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Stanford CS9: Problem-Solving for the CS Technical Interview

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Re: Stanford CS9: Problem-Solving for the CS Technical Interview

#11

Post by akhilcacharya »

I've been through the ringer quite a few times now (though less than the average Stanford student) and I think about these interviews more than I probably should just for my sanity.

This is a decent primer (and people need primers!) and a good resource overall but I'm very skeptical that this is terribly helpful for most interviews. I liked some of the problems but most are about a notch lower in difficulty than required for the offers Stanford students get.

With that said, it's clear that the students that take this class are going to do well in their internship and job search. I'm honestly just becoming more convinced that ability to perform in these interviews is an inherent quality of top students (no matter the original field!) at this point.

Re: Stanford CS9: Problem-Solving for the CS Technical Interview

#12

Post by adamnemecek »

cat199 wrote: post #8

If a stanford CS degree doesn't otherwise prepare students properly for a tech interview, I'm going to wager it is the interview process that has a problem, not the stanford CS degree..

You are right but like just having to use the fucking white board is different enough to throw people off.

Re: Stanford CS9: Problem-Solving for the CS Technical Interview

#13

Post by electricslpnsld »

Rebelgecko wrote: post #10
czardoz wrote: post #3

This is what I was afraid of. I always thought interviews were something where you present your abilities, experience and knowledge. It should not be something you "prepare" for because then you're not showing off your skills, instead you're just regurgitating what you are trained to do. I do somewhat blame the whiteboard culture, but I guess that's the one that has given the best results so far. I've no doubt that i…

The idea of having a whole class on how to solve interview whiteboard problems (a skill that is, at least where I work, not very relevant to doing your job) is terrifying.

This isn't that far removed from an algorithms or data structures class, or what you would learn in one of those programming olympics type prep courses that people do.

Re: Stanford CS9: Problem-Solving for the CS Technical Interview

#16

Post by mathattack »

Rebelgecko wrote: post #10
czardoz wrote: post #3

This is what I was afraid of. I always thought interviews were something where you present your abilities, experience and knowledge. It should not be something you "prepare" for because then you're not showing off your skills, instead you're just regurgitating what you are trained to do. I do somewhat blame the whiteboard culture, but I guess that's the one that has given the best results so far. I've no doubt that i…

The idea of having a whole class on how to solve interview whiteboard problems (a skill that is, at least where I work, not very relevant to doing your job) is terrifying.

It’s 1 pass/fail credit out of 180 to graduate. The course looks as much like how to job hunt as anything else. (Resume writing, etc)

Re: Stanford CS9: Problem-Solving for the CS Technical Interview

#17

Post by stephencanon »

andoma wrote: post #14

FWIW the second example of finding halfway points in https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs9/sample_probs/ListShufflin... is buggy. Crashes if the list have odd number of elements.

"Your job is to write a function that accepts as input a pointer to a linked list with an even number of elements"

Re: Stanford CS9: Problem-Solving for the CS Technical Interview

#18

Post by xiphias »

czardoz wrote: post #3

This is what I was afraid of. I always thought interviews were something where you present your abilities, experience and knowledge. It should not be something you "prepare" for because then you're not showing off your skills, instead you're just regurgitating what you are trained to do. I do somewhat blame the whiteboard culture, but I guess that's the one that has given the best results so far. I've no doubt that i…

Google interviews are mostly IQ tests. There are a basic set of primitives (algorithms and data structures) and you have to think fast and combine them. Google never cared about experience and knowledge as much as intelligence (the ability to learn fast):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjs2gPa5sD0

Re: Stanford CS9: Problem-Solving for the CS Technical Interview

#19

Post by akhilcacharya »

jdiaz5513 wrote: post #9

This makes me very, very sad. I will never subject one of my potential hires to this nonsense. These concepts are valuable and academically interesting, for sure, but for the practical kind of engineering that's done at most companies it's simply not needed. Either that or it's already implemented in a library. What a waste of time.

I'm sympathetic to this viewpoint but looking at the cost/benefit for a Stanford student I think the benefit to studying for these interviews is clear - its a bit of a simplification, but for Facebook if you can do 3-6 problems over the course of 2 60 minute internship interviews you have the ability to get a $75k-$100k signing bonus if you convert to full time in addition to more shares over 4 years. Granted this depends on whether you're a high performer during the internship but I definitely understand why someone would make or take this class.

Re: Stanford CS9: Problem-Solving for the CS Technical Interview

#20

Post by lz400 »

I think this is terrible. I feel there are many good engineers that can't possibly compete for decent jobs in tech companies because they haven't spent 6-12 months reading cracking the code interview, doing this Stanford course, practicing mock interviews in crowdsourced websites, getting their leetcode rank up, attending bootcamps where they pad their githubs and practicing any single interview question they can scrub off glassdoor. All things that are marginally useful in the job at hand. And this is getting worse all the time.
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