101–110 of 130 posts
I found myself interviewing with a hedge fund last year because they liked some of my open source stuff (and approach to API design)... I had about six conversations with a bunch of the team and a conversation with the CEO to sell me on the position. The last step was a seventh “conversation” with the Chief Data Officer to figure out if this was something I really wanted. The CDO had different ideas… he joined the Zo…
My son was only a few months old. I had made it to the final rounds the interview process at a FAANG. He hd kept me up the night before as he had a cold I tended to take care of him in the night so my partner could sleep. Next day I was asked all kinds of fun, esoteric questions about the C specification. That’s was hard. I was frazzled. The final question I was asked to implement knn. Which I did brute force. And th…
All of the people who admit their process is flawed A) don't change the process and B) don't hire people who point it out
I found myself interviewing with a hedge fund last year because they liked some of my open source stuff (and approach to API design)... I had about six conversations with a bunch of the team and a conversation with the CEO to sell me on the position. The last step was a seventh “conversation” with the Chief Data Officer to figure out if this was something I really wanted. The CDO had different ideas… he joined the Zo…
presumably regarding the string reversing: they probably wanted a reverse in place (then making sure you handle the even/odd edge condition). however, Python strings are immutable, so you'd have to use a bytearray, but if you have a huge string, converting it to a bytearray, reversing the array, and converting back to a string would likely take longer than having python's string reverse function allocate a new string…
Unfortunately, this problem has an easy and ultra-straightforward solution using deques with O(N) space complexity, and an another slightly tricky solution with O(1) complexity. I had spent some time the other day cracking this O(1) solution. I decided that I would take the risk of reproducing the tricky solution and wow the interviewers.
Naturally, I didn't. I got confused and had to start from scratch several times. And the interviewer kept hinting that I could use a data structure to make this simple, but stubborn me thought I was just minutes from a working perfect solution.
I deeply internalized the saying "Perfect is the enemy of good" after I was marched out of the building after only two interviews instead of the usual 4. I've had my fair share of interview bombs but I consider this the worst because I was lucky enough to have faced a problem I had solved recently, and for which the interviewer was willing to accept the easier solution, and yet I managed to nuke it to oblivion.
10+ years ago I've been applying for junior ruby dev roles while still at university. At one company they gave me a pen and a piece of paper, told me to sort an array and gave me a couple of minutes to write my answer. I assumed I'm at command line, so I generated a rails scaffold (model, controller, view, db migrations), created and migrated the database, opened a database prompt and wrote a SQL "select ... order by…
I found myself interviewing with a hedge fund last year because they liked some of my open source stuff (and approach to API design)... I had about six conversations with a bunch of the team and a conversation with the CEO to sell me on the position. The last step was a seventh “conversation” with the Chief Data Officer to figure out if this was something I really wanted. The CDO had different ideas… he joined the Zo…
presumably regarding the string reversing: they probably wanted a reverse in place (then making sure you handle the even/odd edge condition). however, Python strings are immutable, so you'd have to use a bytearray, but if you have a huge string, converting it to a bytearray, reversing the array, and converting back to a string would likely take longer than having python's string reverse function allocate a new string…
They were just expecting exp(x) = \sum_{i=0}^{\inf} \frac{x^i}{i!}.
Depending on the role it might be useless trivia, but it's not exactly an impossibly high bar tbh.
Cool; let’s talk by phone, I replied.
The phone interview was insane. I asked the woman what about my work history made her suspect that I’d be a good PM and she was not able to respond. I asked her what product she anticipated that if work on and she said we would figure that out after I started, as if that was the most natural thing in the world. And I asked her how they handled remote employees, to which she replied that the person who took the role would be moving to Mountain View.
“So,” I said, “you do not know why you are hiring me, and you do not know what I would be hired for, but no matter what it is, the job is in Silicon Valley?
She said yes, already sensing where this was going. I asked her if she could make sure Google never contacted me again for any reason and she agreed that was probably for the best.
I did not get the job.
Interviewed onsite at a company where I was asked some leetcode-medium binary tree problem. This was a well-known company with easily available lists of frequently asked interview questions you can find online. Luckily, I had solved this exact problem a few days back. Unfortunately, this problem has an easy and ultra-straightforward solution using deques with O(N) space complexity, and an another slightly tricky solu…
Circa 2010 I got an email out of the blue from a Google recruiter. “We looked at your LinkedIn and you’re a good candidate for a ‘product manager’ role.” Cool; let’s talk by phone, I replied. The phone interview was insane. I asked the woman what about my work history made her suspect that I’d be a good PM and she was not able to respond. I asked her what product she anticipated that if work on and she said we would…
Cue that well-known [1] joke about an engineer and a manager/MBA and a hot air balloon.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25855303
I'm not against any of those roles, and have been in 2 out of 3 of them (not the MBA), just don't like stupidity (though have done a lot of that too :)