Always try new things

This week I have been preparing my rubrics for the interview, this time I’m the interviewer and additionally I have to create a problem for the interviewee. The goals of this interview are the same as before, but this time, as interviewer, I need to make sure that the interviewee knows that they’re in a safe space and make them curious about new things.

Making a problem is actually harder than expected because first I need to know about the interview’s stack and also make sure that I can cover most of the possible approaches or make sure they are going in the right way or how to guide them. I know that problems can be solved in different ways as there is not a specific language for a problem, some are easiest tho, but my concern comes to be able to recognize that they are making good use of the tools they have.

I want to keep talking about the book “Elements of programming interview”, for some reason I have a liking for this book, “Cracking the coding interview” was the book I was reading during the second phase, I haven’t finished it yet but I feel like I read and learn some good tips about interview and where I’m actually, in a technical level. There are a lot of problems there, some of them seems trivial but if you’re not experienced enough then I can get complicated, this is also the reason I have been focusing more in this book instead of solving the hacker rank problems, because I noticed that not all the problems are that well structured, they are separated by category but that does not prohibit you from solving them using another technique. The book also has categories, but it doesn’t have any structure to solve the problem, helping you to think outside the box and try different approaches.

Up until now, solving problems using code was all about knowing how to do some math, it was a straight line, but now I know that solving more real-life problems comes with having more experience, design patterns. The difference between solving a problem from school and one from a client is that for a scholar problem, you can have different approaches, that’s true, but the base of the problem is in the math, if you understand it then you can solve it. On the other hand we have the clients, they have requirements and we, as developers, should know how to make a system that can fulfill those requirements. Don’t take me wrong, I’m not saying that we just code everything and expect it to work, but there is not that feeling of ownership as it is taught in here.