A while back I had the opportunity to demonstrate my limited coding skills under interview conditions.
Part of that experience was a “pair programming” exercise in an online editor.
Pair Programming meaning that I was coding and my loving tech interviewers were cheering me on from the sidelines. Seriously, they were very supportive bless them.
I did not know the online editor and so did not know how to use:
- code assist
- code completion
- framework plugins
- whatever.
I loved it.
Until I hated it even more.
After the interview I had the opportunity to give feedback about the exercise.
I was so embarrassed with my coding mistakes that we briefly discussed what it is like coding without all the bells and whistles of an IDE.
I had never realised how much code an IDE can automatically write for me with the features like code assistance, code completion, plugins, etc. compared to how much code I write without the assistance.
During the exercise without these features I had experienced moments of “ground… you may now swallow me whole and without hesitation, no need to contact anyone. Yes, now is indeed a good time!”
In an act of guilt, shame and in support of self Continuous Improvement, the next day I started to code in a plain text editor.
Less than an hour later I was back in my IDE.
Sad story, but true.
“What about the interview?” , you may ask… “Did you get the job?”
to which I would reply:
I want to do more interviews. The interview was an educational experience in itself.
In the Java community there are 2 or 3 big IDEs, as far as I know
- Netbeans - I used it about 15 years ago. Not sure of its popularity now
- Eclipse - I used this until about 6 years ago
- IntelliJ - my preferred IDE now
Each is a fully featured, massive developer-eco-system.
Do you use an IDE?
Do you know how much code your IDE writes for you?