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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?

#81

Post by digianarchist »

koala_man wrote: post #28

>there's also extreme examples like the inventor of homebrew that got rejected by google because he couldn't reverse a binary tree. HN has rehashed this debate plenty, but I don't think you should necessarily see this as an example of a dramatic failure of the Google SWE interview process. Homebrew became a success due to great vision and execution, not because it solved a challenging technical problem. Howell seems…

Max would probably fail most companies interviews based on culture fit.

He joined Apple after that and was interviewed on the Changelog not long after he left.

Honestly he sounds like a really difficult dude to work with.

Re: Ask HN: How to not fail on coding interview questions?

#82

Post by jaredklewis »

daly wrote: post #76

BALL-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…

> 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.

This is the typical HN vs the world attitude. "Boycott the world!" I understand the sentiment and I certainly have heard and experienced a good deal of interview horror stories.

But as career advice, I think your anger is getting in the way of your reasoning. "Turn down Google and Facebook because they don't respect you enough!" is most likely terrible career advice for the OP. The big tech companies pay world class salaries and (despite your experience) do not have a reputation for being terrible places to work. Indeed, big tech companies (the same ones with Kafkaesque and soulless interview practices) regularly make lists of the top 10 best places to work in the US.

My own experience is that every company I have ever worked at had varying level of bullshit, but that there has not so far been any correlation with the interview technique used.

Re: Ask HN: How to not fail on coding interview questions?

#83

Post by digianarchist »

lsaac wrote: post #61

In the same boat as you here. As everyone here says, you have to practice. Then, when you're finally fairly good at coding challenge questions, you'll discover that you also have to be good at system design questions which is a different beast altogether. And then you'll learn that instead/addition to the above, company X actually wants you to complete a take-home exercise, and company Y won't consider you because th…

I had two take homes this week.

The first suggested not to spend longer than two hours and had very precise requirements. I passed this.

Second had four questions - first two were clear and the last two were vague hinting that I should spend 5+ hours implementing a authorization system in rails. They got high level answers for those two. We’ll wait and see.

Re: Ask HN: How to not fail on coding interview questions?

#84

Post by tzs »

Several people have mentioned practicing on LeetCode problems. I've been doing LeetCode problems recently as exercises to refresh skills in languages I use infrequently but don't want to forget too much of.

Here's a tip that they either don't tell you, or that I managed to overlook. You are allowed to mutate inputs.

I had assumed that inputs were read-only, and spent about three months trying to solve "Given an array of N integers, find the smallest positive integer that is not in the array, in O(N) time and O(1) space". (It wasn't three months of constantly working on it...it was more for three months it was one of my "something to think about while falling asleep in bed or while sitting at a red light" problems).

I then came across a site that talked about the problem and mentioned doing it in O(1) space involved overwriting the input. It was only a couple minutes to solve after that.

Possibly interesting variant of that problem: Can you still solve it in O(N) time and O(1) space if when your code returns the answer the input must be unchanged? You can still mutate the input while your code is running, but you have to undo any changes you make before returning.

I'm pretty sure that the answer to this is "no" in the general case, but if you are allowed to limit the size of the input so that N is not a significant fraction of MAXINT on your machine you can do it.

Re: Ask HN: How to not fail on coding interview questions?

#85

Post by freyir »

mirajshah wrote: post #59
Felz wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Howell seems like a great guy who would probably make a great senior developer, founder or PM at any company that aims to solve customer needs. Google's focus, however, is on hiring SWEs that can solve uniquely complex and difficult technical problems. Huh? Isn't all difficulty in software complexity management? Isn't writing a package manager a sufficient demonstration of that? What's a "difficult technical proble…

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).

Yet it seems like a big complaint among (ex-)Googlers is that they were underutilized and spent their time working on trivial tasks.

Re: Ask HN: How to not fail on coding interview questions?

#86

Post by gaahrdner »

randop wrote: post #75

You 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.

I like what you're saying, but there is quite a bit of comfort and safety that comes with a $100,000+ job compared to starting up your own business. While many of us are ok with that risk, others may very well have responsibilities that dictate taking the "sure thing."[0]

0. https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/

Re: Ask HN: How to not fail on coding interview questions?

#87

Post by jeffrallen »

tzs wrote: post #84

Several people have mentioned practicing on LeetCode problems. I've been doing LeetCode problems recently as exercises to refresh skills in languages I use infrequently but don't want to forget too much of. Here's a tip that they either don't tell you, or that I managed to overlook. You are allowed to mutate inputs. I had assumed that inputs were read-only, and spent about three months trying to solve "Given an array…

Generalization: Do not follow the rules that you think are there, only follow the rules that are really there. Challenge your own assumptions.

Re: Ask HN: How to not fail on coding interview questions?

#88

Post by crististm »

samueldavid wrote: post #79
crististm wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 re…

Apparently you place no value in an evaluation done within a broken process - and rightfully so.

I have to ask: how do you tell a good process from a bad one?

Re: Ask HN: How to not fail on coding interview questions?

#89

Post by smnscu »

smnscu wrote: post #9

I really enjoyed practicing on Pramp [1]. I ran through their whole batch of problems (roughly 40) so I can't schedule more interviews, but it helped me a lot to work on the soft skills required for FAMG type interviews. Unfortunately I still didn't pass the Google interview (had on-sites in Zurich) even though I was very well prepared. I also maintain (sort of lol) a list of interview preparation resources [2], alth…

At least 2 downvotes on this comment. I'm done with this site.

Re: Ask HN: How to not fail on coding interview questions?

#90

Post by borplk »

daly wrote: post #76

BALL-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…

I agree with pretty much everything you say but the reality for the majority of people is they can't afford to "just walk away" when those things are so widespread.

It was in another recent thread someone was insisting you should "just walk away" if the company doesn't have private offices.

It's not practical for most people.

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