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Ask HN: What were interviews like before Leetcode?
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Re: Ask HN: What were interviews like before Leetcode?
#12There were riddles and brain teasers. Eventually people realized that people who were good at those weren’t necessarily good at the job. Eventually people will realize the same about leetcode.
this is what i heard places like google asked.questions like how many marbles could fill an airplane. idk if it was just like urban legends though.
Re: Ask HN: What were interviews like before Leetcode?
#13Among the previous techniques were questions like how many apples would fit inside Mt. Fuji. It was an invitation to do some talk aloud problem solving on some unknown answer with the purpose of gaining insight into the candidates cognitive processes. It turned out it was also a heuristic for readership for some science magazines. I was totally surprised by them early in my career and again floored when I learned that some families would discussed such problems in the car. Didn't map to the job so it wasn't a good proxy for fitness.
Re: Ask HN: What were interviews like before Leetcode?
#14Companies that liked to do stupid "gotcha" questions still did those, they just expected you to regurgitate the answer onto a whiteboard or (occasionally) into an IDE on a provided laptop instead of a website.
All the other companies did the same as the non-leetcode companies do today. IQ test type things ("next shape in the sequence"), Fermi problems ("how many piano tuners"), behavior questions ("tell me about a time when..."), code review ("look at this [bugged] code, what improvements would you suggest"), systems analysis ("explain the sequence of events that happen when..."), systems design ("draw an architecture diagram of a project you recently worked on and explain it") etc.
Re: Ask HN: What were interviews like before Leetcode?
#15We had algorithm questions, but they weren't absurd. Whereas you'll routinely run into leetcode "hard" questions in interviews now -- which should be a dead giveaway that the candidate has memorized the answer -- back then you'd maybe get one question that peaked out at about medium. That's about the practical limit for a competent (but exceptional) mortal who hasn't simply memorized a book of trivia. (And yes, we di…
ive gotten fizzbuzz or some variation that's a play on the companies name a few times. i usually interview for like sre/devops type jobs though.
Re: Ask HN: What were interviews like before Leetcode?
#16In the 90’s when I was at Microsoft it was common for people to ask brain teasers and algorithm questions and expect people to be able to reason through the problems even if they walked in not knowing the particular algorithm or data structures involved. The interview was graded more on your thought process and ability to make forward progress with hints and less on getting to a correct answer in 25 minutes.
People were super harsh about attention to detail, e.g. you had to write code that would compile on the whiteboard and you would get penalized to some degree for making mistakes, especially if there were enough to make it clear that you hadn’t really been using the language you claimed to be proficient in.
Re: Ask HN: What were interviews like before Leetcode?
#17We had algorithm questions, but they weren't absurd. Whereas you'll routinely run into leetcode "hard" questions in interviews now -- which should be a dead giveaway that the candidate has memorized the answer -- back then you'd maybe get one question that peaked out at about medium. That's about the practical limit for a competent (but exceptional) mortal who hasn't simply memorized a book of trivia. (And yes, we di…
> Whereas you'll routinely run into leetcode "hard" questions in interviews now
Where are you seeing LC hard questions? I’m in a fairly big Slack where people have been comparing notes on interviews for years. The number of people who actually get LC hard problems is extremely small.
A lot of people will claim they got LC hards immediately after an interview when they couldn’t solve them, but when you ask them to describe the question and someone looks it up, it’s always a medium.
There were also sites where people could report recent LC problems they received from specific companies. Hard questions rarely made the list of commonly asked questions.
The only exception seems to be people interviewing at certain companies in India for some reason.
Re: Ask HN: What were interviews like before Leetcode?
#18In the 90’s when I was at Microsoft it was common for people to ask brain teasers and algorithm questions and expect people to be able to reason through the problems even if they walked in not knowing the particular algorithm or data structures involved. The interview was graded more on your thought process and ability to make forward progress with hints and less on getting to a correct answer in 25 minutes. People w…
Here’s an idea. What about using a computer, causes that’s what you are going to be doing.
I’m just bitching about having to code a binary search using a white board at Google when I had previously written a search engine and indexed two country’s by a man who wears a cowboy hat to work. (To be fair it was a nice hat)
I didn’t get the job, they claimed not good enough at coding, wtf! Well f*k them then.
Re: Ask HN: What were interviews like before Leetcode?
#19My first job, I had an hour or so to learn vi, and show what I'd learned, then write a basic program (not much more than hello world) in C, of course using vi.
Second job similar actually, only this time it was their awful proprietary word processor (a Wang clone I think) and it's macros ans PL.
Then for a big-name computer company, a full day of IQ tests, personality tests, 3-4 interviews, whiteboard pseudo-code, team meets, etc - but all candidates processed in a single day and an answer a few days later (I got the job) - not the same as today where it's spread over weeks or months and you might be ghosted at any stage.
Re: Ask HN: What were interviews like before Leetcode?
#20[flagged]
>Americans
>They cannot build anything
What are you basing this on?