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Despite having almost two decades of experience they asked me the kinds of questions that only someone who recently aced a CS theory class could answer. The kinds of things that do not matter at all to the job. I didn’t even bother. I just said I didn’t know the answer, and that them asking those kinds of questions made me not want to work there. I guess that counts as bombing, but I really could not have cared less.
I applied to a FAANG for a leadership IC position and the code challenge was the literal exact question I've asked maybe 100+ candidates. I completely forgot everything about it and had to solve from first principles.
I applied to a FAANG for a leadership IC position and the code challenge was the literal exact question I've asked maybe 100+ candidates. I completely forgot everything about it and had to solve from first principles.
was it a leadership or individual contributor position?
Despite having almost two decades of experience they asked me the kinds of questions that only someone who recently aced a CS theory class could answer. The kinds of things that do not matter at all to the job. I didn’t even bother. I just said I didn’t know the answer, and that them asking those kinds of questions made me not want to work there. I guess that counts as bombing, but I really could not have cared less.
Do you have an example or two?
I think being able to implement a queue using two stacks is kinda neat. But, nevertheless, it's not a good interview question.
Also failed at Amazon because they brought me for an interview and it started 9am and ended at 5pm. I was too tired and they kept trying to make simple question harder by adding constraints. I gave up because it wasn't worth it.
Do yourself a favor, if you don't like the interview and interviewer just leave in the middle of the interview. It's not worth the emotional and mental cost. Also there is a good chance you don't like the company and the company culture if the interview is not going accordingly.
Most recently, I was asked to implement os.path.normpath in plain python, getting it right, and then told I failed with no feedback. Later I realized the problem is in leetcode and I had answered everything right, so I'm still curious what I did wrong.
I don't understand why folks are asking leetcode questions straight off the website without even changing the test cases, or not providing a function signature, docstring, and some test cases.
Ultimately, I've learned you have to simply accept when an interviewer is an idiot and move on. Even if you've been blocked for moving forward on a role that you're perfect for. Now when I administer and interview I work extremely hard to allow the interviewee to demonstrate their positives.
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…
For the 'e' question: I mean, we learned functions to approximate e in high school. There's a summing series you can do to approximate it- were they expecting you to remember that off the top of your head (if so, you probably dodged a bullet). Otherwise, e*x is its own differential, so i wonder if you could write some terrible routine iterating from a random value to the right one by computing finite differences of various values.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s not bombing the interview in my book, that’s just being thrown in front of a bus. Seems like they have terrible hiring practices.
The whole process was pretty informal as I never actually applied (they reached out because of my code!) I’ll never know exactly what happened, but it I had to guess I think the CDO felt undermined by the “rogue” employees who sourced me as a candidate and pushed me through the process without his consultation…
I was sooo deep in specific wireless network protocols I had to take a step back and really try not to go too deep too fast. I got way too deep into the specifics of wireless networking and everything that can go wrong. They seemed disinterested, and that killed my confidence. I mumbled over my words quite a bit and struggled to keep at the right level of abstraction. I felt rather intimidated. I had a strong vibe this person interviewing me didn’t want to be there anyway and they weren’t helping me along.