You just need practice. First, mount a whiteboard on your wall at home. Practice answering common coding questions. Learn to use the space without crowding.
Next, get a friend to interview you, with you writing on your whiteboard. That will up the stress level.
And wearing a suit? At Yahoo, I don't think I've ever seen a candidate in a suit. Are you in some repressive east-coast hellhole? Just wear a T-shirt that's free of conspicuous holes or odors.
Anyway, practice builds confidence. When I smell the solvent of dry-erase markers, I'm ready to rock.
I understand that it sucks to be asked about trivia which could be looked up in a few minutes. On the other hand, sometimes these questions differentiate people who've actually done something real with the language.
For example, when interviewing or screening a Java or Perl programmer, I might ask how to sort an array or vector by a specific criterion. If you've done any serious programming in one of those languages, you know roughly how this is done. Getting the syntax wrong doesn't matter much. Showing complete unfamiliarity with the concept is fatal.
Is this reference manual trivia? I don't think so. You need to know roughly what tools are available in your preferred language.
I think Yahoo! Local has the most accurate local listings. We didn't get there easily -
we pay a lot of money to acquire data from partners;
we focus a lot of development resources on improving data quality (and this is a non-trivial problem, spanning years of development)
we use human editors where appropriate
Google, in contrast, seems to just scrape the web (including Yahoo!) and attempt to parse the results. Like the magic 8-ball, the result is sometimes very accurate and sometimes... a bit misleading.
There are no shortcuts here; there is no clever algorithm that will yield an accurate Local database in the face of innacurate primary sources and willful abusers.
I think this purported $10 offer reflects Google's dawning realization of that fact. I'll let others comment on the attractiveness and credibility of the offer.
Slashdot Mirror
You just need practice. First, mount a whiteboard on your wall at home. Practice answering common coding questions. Learn to use the space without crowding.
Next, get a friend to interview you, with you writing on your whiteboard. That will up the stress level.
And wearing a suit? At Yahoo, I don't think I've ever seen a candidate in a suit. Are you in some repressive east-coast hellhole? Just wear a T-shirt that's free of conspicuous holes or odors.
Anyway, practice builds confidence. When I smell the solvent of dry-erase markers, I'm ready to rock.
I understand that it sucks to be asked about trivia which could be looked up in a few minutes. On the other hand, sometimes these questions differentiate people who've actually done something real with the language.
For example, when interviewing or screening a Java or Perl programmer, I might ask how to sort an array or vector by a specific criterion. If you've done any serious programming in one of those languages, you know roughly how this is done. Getting the syntax wrong doesn't matter much. Showing complete unfamiliarity with the concept is fatal.
Is this reference manual trivia? I don't think so. You need to know roughly what tools are available in your preferred language.
- we pay a lot of money to acquire data from partners;
- we focus a lot of development resources on improving data quality (and this is a non-trivial problem, spanning years of development)
- we use human editors where appropriate
Google, in contrast, seems to just scrape the web (including Yahoo!) and attempt to parse the results. Like the magic 8-ball, the result is sometimes very accurate and sometimesThere are no shortcuts here; there is no clever algorithm that will yield an accurate Local database in the face of innacurate primary sources and willful abusers.
I think this purported $10 offer reflects Google's dawning realization of that fact. I'll let others comment on the attractiveness and credibility of the offer.
Yahoo's Mission College campus in Santa Clara, CA has a Dot's Cafe