41–50 of 410 posts
I've been a programmer for a bit over ten years. I've worked at scrappy little startups, midsized companies, now for a tech giant for a few years. The engineers I work with at the tech giant are consistently better engineers than my other coworkers have been, and I credit the very structured interview process. We're trained to ask specific questions, look for specific types of answers, and each interviewer is evaluat…
Yet why do some marriages last forever (till death do us apart) while others fail miserably or crumble even after 20 years?
The search for the global optimum cannot be performed by asking a set of questions. I argue that it cannot be done consciously. It's gut/instinct thing. If you have a mechanical approach, anyone can game the system and get a job because humans can be like chameleons to present themselves as the right candidate, and they can study for the interview. Only way IMO is to have that 3rd eye or whatever you call it... instinct, gut feeling, etc
The problem with this conclusion is that instinct and sexism/racism are often conflated.
No good answer.
I'd rather hire a programmer who knew less and could get along with others than a master dev who's a total a-hole.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having done interviews at a few of time, I'd say that's mostly false, at least for the last 2-3 years. As far as I can tell, there's always a pre-defined pool of questions. Some of them are pretty 'open ended', but still targeted towards getting a good impression of a certain area of knowledge. That being said, I had an interview with Google at some point in the past where one of the interviewers almost seemed appall…
Recently I failed an interview at Facebook because I chose to serialize a binary tree into a list of N items, rather than a list of N items and O(N) sentinels. Most of the interview was spent convincing the interviewer that this could possibly be correct.
Once you start collecting data on your hiring pipeline work sample hiring becomes so much obviously better that it makes little sense to spend the time to do the hard work of making a good structured interview process.
Articles like this - and the comments that follow - always overlook the primary value of job interviews, which to me is answering the question: "Do I want to work for this company?"
And articles like this are almost universally written from the perspective of someone being interviewed, rather than the one interviewing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This accusation is almost always from people who haven't studied that particular pet topic. In my experience, the pet topics you list - parallelism, dynamic programming, networking, etc. - are needed quite frequently for those jobs at AmaGooFaceSoft. In other words, those candidates would be poor fits for those jobs, which is exactly what an interview is trying to test. I think the Google hiring process is fucked up…
Are those topics really needed for (what you're implying) is the majority of jobs at those companies? I'm not sure if there's any way to really test this.
MapReduce, Pregel, Bigtable, Flume, etc. are building blocks: they solve some of the distribution problems, but you still need to understand how the algorithms that run on top of them work, on a step-by-step level, to implement on top of them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does this work in practice? If there are consistently used questions and specific criteria for assessing responses, can a candidate just learn the likely questions and what constitutes the "right" answer?
Google tries to keep interview questions confidential - that's why candidates sign an NDA - and periodically rotates out questions that have appeared in public. Many engineers are also continually trying to think up new questions as well, usually based on their work. For most questions, there's no "right" answer, but there are a set of points that the interviewer wants to see you touch on. For example, they might fir…
My opinion is that big-O often ends up being used as a premature optimization effort hindering "just get the right answer first". Maybe that brute force method will work in a reasonable clock-time cost, despite having egregious algorithmic cost. You won't know if you're busy overengineering and optimizing before you even have a working solution.
I've been a programmer for a bit over ten years. I've worked at scrappy little startups, midsized companies, now for a tech giant for a few years. The engineers I work with at the tech giant are consistently better engineers than my other coworkers have been, and I credit the very structured interview process. We're trained to ask specific questions, look for specific types of answers, and each interviewer is evaluat…
Which of the companies paid the best/has the best benefits? If it's the tech giant, it's very possible they attract better candidates because they offer more.
The best sofware guys I've ever seen work at those big corps. The big corps are the ones that have the resources to work on the REALLY hard problems and not writing the same CRUD app over and over again. Those same companies also provide tons of educational benefits so that you become an expert in your field.
Things like fighter jet software are fantastically complex. You hear about the dumb mistakes that are made (International Date Line Issues), but you never hear about the thousands of hours of testing every change to code goes through and the insane calculations that are made every second in even standard level flight.
I have no idea why there is such a backlash against interviews. What's so hard about studying for a job you want? Even if you don't USE knowledge, you should at least be able to rederive things using your base knowledge. Thoe interviews I've seen at aero companies are damn hard. Tons of grilling on if you actually understand mechanics and fliud dynamics.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having done interviews at a few of time, I'd say that's mostly false, at least for the last 2-3 years. As far as I can tell, there's always a pre-defined pool of questions. Some of them are pretty 'open ended', but still targeted towards getting a good impression of a certain area of knowledge. That being said, I had an interview with Google at some point in the past where one of the interviewers almost seemed appall…
Recently I failed an interview at Facebook because I chose to serialize a binary tree into a list of N items, rather than a list of N items and O(N) sentinels. Most of the interview was spent convincing the interviewer that this could possibly be correct.