April 24, 2004
Intervista
Well, that went surprisingly well. Only time will tell, but I think I may have convinced them that I do actually know stuff. More to the point, I almost convinced myself.
I went into the interview feeling like a complete fraud, a brainless dullard who'd never done anything worthwhile and had long since forgotten whatever pitiful scraps of irrelevant knowledge he may once have possessed. But it turns out that I'm not quite the ignoramus I feared. I can, in extremis, talk intelligently about games and networking and such. Whether or not that leads to [CEGX] offering me a job -- and whether or not I take it if they do -- just handling the interview was a bit of a confidence boost. Perhaps I should make a long term hobby of getting interviewed for jobs I don't want. (Not that this one falls into that category, necessarily -- although it's hard to say for sure since it's still not clear exactly what the job would be.)
I was warned there'd be some kind of testing involved, and it turned out to be a written test on C++. Not a bad one, all in all, involving some slightly murky backwaters of the language, but nothing domain-specific. For my own future reference more than anything else, here is my answer to the only real coding question:
void reverse ( char* str )
{
char* c = str;
/* don't try to de-ref NULL */
if ( ! str )
return;
/* locate the end of the string */
while ( *c )
++c;
/* leave the terminator in place */
--c;
/* walk the pointers together until they meet in the middle
swapping chars at each step
this is never entered for strings of length 0 or 1 */
while ( str < c )
{
char tmp = *c;
*c = *str;
*str = tmp;
++str;
--c;
}
}
Joel Spolsky's Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing indicates that this is a pretty textbook interview question, although the [CEGX] version somewhat undermines the test (at least in terms of what Joel looks for) by explicitly specifying that no additional buffers should be allocated, nor any calls made to strlen().
Oops, I seem to be pinning the geekometer. Moving swiftly on...
The interview lasted almost exactly as long as Kill Bill volume 2, which we went to later. My enjoyment was certainly reduced by the deafening sound levels in the Empire, probably set to combat the throbbing bass from the discotheque downstairs (still clearly audible in the quieter passages), but although I loved lots of things about the film it was ultimately a bit of a disappointment. Certainly not nearly as much fun as volume 1. I may have to see it again in quieter surroundings to reach a more considered judgement.
Glorious weather at the moment. Ian and I spent most of the afternoon lying on the grass in Green Park -- along with half of London. I love the summer -- which it isn't, yet, but today it was masquerading.
Not surprisingly, there was a fair bit of boy-talent on display. Dear me. In spring, a young man's fancy etc. In the words of This Life's Egg:
