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Comment by throwuxiytayq

5 hours ago

This is why at my company in interviews we ask people to draw a CPU diagram. You'd be surprised how many supposedly-senior computer programmers would draw a processor that would not work.

If I was asked that question in an interview to be a programmer I'd walk out. How many abstraction layers either side of your knowledge domain do you need to be an expert in? Further, being a good technologist of any kind is not about having arcane details at the tip of your frontal lobe, and a company worth working for would know that.

  • I mean gp is clearly a joke but

    A fundamental part of the job is being able to break down problems from large to small, reason about them, and talk about how you do it, usually with minimal context or without deep knowledge in all aspects of what we do. We're abstraction artists.

    That question wouldn't be fundamentally different than any other architecture question. Start by drawing big, hone in on smaller parts, think about edge cases, use existing knowledge. Like bread and butter stuff.

    I much more question your reaction to the joke than using it as a hypothetical interview question. I actually think it's good. And if it filters out people that have that kind of reaction then it's excellent. No one wants to work with the incurious.

That's reasonable in many cases, but I've had situations like this for senior UI and frontend positions, and they: don't ask UI or frontend questions. And ask their pet low level questions. Some even snort that it's softball to ask UI questions or "they use whatever". It's like, yeah no wonder your UI is shit and now you are hiring to clean it up.