201–210 of 238 posts
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Nobody ever needs to code binary trees, outside of interviews and a few library developers.
As a single point of data, this is not the case at my job
Binary trees have been around for decades, and I assume there are solid libraries for all useful variants of them, and that everyone can use them.
I'm probably wrong, but in what way?
> 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…
Same for the prospective programmer who raised one's own kids. That translates to real-world understanding of problems rather than being too deep into the theoretical side.
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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.
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Nobody ever needs to code binary trees, outside of interviews and a few library developers.
As a single point of data, this is not the case at my job
I'm kind of sick of doing CRUD apps. Maybe hearing about what you do would inspire me to explore something new.
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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…
Im good at my job. I solve problems that provide business value. It has nothing to do with art. If you ask me to work for 2 hours, I'm sending you an invoice.
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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…
You sound like someone who doesn't realize this isn't 2006 anymore and people stopped pretending to change the world with every new job.
Anytime there's a blog post or a thread complaining about the 'broken coding interview process' it ends up being upvoted by everyone and their brother on HN but very rarely have I seen people offer a reasonable alternative instead. I work for a big tech company and for our org, typically we have a couple of Algorithms/Coding rounds, a system design round, a technical communication round and a loosely structured inter…
Instead of trying to find weaknesses of candidate, try to find their strengths. You will genuinely be surprised at what kind of amazing programmers are out there.
I was recently rejected in a programming test because I designed my own implementation of a graph which was unlike the classical Graph class (containing addEdges(), findPath() etc.).
If the interview heuristic was "trying to find his strengths" instead of "oh..there he goes. Doesn't know textbook implementation", I would actually be picked for being a smart programmer.
“Never memorize something that you can look up.” -- Albert Einstein
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That assumes the interview accurately measures something useful. The more I read about this area the more I think a 1-2h pre-interview practical coding assignment, then a 1 on 1 discussion during the interview is better. You then get to understand how they think, how they design solutions, and some sense of how they interact. In other words, how they'd do the job.
Good design instincts takes lots of hard earned real world experience to develop. I wouldnt expect the average 21 year old programmer to really know how to design stuff maybe they can provide me crammed textbook answers but that is as "irrelevant" as whiteboarding. I think a good approach is to not emphasize the whiteboard as much for senior hires, so people with good work experience can mostly get in on their resume…
I've been paid to write code for 20 years or so and can't remember any of those friggin algorithms. Being able to understand a problem enough to successfully google an answer is the most valuable skill for a programmer.
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…
For most developers we don't need to even consider these trade-offs. It really depends what stack you're working with. Are you a front-end engineer? Then this doesn't even make sense because you wouldn't be putting that much into storage anyways that O() is going to matter.
I'm an iOS developer and quite frankly you shouldn't be doing that much business logic on the phone. We implemented an algorithm that had a O(n^4) runtime without optimizing it because the dataset was so small it wasn't worth the time to over optimize.
You're looking for an extremely rare case and discrediting 95-99% of the time we're programming. Sure we can do speed-ups but do you really have to filter every single developer for those criteria? You really don't. Guess what? Unicorns are built off the backs of medicore developers. The codebases once they start expanding are highly unoptimized. Slack was built from contractors. Twitch apparently is still having growing pains on their iOS app because the original developer wasn't very skilled. I was turned down from thumbtack even though I knew more about iOS than the iOS team lead that interviewed me because they valued CTCI more. The iOS team lead was taking advice from me about system design. What would you rather have? Someone that knows system design or someone that memorized how to serialize an n-ary tree? What is actually going to make you the bazillion dollars? A functioning app that can scale, or someone maybe helping you serialize a data structure (with a very known solution) on an iOS app which is completely useless?
It's simply an illusion that you need to have developers who have memorized useless problems in the case that they may one day possibly might see an issue they could optimize 1% better by introducing more complicated code.