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

111–120 of 238 posts

Re: Data Structures for Coding Interviews

#111

Post by FlyingSnake »

watwut wrote: post #105
daliwali wrote: post #87

I got an impression who their target audience is, based on the examples used, drinking kombucha and listening to Spotify. All the young, beautiful people who wouldn't have ever taken a computer science course if it weren't such a lucrative industry to be in right now. Maybe with this guide they can pass an interview at a big company where they just twiddle with bits all day. I won't be holding my breath until they ca…

Are we now blaming young people for looking at employment perspective before picking up major? Or are we blaming them for trying to learn? Because last time students were mentioned, they were blamed for picking up unpractical major unlike everyone older in STEM who was supposed to make more rational choices (as supposedly proven by them not picking humanities by passion).

No one is blaming the youngsters, people here are blaming the inadequate teaching methods.

Re: Data Structures for Coding Interviews

#112

Post by sheldor »

watwut wrote: post #107
sheldor wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nailed it. I have a very hard time explaining to my youngster colleagues that they're neither "engineers" nor "scientists'. Now I can use your words.

Job offerings look for "engineers" while they mean coders. Young person who think he/she does not count as engineer will pass over that job, despite being fully able to get it and work there. "You are not actually engineer" is bad advice in current job market. (I used to be that young person and used to pass on opportunities because of superficial reasons like that.)

-

Re: Data Structures for Coding Interviews

#113

Post by FlyingSnake »

sgt101 wrote: post #101
FlyingSnake wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what you get when you commoditise Computer Science. The article is about coding interviews and then goes on to deliver a lecture about "Computer science in plain English". Isn't it common knowledge that Computer Science and coding are like chalk and cheese? People used to study DataStructures for a whole semester to get a deep understanding of how these work, and the time/space complexities affect system desi…

It isn't science, or engineering, because many of the things that count in computing defy measurement : - code quality - software productivity - expected time between failure - tolerance to error - expected life in field - usefulness to users Because the science and engineering cultures of computing have failed to address these effectively, or even create cultural norms that support their development, a craft culture…

> Because the science and engineering cultures of computing have failed to address these effectively

That doesn't automatically make coders 'Artists'. There is a huge gamut of software outside the CRUD world of HN. Software that runs mission critical applications like Mars Rovers, power plants, Public transport systems, etc. We should have a fair amount of rigour to ensure the software being written is rock solid, and taking shortcuts to learn basics of CS is bad.

Re: Data Structures for Coding Interviews

#114

Post by bachpug »

drewrv wrote: post #73
narak wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 because they are transferable skill to a wide array of problems a startup may face I'm really skeptical of this claim. Nothing about CS fundamentals prepares you for debugging mobile browser performance, or machine learning, or setting up a sharded database. Maybe the big companies have a reason for asking these questions, but few startups benefit from these types of questions.

From the POV of the large tech companies, it's mostly a matter of keeping the interviews short since the questions can be complicated yet fit in under an hour. The top companies are constantly growing, have ~3 year turnover and are flooded with applicants due to their name recognition. Why all the smaller ones copy this approach, I have no idea. The alternatives usually are just as unpalatable: pair programming, a long project, language triva questions, etc. So nothing changes.

Re: Data Structures for Coding Interviews

#115

Post by seanwilson »

pavlov wrote: post #62

Hiring engineers based on data structure trivia is like hiring a marketing department based on spelling bee scores.

You'd really be fine hiring a senior developer that had no idea how a linked list, a hash table or a binary tree worked? Understanding which data structures are good for speed and memory usage is at a minimum required for memory constrained apps and dealing with large scale data.

Re: Data Structures for Coding Interviews

#116

Post by watwut »

FlyingSnake wrote: post #111
watwut wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we now blaming young people for looking at employment perspective before picking up major? Or are we blaming them for trying to learn? Because last time students were mentioned, they were blamed for picking up unpractical major unlike everyone older in STEM who was supposed to make more rational choices (as supposedly proven by them not picking humanities by passion).

No one is blaming the youngsters, people here are blaming the inadequate teaching methods.

This is not blaming of inadequate teaching methods: "All the young, beautiful people who wouldn't have ever taken a computer science course if it weren't such a lucrative industry to be in right now. Maybe with this guide they can pass an interview at a big company where they just twiddle with bits all day. I won't be holding my breath until they can produce something useful. "

Re: Data Structures for Coding Interviews

#117

Post by watwut »

sheldor wrote: post #112
watwut wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Job offerings look for "engineers" while they mean coders. Young person who think he/she does not count as engineer will pass over that job, despite being fully able to get it and work there. "You are not actually engineer" is bad advice in current job market. (I used to be that young person and used to pass on opportunities because of superficial reasons like that.)

-

Better for competition who gets the job with the same qualification and skills maybe, better for you personally (in both terms of what you learn and how good jobs you get) - no.

Re: Data Structures for Coding Interviews

#118

Post by zerr »

drewrv wrote: post #78
pavlov wrote: post #62

Hiring engineers based on data structure trivia is like hiring a marketing department based on spelling bee scores.

I think these types of questions are a good filter for the big tech companies, just in a different way than most suspect. What these types of interviews filter for is... - People fresh out of college and therefore relatively young. It would be illegal to make this an explicit policy. - People who really really really want the job. All employers want to filter by this criteria. - People who will accept the status quo…

> - People who really really really want the job. All employers want to filter by this criteria.

But then you miss out a lot of brilliant people who "just want" (instead of "really really...") the job, but think that it is not worth to allocate month(s) for preparation.

Re: Data Structures for Coding Interviews

#119

Post by virtualized »

seanwilson wrote: post #115
pavlov wrote: post #62

Hiring engineers based on data structure trivia is like hiring a marketing department based on spelling bee scores.

You'd really be fine hiring a senior developer that had no idea how a linked list, a hash table or a binary tree worked? Understanding which data structures are good for speed and memory usage is at a minimum required for memory constrained apps and dealing with large scale data.

Most "senior developers" I know don't know much about data structures. Standards are pretty low in the industry. One reason might be that optimizing for memory consumption or handling "large scale data" almost never happens in practice.
Post reply on HN