Interviews and Whitespace

Lately, I have been in the market for a new position, but I'm not looking to settle.  I have worked at enough different places to know what is important for me, and it's not just the bottom line hourly wage.

There are so many other aspects of being happy at work that do not involve getting paid.  Team environment, willingness to collaborate and innovate, and general motivation to get better are all things that I find appealing.

Being that I do not *need* to work, I have the luxury of viewing potential work with in a very different light.  I want to work with motivated engineers who do not hide behind 'We do not have time to do things right', or 'testing just wastes time', or any other excuses of why things are not done well.

So with that in mind, I have been out looking for a perfect place where I can work to my hearts content and produce value to the company.  While interviewing, I have noticed something ... concerning ... to say the least.

I have had at least a few interviews where I was not even asked anything technical!  I wonder how these companies decide to hire talent and what problems they are running into with this approach.  I know when I interview potential candidates, I typically have the following format:

1.  Ask the candidate to self rate (on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being a complete expert, 1 being a novice)
-> This is important to find out their confidence level and guides me on what level of question to ask.

2.  Start with the basic (what is OOP, inheritance, design patterns, sealed classes, ...)
-> This gives me an idea of the candidates strength, whether they self evaluated correctly, and further points where to start digging.

3.  Rapid descent into technical weeds.  From here, I try to quickly get to questions at the users self evaluation level.  For instance, if they evaluated at a 5, I would ask questions a mid level developer should be able to answer, or at least talk intelligently about.  I would not go into questions I would expect expert knowledge to answer unless the candidate crushed the mid level questions.

I would say about 45 minutes of digging into the candidate's brain gives a good idea of technical background.  The remaining 15 minutes are typically soft-skills type questions and allowing the candidate to ask any questions.

I finally had an interview today where they asked me a decent amount of technical questions.  One came up, however, that I just cannot seem to understand.  "Do you prefer tabs or spaces?"

I prefer spaces, always.  The reason is for dot alignment of code.  At a minimum, you would have to mix tabs and spaces to account for when you want to align to a character that is not at a tab stop.

Still, I cannot see the benefit of tabs.  You can press the tab key in Visual Studio and it will enter the appropriate number of spaces for you.  Same with Shift + Tab.

During the conversation around this, it seemed more important for a dev with different tabs to be able to see the code differently.  I do not see any value in this at all compared to dot alignment.  I would rather see my functions lining up than worry about the difference between 0.125" and 0.200" white space on the left.  I left the interview still wondering why they were so insistent about tabs.  I frankly see no benefit that would even out the fact you cannot dot align.  I am going to see what google has to say about it :)