Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Data Structures for Coding Interviews

interviewcake.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 238 posts

Re: Data Structures for Coding Interviews

#51

Post by thaumasiotes »

gameguy43 wrote: post #26
curiousDog wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice site but your questions are pretty run of the mill these days. Would be nice to see some new, original questions :-). Also an option to schedule some mock interviews would be great!

Thanks! Have a few new questions in the pipeline :) For mock interviews, definitely check out: - http://interviewing.io/ - http://www.byte-by-byte.com/practice-coding-interviews/ - https://www.pramp.com/ - https://www.funnel.la/ - http://interviewkickstart.com/ (email 'em to ask about mock interviews over Skype)

> For mock interviews, definitely check out:

> http://interviewing.io/

I got this recommendation about a year ago and tried. The site stated that I couldn't register, but I could sign up for a place in the registration queue.

So I did that. I have yet to hear back from them. I don't quite understand how people keep recommending them, as if it was possible to use the site.

Re: Data Structures for Coding Interviews

#52

Post by fencepost »

j2kun wrote: post #22
Mutinix wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's unfortunate, but all the companies are doing this. Here's what a Google lead said in a tweet: > Hello, my name is Tim. I'm a lead at Google with over 30 years coding experience and I need to look up how to get length of a python string. DHH: > Hello, my name is David. I would fail to write bubble sort on a whiteboard. I look code up on the internet all the time. I don't do riddles. Max Howell: > Google: 90% of o…

There's a difference between not being able to write bubble sort and realizing that looking it up is a better use of your time. But when it actually comes time to do something you can't copy/paste off the internet, what do you expect a programmer who can't reinvent a half-decent bubble sort to do? The interview is to convince the other person that you can think logically about programs. Bubble sort is a low, low bar,…

I'm sure I could do it in something pseudocodish, but it'd probably take an embarrassing amount of time. Honestly I could probably do almost as good a job of implementing quicksort, at least in a naive version based on the stack.

Seems to me that what interviewers should be looking for is not savants who can whack out particular odd bits of code but developers who can look up some things to use as reference as they go and most important who know how to determine what it is that they need. Proper evaluation and decision making is at least as important as actually writing the code, because those are the skills that can keep you from writing the wrong code.

Re: Data Structures for Coding Interviews

#53

Post by dcw303 »

gameguy43 wrote: post #36
dcw303 wrote: post #32

This is a good cheat sheet for those who don't have (or have forgotten) the knowledge but want to game an algorithm heavy interview. The problem I got with this is exactly the same as when I tried reading the "Cracking the Coding Interview" book: I got through a few chapters and then the author mentions something off the cuff with an assumption that the reader will know what they mean. But of course, I don't, because…

CEO of Interview Cake here. We work really hard at trying to not do this. Feedback on where folks get left behind is pure gold to us, because it lets us know what we need to smooth out next. We're not trying to be the /biggest/ resource out there--we're trying to be the /smoothest/. For this article, do you remember where specifically you got left behind?

To be fair to your article, it actually reads quite well and has good detail for what's covered. I thought the big-o coverage was a bit sparse, but I also didn't see the expand link the first time.

Re: Data Structures for Coding Interviews

#54

Post by leeny »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #51
gameguy43 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! Have a few new questions in the pipeline :) For mock interviews, definitely check out: - http://interviewing.io/ - http://www.byte-by-byte.com/practice-coding-interviews/ - https://www.pramp.com/ - https://www.funnel.la/ - http://interviewkickstart.com/ (email 'em to ask about mock interviews over Skype)

> For mock interviews, definitely check out: > http://interviewing.io/ I got this recommendation about a year ago and tried. The site stated that I couldn't register, but I could sign up for a place in the registration queue. So I did that. I have yet to hear back from them. I don't quite understand how people keep recommending them, as if it was possible to use the site.

Hey, I'm the founder of interviewing.io. We're coming out of private beta soon, which means we'll be sending out invites to folks on the waiting list shortly. A year is a long time though, and I'm sorry you had to wait that long, so I figured least I could do was kick you an invite (check your email). Thanks for being patient with us while we figured things out.

Re: Data Structures for Coding Interviews

#55

Post by stevenwoo »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #48
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, Microsoft was doing this long before google even existed.

I thought the traditional Microsoft interview was more along the lines of "how many golf balls fit in an airplane?"?

I interviewed at Microsoft in 1990 for a software test position and no one asked me a puzzle question so it had already gone out of style by then at least for my interviewers. They asked me a couple of questions that I recently recognized on the leetcode interview questions list in the easy section.

