Post #1884650

2026-04-30 00:18 UTC

With the tech job market the way it is, I know a lot of people who are interviewing right now, and some of the questions they get asked make me cranky. I wrote up a little rant about one category of them that&#39;s near and dear to me: http://dscoder.com/perfinterview.html

Replies (3)

@Catfish_Man@mastodon.social 2026-04-30 00:59

This is a valid point and highlights a bias of mine: I’m mostly a maintenance engineer, so I sometimes under-focus on the needs of greenfield code https://social.belkadan.com/@jrose/statuses/01KQDWK7KM3VDX2M5W8WBVRQ3T

Open ##1942220
@jrose@social.belkadan.com 2026-04-30 00:28

@Catfish_Man I agree the interview structure isn't the right one, but there's something to be said for picking the right data structure in the first place, so that you don't have to wait for the natural pushback later. 80% of the time it won't matter, and 5% of the time it might make things worse, but I think there's still a good 15% or so where having better defaults than "accidentally quadratic" is worth being part of the initial implementation.

Open ##1942221
@tjw@social.lol 2026-05-04 22:49

@Catfish_Man 2 is waaay easier when you are the CTO. 3 is waaay harder when using SwiftUI or other similar “put in a description; hope it works" tools. 😂 (Though I hear tooling has gotten better, idk)

Open ##2059185