Wednesday, January 12th, 2022
Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LH9tJ6qSGQ
5:30-5:45: Announcements
5:45-7:15: Coding Interviews for Java Developers
In the year 2000 – Joel Spolsky released his first “guerilla guide to interviewing” (most current version from 2006) https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guide-to-interviewing-version-30/
This really started to set the standard for the modern software engineer interview. In particular, this quote set the tone:
“Most of the time in the interview, though, should be spent letting the candidate prove that they can write code.”
Somewhere along the line, we started to suspect that maybe there were a lot of SE candidates who couldn’t actually write code, so making candidates write code became a standard practice.
Not all of us are performers or perform well under pressure, or with someone watching. Some of us don’t spend our nights and weekends working on toy problems, and the day-to-day code we work on is anything but a toy problem, or we work in an application framework or work on code that’s in maintenance mode where we’re not really writing tons of new code from scratch – when was the last time you wrote a main() method? So the coding exercise is an alien environment.
I’ll talk about general advice for live coding, as well as some strategies for succeeding in these coding exercises, particularly the live coding variety, with an emphasis on pitfalls for using Java in live coding interviews and strategies for getting around them.
About Gordon Weakliem
Gordon Weakliem has worked as a professional software developer for over 25 years. He has worked in distributed systems since the days when CORBA was the next big thing, and has worked extensively with HTTP based services, as well as large scale distributed data platforms. He has worked in the travel industry at companies like Sabre, Galileo, and Vrbo, and currently works for SiriusXM / Pandora Media supporting the Marketing team with big data analytics. In addition, Gordon is a Senior Interview Engineer with Karat, an online interview platform, and has conducted hundreds of coding interviews.
You can find Gordon on LinkedIn at @gweakliem (https://www.linkedin.com/in/gweakliem/).
7:15-7:30: Q & A
The live streaming of this meetup is sponsored by Okta (https://developer.okta.com/).