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I could be wrong, but based on what you are saying here, I'm pretty sure you were being interviewed by a software engineer and not a recruiter.
I'm all for interview prep, but this sounds like a fairly standard tech company loop. I usually take a few days to brush up on algorithms and structures for the first one I do in a batch, and have some canned answers for the personal questions, but otherwise go in with what I know. Some of that's experience now, but I don't remember any point in my career where I'd have done something this extensive. I hope the poste…
I had this view when I was interviewing for internships during this quarter. I have spent working and interviewing at a couple of places, before I came to pursue my masters and I believed people valued coming up with the solution on the spot. I interviewed at atleast 10 places for internships and every single of them asked one of the questions from either leetcode or cracking the coding interview. I found none of the…
one question. i'm a total noob in my 3rd year CS undergrad. I've just started prep to crack companies like Amazon. Any pointers or tips to get started?
The best prep you can do for getting a job at Amazon is to read up on what it's like to be an employee of Amazon.
This is totally crazy to me. Why should somebody lose about a month of his life to prepare for the interview? Why should the interview need preparation at all? The whole point of the interview is lost if you read books and prepare for that since you are not tested for your real on-the-work skills but you are tested for your interview-answering skills, memorizing trick questions and solving toy problems! I think that…
For someone working full-time it would be grueling, but no more grueling than the workload in an after-work Master's degree program.
I view the interview prep ritual as a necessary evil. Some companies prefer to give a take-home coding assignment. Amazon, Facebook, and the rest use this method to optimize for their interviewers' time. I think that "interview crunchers" DO correlate to developers who can produce work. I emphasize that many fantastic developers who produce great work perform badly in interviews. patio11 and tptacek address this with their recruiting startup, Starfighter.
Your English was flawless.
This is totally crazy to me. Why should somebody lose about a month of his life to prepare for the interview? Why should the interview need preparation at all? The whole point of the interview is lost if you read books and prepare for that since you are not tested for your real on-the-work skills but you are tested for your interview-answering skills, memorizing trick questions and solving toy problems! I think that…
However, I've worked for a couple of companies that had this sort of interview process, and I've worked for a couple of companies that did not, and I found that the quality of engineers working for the former is substantially higher than the quality of engineers working for the latter. Correlation, of course, is not causation, and there are many other reasons this could be the case. It could be that the sort of companies that tend to attract good engineers happen to all have a cargo cult-like obsession to this interview pattern, and good engineers actively seek it out. Or it could be that the sort of person who does well on these types of questions tend to also do well at programming by chance. Perhaps you could get nearly as good results by just asking candidates to, I dunno, build the tallest structure out of straws that they can manage in fifteen minutes.
Whatever the reason that it works, in my experience it definitely seems to. I'd love to hear suggestions for an alternative solution, though. Good ideas I've heard in the past involve things like pair programming on a real assignment for a day, although it's sometimes difficult to scale that to the number of interviews these companies need to conduct.
If you feel a great sense of accomplishment from being hired at Amazon, that's fine. If you believe that you are a superior engineer on the basis that you were hired by Amazon (or Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.), you are making a very bad assumption. Some current engineers and alumni believe this fallacy because it supports their beliefs about themselves. It's a trap that stifles their growth. It's as if people ar…
They don't simply because superior engineers abound; it's what's making working at these places something that's not "stifl[ing] their growth".
Also, with the referrals we're continually asked to provide we are well aware how desperate the need is.
Startups and incubators like YC are also competing for the same talent. They are defining a new fit function to identify people who can find problems in their surroundings and want to solve them with the tools available to them. The startup founders are also writing blogs about how they got funded, my series A looks better than your series B etc. They are unable to leverage social engineering as much as these enterprise crowd. Many of the graduates still come out of universities and aim to get a job in a respectable company than I will do a startup mostly because the startup based social engineering is weak.
/end rant
This is totally crazy to me. Why should somebody lose about a month of his life to prepare for the interview? Why should the interview need preparation at all? The whole point of the interview is lost if you read books and prepare for that since you are not tested for your real on-the-work skills but you are tested for your interview-answering skills, memorizing trick questions and solving toy problems! I think that…
For your average application development shop using tools provided, you can do very well by just applying heuristic techniques towards your domain. If you want to get a real competitive advantage in technology, you need to be able to develop systems that are optimized to a point. Granted, in Jr. or normal dev roles you will not be making many of these decisions - often a more senior or prinicple engineer will be working on the mission critical stuff.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Contribute to a personal project, socialize, learn a new language or framework, read books, etc. Amazing how many things you can miss out on with a month of "code" prep. And yeah, this definitely reminds me of high school a bit too much.
I used to believe this. As a masters student who is going to graduate soon, I have to put in months of preparation for the interviews. Nobody believes in your ability to write code even after having close to 100+ commits to a popular open source project. People expect you to come to the correct solution after 5 minutes of them asking the question.
When I interviewed for Amazon for a Java position, they had a C guy give the interview. When he asked me to implement atoi() on Java, Integer.parseInt() was the not correct way to do things at Amazon. After that it was all sys admin questions about the version of Linux they use. Somehow I managed to pass to the next level. I told them no thanks.
I had the same problem with Microsoft (atoi), and the same issue with the interviewer (being a C guy)...the issue there was that he thought (stringInstance).length() was an O(n) op, so the fact I was calling it in my loop meant my algorithm was O(n^2). My explaining that, no, Java stores the length as part of the object...kinda tanked the interview.