Re: Data Structures for Coding Interviews

#56

Post by ng12 »

bastijn wrote: post #50

I once walked into an interview with such questions. On the first question I asked them why they asked the question. The interviewer looked puzzled and asked me to finish the question. I again asked him why, what part of my job would require it. He couldn't answer that question whilst he was an engineer at the department I was interviewed for. I asked a follow-up question if he had the same questions when he joined,…

> I could have answered the question easily but what for?

To show that you're not a complete diva who's willing to put in some work even if it's unpleasant?

The question I ask is not real, either. It's entirely contrived. But I ask it because it's the best way I know to identify candidates who:

  1. Can think critically about a data structure.
  2. Can communicate with me about how to solve non-trivial problems.
  3. Can translate an idea into code without thinking about it too hard.
Given lots of time there are much better ways to test a engineer for these attributes. Given an hour it's about the best I can do. That's not to say everyone who asks these types of questions does it well (I think there's a fair bit of cargo-culting around "The Google Interview") but if you're unwilling to even humour me I think walking out is the best response for both parties.

Re: Data Structures for Coding Interviews

#57

Post by fencepost »

smnscu wrote: post #38
Mutinix wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's unfortunate, but all the companies are doing this. Here's what a Google lead said in a tweet: > Hello, my name is Tim. I'm a lead at Google with over 30 years coding experience and I need to look up how to get length of a python string. DHH: > Hello, my name is David. I would fail to write bubble sort on a whiteboard. I look code up on the internet all the time. I don't do riddles. Max Howell: > Google: 90% of o…

Ah, the perennial apologetics of weaponized mediocrity. If you can't write a simple recursive algorithm that swaps two values (Max Howell), two nested for loops (DHH), or show me that you used Python at least once (uhh length? yes, there is this builtin, I forgot its name...), why would I want to hire you over someone who has seen a computer before? And to avoid being called hypocritical, here's off the top of my hea…

For the simple option of length, depending on what you've been working in you might be thinking of len, length, .length, strlen, sizeof, and undoubtedly many other variations of the same thing. Things that may come seamlessly and automatically when you're in the flow of actually coding in language X may be very difficult to choose between while standing at a whiteboard in a conference room

Re: Data Structures for Coding Interviews

#58

Post by trevor-e »

The article is really well written and has amazing design, but honestly does not seem very helpful. Isn't most of this learned in the first year of university? Who is the target audience in that case? Given the title, I hoped to learn some lesser used data structures rather than what a pointer is. With that said, I do look forward to future articles!

Re: Data Structures for Coding Interviews

#59

Post by Y7ZCQtNo39 »

gameguy43 wrote: post #12
numbsafari wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I gave up reading your site because of the obnoxious popovers. It's super annoying.

:( Ok, time to rethink the email opt-ins.

The opt-out button: "I don't need more coding interview practice".

My first thought: Whoever designed this is super salty for me not wanting to provide my e-mail.

Out of all of the problems in my life, too much e-mail is certainly one of them. I like to keep it to a minimum. And as an adult, a weekly coding problem falls so down far on the priority list compared to all the other e-mail I'd get.

Re: Data Structures for Coding Interviews

#60

Post by Mutinix »

narak wrote: post #49
Mutinix wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe he's being hyperbolic, maybe not. But that's entirely besides the point. I'm absolutely certain that there are many, many engineers who failed interviews because they couldn't write a zig-zag string and could yet come up with good solutions to problems at a real company. > what do you expect a programmer who can't reinvent a half-decent bubble sort to do But interviews aren't testing for that. The guy who inven…

Good CS fundamentals are important because they are transferable skill to a wide array of problems a startup may face. Just because someone wrote an impressive framework or library doesn't mean given a complex problem outside of their known domain (web framework design or package management tool), they would be have the necessary background to solve it. With strong math and CS knowledge, you can reason through almost…

> Good CS fundamentals are important

Yes they are. Except, these interviews aren't testing for that. Finding the maximum sum subarray isn't testing for any fundamental.

> Just because someone wrote an impressive framework or library doesn't mean given a complex problem outside of their known domain

Why are you even hiring them for something that's not their expertise? Seriously, that's literally the whole point of the interview. I don't think Max Howell was trying to get in to the DeepMind team.

Calling these just some other web framework or package management tools is doing them an incredible disservice. Twitter used Rails. Airbnb uses Rails. If Airbnb hired DHH, it would be Airbnb's fault if they made him tune hyperparameters of some ML model rather than see how their web performance could be improved.

Honestly, at this point I'm convinced I could get HN to talk poorly about John Carmack's programming skills.

Post reply on HN