uhhhh, thanks?

[kaigou]

branchandroot and I have commiserated in the past about this obsession over Making Code Look Nice (Just On The Off-Chance Someone Might See). I've always applied that rule. I mean, it's not like it's my own hair, which ostensibly I should be making Look Nice but hell if I can see it myself, so I don't have to look at it. But I do have to look at my own code when I'm working on it, so I try to keep it clean and organized and legible.

So I had a benchtest for an FED position, and naturally I organized the code like I normally would (although the commenting was more than I'd usually do, since it was a benchtest). I didn't fully minimize it for live-level presentation, but was still mostly legible. During the follow-up interview both the PM and the lead were highly complimentary about how nicely organized it was, that it was the highest level of clean, simple, efficient code presentation they'd yet seen.

I was all complimented until they added that other benchtests they've gotten back have consisted of a) the original png, sliced into large chunks and arranged on the page via basic css, and even b) a digitized, pixelated flat-image version of... the original png.

I'll take the original compliment as-is, but it's still hard to see yourself as that awesome when you find out the competition was that low-grade. It's like being proud of getting an A on what you thought was advanced calculus only to find out the most anyone else did was sign their name. If they're grading on a curve, that A might not have been so awesome, after all.

But that could just be me. Still going to keep organizing my code neatly, as a matter of pride, at the same time I wish I could pay someone to interview for me. I really do suck at extemporaneous on-the-spot questions.

Comments

[branchandroot]

*winces* Oh man. Well, hopefully they meant "prettiest, cleanest code we've seen /ever/", and not just "this round of interviews".

(/Images/? Really? *facepalms*)

[kaigou]

Well, it sounded like "ever seen", and then they casually mentioned what else they've seen, and it wasn't exactly impressive. I'm not doing this process via the usual recruiter, so I have no idea how long they've been looking (though they did mention something about someone previous doing FED-like work who had certain, shall we say, habits and apparently a chunk of the position involves undoing those habits omg-ide-rly).

I'm pretty sure when they mentioned the "took the png and sliced it" that my jaw kind of dropped, and the "sent back a picture of the png, pixellated" was when my eyes kind of bugged out. I might've even blurted out something about how isn't that kind of totally missing the point? which, yeah, it is, but still. dude.

[kathmandu]

FED position?

[kaigou]

FED = front end development (user interface).

[kathmandu]

They probably had more than those two other benchtests ever. Having been -- at least a few times -- on both sides of interviewing processes, the stories told about other applicants tend to be from previous rounds (meaning not your direct competition) or the most extreme, or both.