Amen to that. It's always amazed me how many candidates I've had sputter on something like this. Nothing flips my bozo bit faster than someone claiming a particular language or technology they've supposedly "mastered" is perfect.
I worked at a shop with a supposedly Object Oriented architecture. However, one subsystem consisted entirely of Class methods -- very, very long class-side methods with nested loops, deeply nested logic, and a half dozen array simultaneously incremented indexes that recursively called cut-and-paste variant copies of themselves.
Now I work with a different company, but I was interviewing someone who worked at the same shop, and asked him about his opinion of the architecture of the above subsystem. His answer: "It's very nice."
I've started asking in interviews what people thought was wrong with a particular language or environment and if they had any thoughts as to features they would want added (or removed).
That reminds me of an interview I did years ago with a Computer Science grad student. His area of study was in compilers, and he said his strongest language was C.
So, I asked him: "what would you improve in C? What's less than ideal about it?" He couldn't tell me a single thing.
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After finding out what language/library someone is most proficient in I always ask them what they find bad/wrong about that language/library.
Amen to that. It's always amazed me how many candidates I've had sputter on something like this. Nothing flips my bozo bit faster than someone claiming a particular language or technology they've supposedly "mastered" is perfect.
One job interview sputter I recently produced:
I worked at a shop with a supposedly Object Oriented architecture. However, one subsystem consisted entirely of Class methods -- very, very long class-side methods with nested loops, deeply nested logic, and a half dozen array simultaneously incremented indexes that recursively called cut-and-paste variant copies of themselves.
Now I work with a different company, but I was interviewing someone who worked at the same shop, and asked him about his opinion of the architecture of the above subsystem. His answer: "It's very nice."
I've started asking in interviews what people thought was wrong with a particular language or environment and if they had any thoughts as to features they would want added (or removed).
That reminds me of an interview I did years ago with a Computer Science grad student. His area of study was in compilers, and he said his strongest language was C.
So, I asked him: "what would you improve in C? What's less than ideal about it?" He couldn't tell me a single thing.