Post #3749207

I've told this story in the other place. A few months before the #pandemic, I applied to work in a senior tech role at an AI startup. At the time it would have been a learning opportunity for me to understand AI better. They asked me to create a Roman numeral calculator in #golang. I asked if it was ok to use libraries, they said it was fine. I, obviously, looked who had implemented this in Go before, and whether they had implemented it as a library that I could import in my project. What the library author hadn't done is implemented factors, which was a requirement for the take-home project. It was about 60 line of code to write my take-home project, including the library which implemented most of the calculator backend functionality. As the library didn't implement factors, I forked, added functionality—about 20-30 LoC—wrote unit tests, submitted a PR to to original repo, the original library author merge the PR upstream, got the PR merged and submitted the take-home project and the record of the PR to the start-up. They rejected it, as I didn't write enough code. Their answer: "Would you mind to implement from scratch the Roman numeral calculator?" My first reply was: "Yes, I would mind. Would you mind paying me my regular rate of €xxx/h for the time I spent on this task? I'm not going to work all weekend and take time away from my family without something to show for it." I wrote it in the shortest time possible—the work took about an hour or two. As expected from a senior, I reused existing components and didn't try to reinvent the wheel. I modified existing code, wrote unit tests for someone else's code, and submitted a PR, which was merged upstream. (I didn't expect that it would be merged in such a short time, this was just bonus.) Obviously, the startup pivoted at some point because the business model didn't work as well as they'd hoped, and they seem to be coders for hire now. * To be clear, I have Roman numeral calculators written in a number of languages on my GitHub inspired by Sandi Metz, just not one in #golang https://github.com/webhat/fantastic-lamp