CodeTinkerer

I've seen less specific questions or questions that say what the want, but not why they want it. In a way, asking "What language should I learn" is much better than "I want to learn C++, how should I do it". The second says they've made a decision, but they don't explain why. By asking them more questions, you can get a better answer.

Either question begs the question, why do you want to learn programming, and what's your background, and even how old are you?

A few observations

• Given that interviews are different from what you do on the job, how do you prepare? I know they can be quite different. I did one interview years ago where they were still doing brain teasers (Microsoft). One where it was kind of a cross between coding and algorithms, and each person could ask what they want (Google) although some questions were not so much coding but math problems or facts about C. Finally, one which was group questions (my current location) that later I learned asked the same questions of everyone. Oh yes, prior to that, I had an interview that had a written test as well as personality questions as well as brainteasers.
• What's the best way to handle the first few weeks as a new developer where you might not know things (e.g., git, and certainly the code base, and how the team functions)? Is it better to ask lots of questions, or will they distrust that, and then you are stuck. This is impostor syndrome. It seems there's a lack of uniformity where you'd like a good mentor, but not all companies are willing to do that because they want to keep everyone busy.
  

In this case, I'm assuming ambitious really means skillful. It's possible, I assume, for ambitious to be incompetent.

How do we observe things? We need light to impact the thing we're looking at and reflect into our eyes. So observed is more to do with how we intend to observe it, that is, the mechanism, more than it has to do with actual observation by a person.

We tend to think observation is a passive thing. If I see you, then nothing got "disturbed". But in actuality, light has to bounce off you and into my eyes.

In other words, whatever technique you use to "observe" and usually this means to determine some information will necessarily disturb what's being observed. A famous example is a two-slit experiment which creates a fringing pattern. This pattern can be understood using waves (interference).

If you slow down the light to like one photon per unit time, it still creates this pattern. If you attempt to add detectors to determine which of the two slits the photon went through, the fringe pattern disappears. It's the mechanism of detecting what happened, not the observer, that matters most.