letter and an email from someone at a16z asking about my AngelHack project, so I guess my job hunt is over. When it rains, it pours.