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November 09, 2003
Interview questions
I had the first phone interview on Friday for a potential employer. Beyond the fact that I was under the impression that the interviewer was not paying attention to anything I said (at one point I asked him a question and his response was "yeah, thats great"), but it became painfully obvious how HR oriented he was vs development. One of his questions was about the total lines of code I've written within a project. Now this is a misleading question for many reasons, but mainly for two big ones.
First, the functionality of a piece of code can always be written in a notation that makes it difficult to follow, or it can be made easy to follow. Short or longer. Reusable or not. But typically, this isn't something developers often concern themselves with! I don't make it a habit to write an application with no less/more than N lines of code. Nor do I sit down and count them later.
Second, lines of code is a misleading concept. In my mind a line of code can and should be followed by a through explanation in comments of what each section is doing. Are the lines of comments counted or disregarded in the counting process?
When I brought these points to his attention his comment was "Well just take a guess if you can." This leads me to guessing properly or improperly. Trying to stay honest in the interview, I'm not sure I'll remember the number being given. I still don't understand the point of this question.
Posted by Dan at November 9, 2003 10:47 AM
Comments
Back in the day, IBM'ers and others of the like (gov, etc) often judged a project's success simply by the number of lines of code (oddly more was better).
This person was a poor representative for their company; you should contact the hiring technical manager (if possible) and let them know.
Posted by: brouda at November 11, 2003 04:51 PM
Sometimes on particularly dumb questions like that, I try and get to the root of the question. It sounds like what they really want to know, is have you worked on a "complicated" project. Using the rough notion that more lines of code is more complicated. I think an answer of "very many" would have been appropriate, and if not accepted maybe "really very many." But I guess the real answer is "Yes I am capable of working on complicated projects, even in such cases when I need to remember everything about the software because documentation is scarce, and often incorrect."
Also the lack of attention by the interviewer is unfortunate, a visit from Phil from Heck may cause him to change his tune.
Posted by: Kevin at November 17, 2003 01:46 PM