I recently took the first one ever in my career (in my late fifties). People tell me they think I'm an excellent programmer, but I did awfully bad. Why?
- it was my first time
- in daily life I switch between many languages, devops, meetings, and research. It always takes me some time to ramp up, especially on syntax: coming from Elixir, switching to Javascript: how does JS access object members again? I usually need an hour or two to get up to speed again.
- the tasks are very much outside the normal realm. If in real life I need to map some multi-dimension array, I first look for libraries and such, and if not, approach this as writing a library function: take my time to do it well.
Even though I could rationally understand the reasoning, it still felt demeaning, given my resume. Also, because I underperformed, it's easy for them to jump to the wrong conclusions.
I recently took the first one ever in my career (in my late fifties). People tell me they think I'm an excellent programmer, but I did awfully bad. Why?
- it was my first time
- in daily life I switch between many languages, devops, meetings, and research. It always takes me some time to ramp up, especially on syntax: coming from Elixir, switching to Javascript: how does JS access object members again? I usually need an hour or two to get up to speed again.
- the tasks are very much outside the normal realm. If in real life I need to map some multi-dimension array, I first look for libraries and such, and if not, approach this as writing a library function: take my time to do it well.
Even though I could rationally understand the reasoning, it still felt demeaning, given my resume. Also, because I underperformed, it's easy for them to jump to the wrong conclusions.