191–200 of 238 posts
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I just googled Paxos and I still can't implement it. =(
Try raft. It's the easy version that works most of the time.
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It's asymmetrical though. A reviewer can yea-or-nay my 1-hour assignment in a minute or two. If I'm desperate for work, sure I'll do it. But my position is in high enough demand that I can choose another position that doesn't require me to do homework. If they made some attempt to get to know me, talk to me, and then give me homework, I might bite. But I'm not going to do hours worth of work just for the chance to ge…
Why would you apply for a job that you don't want? And if you want it, why wouldn't you put at least some effort into getting it? Effort does not only include writing a cover letter that will be appealing for the company you apply to instead of just forwarding HR your resume. It also includes small activities like these. You sound more like a spoiled brat, pardon my French, than an artist looking for new opportunitie…
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If you have one candidate who has seen all of this stuff before and can use it directly from memory, and another candidate who has been busy raising kids and has never seen this stuff before, who do you want to hire, all else being equal? The one who's raised kids† obviously. As that's approximately 3-4 orders of magnitude more difficult -- and indicative of not only of general character (by itself hugely important),…
Whiteboard programming isn't very relevant to day-to-day programming. Raising kids is doubtlessly even less relevant.
That's a bit dismissive. From personal experience, if one isn't a complete failure, raising kids to a satisfactory degree would exercise one's managerial and time management muscles, not to mention their ability to work under pressure/sleep deprivation. Parents of infants
I have found three different categories for tech-related interviews: 1. Algorithm and data structures trivia: which includes the classic CtCI [1], 2. In-house problems: where you have to analyze and propose multiple solutions to a problem that has been faced by the current development team in the company that is executing the interview, 3. Homework-like projects: which usually take 3-7 days to finish. After an exhaus…
One of the solutions my team has come across for this (also mentioned in previous HN threads) is to pay the interviewee for a day's work or give them an Amazon gift card for an equivalent amount. And we aren't looking for a perfectly crafted solution. We're just trying to get a handle on their general coding style, maintainability, coherence from variable naming and/or comments, DRY, whether they bother with edge cases in their solution, robustness/anticipate other types of errors or bugs that may pop up, etc.
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If you have one candidate who has seen all of this stuff before and can use it directly from memory, and another candidate who has been busy raising kids and has never seen this stuff before, who do you want to hire, all else being equal? The one who's raised kids† obviously. As that's approximately 3-4 orders of magnitude more difficult -- and indicative of not only of general character (by itself hugely important),…
Raising kids is a metric of nothing other than having had sex. Every parent I know is a "great mom or dad" simply because you're not allowed to say people aren't great parents unless they are truly bad.
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How do you know the answer you find is a good one? Say you think you need a binary tree, so you can get Log(n) lookup, you look it up, implement it, it works, great. Not bad. Then a lady comes along who actually understands the problem domain, and knows that cache locality will be a big win in this case, and she uses a sorted array with a binary search. Latency is cut in half and the company makes a brazillon dollars…
Nobody ever needs to code binary trees, outside of interviews and a few library developers.
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If you have one candidate who has seen all of this stuff before and can use it directly from memory, and another candidate who has been busy raising kids and has never seen this stuff before, who do you want to hire, all else being equal? The one who's raised kids† obviously. As that's approximately 3-4 orders of magnitude more difficult -- and indicative of not only of general character (by itself hugely important),…
Whiteboard programming isn't very relevant to day-to-day programming. Raising kids is doubtlessly even less relevant.
Right. But if done successfully (or even just satisfactorily -- given how difficult of a job it truly is), at least has some correlation with character, and general cognitive fortitude.
And hence -- unlike the ability to withstand repeating whiteboarding sessions -- has at least some correlation with actual fitness vis-a-vis the role being applied for.
Since this issue comes up so often in HN a reader might think that there's a strong consensus in the tech community about the demerits of the current system. However, that would be a false conclusion. The losers under the current system complain a lot but people who have positive experiences don't feel the need to share their side of the story.
> The process “freezes out many of the people who are underrepresented in the software development field,” Larson wrote. “If you’re busy working and raising kids, you want to spend as much of your scarce time as possible learning to code — not performing rote memorization that won’t matter once you start your job.” I'm not sure I buy this argument. If you have one candidate who has seen all of this stuff before and c…
i did my masters degree while working full time. at 5pm i started studying and doing homework, i continued (except a break for dinner) till 12 or 1 am. on weekends, the entire time was used for studying / homework. then comes interviews, where i was pitted against students who took 2 classes a semester that spent many hours a day practicing with things like leetcode and cracking the code interview. I have never had t…
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Rushing into coding something using abstract mathematical computer science techniques is a poor way to solve real world business problems. The person who has spent time in the real world raising kids realizes that you do not build business value by being a smartass know-it-all and that when time and money are of the essence, something quick and dirty, maybe even brute force, will save the business, please the custome…
That presumes a specific type of engineering role. Here's another: the founders already coded all the brute-force versions of everything. Now they want their software to scale. You will use your knowledge of algorithms and data structures (and distributed systems) to turn their one node that handles 10 events per second into a cluster that handles 10 million per second with low latency across several geographic regio…
If you don't, either look for someone who's done something like your problem before, and ask about resume/experience instead of whiteboard gauntlets. Or acknowledge that it's a research&implement position, and... again, skip the gauntlet.