One thing people often don't realise about interviews at Google and other companies with similar interview standards. You can't casually apply for those. You have to prepare a lot. At least for a month (probably much more) before the interview you have to practice coding questions on Leetcode or similar resources.
Ask HN: How to not fail on coding interview questions?
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Re: Ask HN: How to not fail on coding interview questions?
#72Does anybody know what the interviews at the FANGs are like for non-SWE roles? What are the interview questions for a front end developer? Do they still make you reverse binary trees?
Frontend Developers at Google (and probably the other letters in FAANG) are SWEs.
Re: Ask HN: How to not fail on coding interview questions?
#73Right, so most of the problems in coding interviews that I've done are closer to CS111 trivia or ACM contest prep than an interview of your real-world abilities. Therefore, the best way to practice for that problem set is to practice doing problems like that problem set. There are plenty of resources online to help prepare for that.
That said, a surprising number of problems in life tend to reduce or closely resemble a fundamental data structure or computer science problem. (A lot of problems tend to approximate to graphs.) Additionally, even though most languages have support for fundamental data structures or algorithms in their standard libraries, knowing the performance implication of a double-for loop or understanding when to use a binary search tree compared to a B-Tree or RB Tree can make huge performance differences that real users care about.
This is where the value of the coding trivia interview sort-of comes in. It is the clearest indicator of ones skills in CS primitives you can have, and it does a good job in setting a quality bar within an engineering organization (at least everyone knows how to do these).
I personally think that more comprehensive and system-level interview questions are more valuable in assessing the technical abilities of a candidate in toto. In asking something like "How would you design an app like Instagram," you get a clearer sense of how the candidate thinks, how they approach problems, how much of their CS fundamentals they've retained, and, to some degree, what they're like to work with. It also allows more flexibility than the trivia-style interview. If you want to assess coding ability, you can ask them to write their idea of a feed algorithm. Conversely, if you want to assess their abilities as a lead, you can ask them about maintaining the system and finding the right team to build an app like this.
Re: Ask HN: How to not fail on coding interview questions?
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
A difficult technical problem, for example, is Google search. It's not just managing the completely of PageRank, it involves creating fundamentally new algorithms to deliver better search results. Another way to think about it is that Google wants SWEs who can also act like researchers (e.g. PhD students).
And yet, the bulk of phd students don't reverse binary trees.
The binary tree is one of the core data structures used in search. To apply at google and not be able to perform the basic search algorithms on that data structure is a huge red flag. Binary tree is to search what an array is to the programming language, would you hire a programmer that could not use array indexes?
Re: Ask HN: How to not fail on coding interview questions?
#75You are not alone on this one. I myself have also been through this experience.
Have you considered a different option ? How about building your own start-up to serve real business needs? Or working on open source projects. There are a lot of opportunities to look forward into.
Why keep banging your head multiple times on something, when you can use that energy on other meaningful ways.
Re: Ask HN: How to not fail on coding interview questions?
#76BALL-PITS and CLOWN NOSES
I worked with a guy, Bob, in our college computer room. Bob had returned to get his BS after many years in industry. He had great stories. He also had great advice. He taught me that you can learn a lot about how a company will treat their employees by paying attention to the way they treat you during the interview. He suggested several sign that indicated it was best to just "walk away".
If you go into a restaurant for a professional lunch meeting and they have a ball-pit / swing set /etc. it might not be the most professional place to hold the meeting. Just walk away.
If you go to a 5 star restaurant and they want you to wear a clown nose (Everybody Does It!) Just walk away.
The big scam is "We hire the best and the brightest". "We mandate a whiteboard test (Everybody Does It)". It is my opinion (based on experience) that companies that insist on a whiteboard test, despite years of programming on your resume and open source code, are either Ball-Pit companies (who don't know what it means to be a professional) or Clown-Nose companies (who know what it means to be a professional but still treat you like a commodity). Just walk away.
I understand why Google does it. I've even interviewed there. They get thousands of resumes (which they never read, at least nobody did at my interviews). They have to weed out the "learn coding in 6 weeks" crowd. But you're a professional. You should expect to be treated like one. You don't ask your surgeon to cut up hams in an interview. You don't ask your builder to nail two boards together. Professional accountants are not interviewd by bank tellers and ask to count change.
Google, like Microsoft before it (remember the "why are manholes round? quizes?"), have combined the marketing claim "We hire the best and brightest" with the ball-pit mentality of whiteboarding. Google HR (sorry, People Resource?) SHOULD be embarrassed but apparently they, and upper management, LIKE ball-pits.
A real professional interview involves a discussion about what the company does, what it current problems are (aka why are they hiring), and a discussion of if you, as a professional, have the skills to solve the problem. What do they need? How can you contribute?
We, as professionals, should consider whiteboarding as an insult.
Just walk away.
Re: Ask HN: How to not fail on coding interview questions?
#77Consider freelancing or going into business for yourself.
Re: Ask HN: How to not fail on coding interview questions?
#78BALL-PITS and CLOWN NOSES I worked with a guy, Bob, in our college computer room. Bob had returned to get his BS after many years in industry. He had great stories. He also had great advice. He taught me that you can learn a lot about how a company will treat their employees by paying attention to the way they treat you during the interview. He suggested several sign that indicated it was best to just "walk away". If…
> The big scam is "We hire the best and the brightest".
And adding noise to the hiring process increases the effect of "we are the best".
If you flipped a coin, it would be more honest and less expensive than putting people through a "difficult" whiteboard test. But you wouldn't get the "we only hire geniuses" effect.
As these "difficult" tests are usually based on a corner of the CS field that the interviewer enjoys, it is essentially random, while appearing to be totally meritocratic.
You end up with a process that filters out 90% of qualified candidates, but nobody that was hired by that process wants to change it.
Re: Ask HN: How to not fail on coding interview questions?
#79you don't want to blame the process, yet you admit it brings you down every time you fail and makes you doubt of the already proven ability you have as an engineer, and the process is ok?
Your answer is not helpful on several levels and you might even know it.
he is just hurting himself by trying so hard on a already broken system, encouraging him to keep going at it like most of the user on this thread( Keep drilling! keep drilling!) will just make him more sad and doubt even more of his own skills which are already proven on his company to be good enough, if anything people should encourage him to try places that don't use such broken methods and go for companies that really value his skills and dont take such broken process seriously.
Re: Ask HN: How to not fail on coding interview questions?
#80I can understand your situation because I was in your shoes once. I joined a place as an intern and stayed there for 6 years. Once I tried getting another offer, I realized I was a bad SWE by other company's standard. And I failed interviews after interviews. Around 25 interviews but finally nailed one which led me to path which turned my life around.
So, how did I get the last interview? Once I realized that I wasn't doing great, I started writing down all the interviews questions. The aim was to understand what was I doing wrong. But in doing so, I started to see a pattern, most interviews tend to follow a singular script. For example transverse a heat map, merge sorted array etc. And I trained on all those questions. Now this wasn't a perfect solution because I still failed 10+ interviews but over time I got better. And then around the 25th one I finally nailed one as all the questions were repeated.
Nowadays there might be a better options to do this like books/sites which throw tons of whiteboard interviews at you. So try those and best of luck.