Unstructured Data

Alex T had hit the ceiling with his current team, in terms of career advancement. He was ready to be promoted to a senior position, but there simply wasn't room where he was- they were top-heavy as it was, and there were whispers among management of needing to make some cuts from that team. So Alex started looking for other openings.

There was another team at his company which had just lost all of its senior developers to other teams. Alex knew that was a bad sign, but in general, climbing the career ladder was a one-way street. Once he had a senior position, even if it was terrible, he could transfer to another team in a few months, keeping his senior title and salary.

Perry was the team's technical director. "I've been laying out the TPM architecture for years," Perry explained, "and you are going to be part of implementing my vision." That vision was an Internal Framework called "Total Process Management", which, as the name implied, was a flexible business rules engine that would manage all of their business processes, from HR, to supply chain, to marketing, it would do everything. "We're bringing the latest technologies to bear, it'll be based on RESTful microservices with a distributed backend. But we need to staff up to achieve this, so we're going to be doing a lot of interviews over the next few months, you and me."

Alex knew he could apply for another internal transfer after six months. He already saw this was a disaster, the only question was how disastrous would it be?

While the code Perry had him writing was an overcomplicated mess of trendy ideas badly implemented, the worst part was doing the interviews. Perry sat in on every phase of the interview, and had Opinionsa about everything the candidate had on their resume.

"You used Angular for that?" he demanded from one candidate, sneering, and drawing a bright red "X" on their resume. He criticized another for using a relational database when they could have used MongoDB. One interview ended early when the candidate admitted that they didn't spend their nights and weekends hacking at personal projects.

The worst part, for Alex, was his role in the technical screens. He'd read about the failures of white-board programming, the uselessness of asking trivia questions: "How do you reverse a linked-list?" wasn't exactly a great interview question. He'd planned out a set of questions he thought would be better, and even some hands-on coding, but Perry nixed that.

"I want you to build a test with an answer key," Perry said. "Because at some point, we may want to have non-technical people doing a first-pass screening as our team grows and more people want to join it. Use that in the technical portion of the interview."

Interviews turned into days, days turned into weeks, weeks into months, and eventually Perry brought in Jack. Jack had worked at Google (as an intern), and Perry loved that. In fact, through the whole interview, Perry and Jack got on like a house on fire, smiling, laughing, happily bashing the same technologies and waxing rhapsodic over the joys of using Riak (Mongo was so last year, they were junking all of their database access to use Riak now).

Eventually, Perry left and it was Alex's turn to recite his test, and compare the results against his answer key. "What's a linked-list?" he asked, dying on the inside.

"It's a navigation widget on websites."

Alex blinked, but continued. "How does a linked-list differ from a doubly-linked-list?"

"A doubly-linked list has a pop-up menu so you can have more links in the list," Jack said.

For the first time since he'd written his test, Alex was actually excited to see the results. Jack wasn't just wrong, he was finding incredibly new ways to be wrong. He claimed a binary-tree was a kind of legacy hard-drive. Or RAM, perhaps, it wasn't really clear from his answer. Design Patterns were templates you could use" in Photoshop.

Alex thanked Jack for his time, sent him on his way, and then went to compare notes with Perry.

Perry was positively beaming. "I think we found a really great candidate," he said. "Jack's sharp as a tack, and is definitely a culture fit. What did you think?"

"Well," Alex started, and then stopped. Perry was difficult to handle, so Alex decided that he should be as diplomatic as possible. "It started pretty well, but when we started talking about data-structures- he was really weak. It's a bad sign. We should pass."

"That's probably not a big deal," Perry said, "I don't care if he knows Oracle or not. We use unstructured data."

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