software-engineering

Photo by Markus Winkler on UnsplashThere are two ways to approach software development: Top-down, and bottom-up. This is mostly me taking poetic license over academic terms that mean something else, but coding interviews today have a very “bottom-up” approach to assessing software competence. They assign coding tests, likely piggy-backing off of containerization technology like Docker, and they ask interviewees to build their own self-contained programs that run only on the code they can whip up in a few minutes. They do not have to spend time setting up their environments. They do not have to customize their configuration files, or download dependencies that are necessary for other dependencies. They just code, and tests are run automatically. In some cases candidates only get a plain tex...