Cargo Cults and Interview Questions
How, I asked her, does she handle unintended implicit conversions? She gave me some platitudes about code coverage and unit tests, but I immediately suspected she was one of those ‘All hat, no cattle’ developers, the kind that can talk a good line and put together small, good-looking things for showing off but can’t do any serious work. Sure enough, when I asked her some more specific questions, like whether she could write out the signature for certain Boost library functions from memory, she drew a blank and explained that her tools provide that sort of detail via auto-complete.
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Sounds obvious, but I guess there are still people out there who disqualify interviewees with such questions.
