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"It's not enough to be a mediocre engineer for a mediocre paying job. If you want to play in the local tennis league, you better be Roger Federer (without his pay)"
I think software engineers should counter-question the interviewers. Interviewers should be allowed to judge the candidate only if they can answer the candidate's questions to them. If the interviewer cannot, he/she is not qualified for the job of interviewing.
I hate to sound alarmist but, I fear many younger tech people may not realize how lucky they are currently. If the economy turns south you are not going to get 38 job interviews unless you seriously have some needed skills.
Don't be like this guy and accept you are bad at interviews thinking there is plenty of opportunity. Don't blame the white board if every job in your field expects you to be able to white board. If you plan to survive during the next downturn or bubble burst you better be someone companies really want to hire. You may be lucky to land one job interview and it will be hard to stay motivated as months start to go by.
Hint: almost always start with putting the input into a tree, and if tree is completely out of question - into hashmap :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep! I have been interviewing for fun for the last few years (averaging maybe one or two interviews every few months), and I've seen all kinds of stuff. Way too many whiteboards. In fact, even after all these years, whiteboards still make me nervous, and basically makes it impossible to get into flow, or have a reasonably nice mindset for solving problems. And if I do this for fun, you can bet that people who depend…
While I appreciate that this process has been great for you, I would think that it probably sucks for all the engineers and managers whose time you took up interviewing "for fun". Have you ever tried to hire engineers? It is a pain in the ass, and giving serious consideration to every candidate takes up a huge amount of time even before the interview, much less taking a significant chunk of a day for a significant ch…
I don't want to spook my current employer due to long term job prospects being poor.
Nearly every silicon valley interview is based on whether or not you are as hipster as the interviewer. Keep your head up and don't subscribe to the culture. You can be excellent and live as different as you want.
Full disclosure, I work for HackerRank, but I really wanted to comment for two reasons: (1) Reading this article and seeing the comments, really helps me see how my daily work helps level the playing field and as Alibek says, change people's lives. Very fulfilling and thankful for that. (2) Re: exabrial's comment above, where do you think culture fit should be evaluated in the process? Lots of interview processes tod…
One very important thing strikes me about this. Getting 38 job interviews is very much a sign of the times. In 2002 I was a highly skilled senior linux/aix/hp-ux/Solaris admin and PHP programmer and I got laid off. I submitted my resume more than 1000+ times in the first year and ZERO interviews. I hate to sound alarmist but, I fear many younger tech people may not realize how lucky they are currently. If the economy…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If your interviewer really dings you for the appearance of your scrawled code on the wall, they're being self-defeatingly stupid and you'd probably be happier working with other people. I do lots of tech interviews, and I always make it clear that I don't care how pretty the ink looks. I stick with the whiteboard because it's the best way for candidates to explain their analyses and algorithms before they write the c…
My Google interview in 2008, one guy asked me to write a binary tree structure and implementations of depth and breadth-first search (maybe also balanced insert?) on the whiteboard in C, which I blew through in no time. He then immediately said it was wrong and let me wither for a few minutes trying to figure out what the problem was before pointing out I forgot a semicolon.
I guess calmly evaluating my conclusions and approaching the problem with a third algorithm (I had already devised two and compared the answers) and then calmly asserting that my answer was in fact correct was the right move.
Luckily in my current job search I've only been told there would be a whiteboard once (this Friday!). This article made me nervous though—as a busy student I don't have time to sit down and review/learn all those tree and linked list operations as well as their complexities. Best interview I've had was pair programming with a team member and fixing a bug.
That's an excellent approach. It's quick enough to get meaningful results, it's interactive, and it's not artificial in the wtf-coding-without-an-ide way that whiteboard coding is like.
* Tests your knowledge of the language/framework
* Tests your problem solving and bug fixing abilities and workflow
* Tests your debugging skills
* Tests your ability to work with other people
Not all of these are crucial (except the last one), but this format tests what is most relevant.
That interview, I was asked to do something using recursion. (Ug.) The next interviewer asked me to reverse a singularly linked list, and because my brain was still in recursion land, I tried to do it recursively. Blame the jet lag, okay? Immediately after I sucked at that, they walked me out the door. It was emberasing. Two steps out the door, and my brain is filled with POP AND PUSH! AAAH! I knew the answer, I've KNOWN the answer since I was about 14. No joke. So, I've been on that side of the "every now and then people interview poorly" thing. And I can only blame the jet lag, because I KNOW the ridiculously easy answer to that question.
Here's the funny thing - if I would have been offered a job there, I would have accepted. And the company went on to crash and burn in terrible fashion. And two months later, I got a job at a MUCH better company.
TL;DR: I've only failed at one interview, and it was arguably the best thing that ever happened to me. (Life is weird!)
Some really great advice within that forms a foundation for the narrative. I can really appreciate the diligence and apparent 'no hard feelings' kind of pragmatism. I especially liked the closing part: > If you fail 10 interviews in a row, go for the 11th interview. But take a look at all the variables, and see if there’s anything you can do differently to improve. Take the pressure off, and work through problems rou…
So I sent an email to everyone in my coworking space that I'd put a six pack in the community fridge for every person who did a mock whiteboard interview with me. Some of them came with their own problems, some of them picked problems from websites or the books that I hadn't done yet. Some of them were doing it as a favor, and some of them wanted to practice interviewing people. I got five mock interviews over a week, many of them with strangers. Best 40 bucks I ever spent. (I nailed the next real interview I had and got a job offer.)