Does anyone know an application completely free of bugs?

Not quite what you’re asking, but at Code Mesh 2018 there was a fantastic talk on eradicating exploitable bugs using formal verification. It makes me think that while today our code will have bugs, perhaps in the future we’ll have sufficiently advanced programming languages to make them a rarity. Well worth a watch!

There’s not enough info and context to judge really.

Say they asked you to write some quick code on a white board, and there are a few bugs. I guess that’s ok, it’s just a draft.

Say they ask you to code something and you have no limit on time, or they allocate a lot of time, and you deliver the solution with bugs. That is a bit worrying, no? Sure bugs happen in production, but should be as rare as possible, and you deliver bugs on the first piece of code they ask you to produce.

Just applying common sense.

Yes I totally agree, but actually I am not completely sure they really found “bugs”.. RH told me that, but looking at the feedback it looks like it was an interpretation or communication issue. Maybe there are some bugs, maybe not.. the context was to read a task and then solve it according to my knowledge, but imagine you chose to use tuples instead of lists, chose decimal instead of floats, chose pagination instead of loading everything into memory.. then your recruiter tells you should load everything into memory, use floats, use lists.. etc Is this a BUG or you just made something in a different way? This is the problem.. I think recruiters should send the task, after you solving it, they should do a code review, then you fix everything they think are wrong and it will give them a complete “overview” on how you work in a normal development process. This is the regular way.. I don’t think a regular company asks something and the team solves everything from scratch without code review and 100% free of bugs.. this is a weird way to evaluate someone in my opinion.

Well, the worst part is that we don’t know whether you really wrote some bad bug-riddled code, or whether they evaluated your code poorly. I feel for you–I’m pretty sure that at least once I submitted a coding exercise that went WHOOSH right over the reviewer’s head

I just interviewed someone who I was certain was being “too clever” (did a look back instead of a lookahead, which the spec called for) but I couldn’t on the find the error my gut knew existed in their crazy convoluted python code.

To find the error I finally had to write a property test and test it against reference code I had written in elixir (offline, after the interview).

Maybe we can learn from that that any assumptions made must be first verified. First quickly validate the approach you take on the task with the reviewer, prior to coding.

Note that you mentioned clearly “bug” in your initial post, i.e. bugs in production and I do think there should not be bugs if you have enough time to solve the problem (otherwise what does it mean? that someone will need to review any code you produce in the company?) ; but now you rather talk about communication issues with the reviewer, and not bugs…

So that leaves me confused ; maybe the reviewer felt the same way.

I think every single piece of code deserves a “review” before going to production. But this is my opinion. I respect you think different. English is my second language. Maybe I had told something wrong. Sorry for that.

That certainly happens. Just to be clear though, in the case that I was referring to, my code was much simpler than what they had in mind, and much faster. Like I said, WHOOSH

God yes, no code should ever be put into production without being reviewed by another person! (Only exception being outages, after hours, when the code review might have to happen post-deployment.)

Yes. Totally agree.

Thank you, that is important to know. I also think that the review is then to make sure there are no bugs (there should be none, but it can happen rarely) going to production. For a junior you may expect to see a bug as soon as the FIRST piece of code submitted; but pretty sure the poster is not junior (with a quick look at his profile). While I now agree with you that there should be systematically reviews (and thank you for stressing that out), there should be no bugs found.