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Three things not to ask in a coding interview
When you’re a candidate in a coding interview, asking questions is an important part of clarifying requirements. You want to feel confident that you understand what’s being asked of you. You want to give definition to the blurry edges of the prompt. So questions are good.
Some questions. Other questions are not great.
I’m going to give you three questions not to ask in a coding interview. In each one, I’ll try for some paragraphs to build an intuition for why it’s not great based on practicalities, but then at the end I’ll throw in what I hope is a deeper answer that’s grounded in principles as well as experience.
Also, I should caveat, you may have asked one of these questions before, and it went totally fine. Or you interview people all the time, and these questions seem totally fine to you. Absolutely. A lot of stuff is context-bound. As Captain Barbossa famously said, “The stuff you read in Medium articles be more like guidelines.” Let’s go.
“Should I worry about formatting?”
I mean, worry is a troubling word.
What this question means is, “Should I format my code cleanly, or since I’m pressed for time can I leave it sloppy?” Asking this question might be slightly worse than just writing sloppy code.
