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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

#41

Post by bearforcenine »

lz400 wrote: post #29
twblalock wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really not that hard. I suppose there might be a few companies with insane expectations, but most interviews don't require that level of preparation.

I don't know. If all the candidates are that well prepared, then if you are not you are at a disadvantage, even if it didn't used to require it. And at companies where people want to work for, like Google/amazon/FB/Netflix, etc. and startups many people come prepared.

No matter what system you use to interview people, if the position is desirable enough, and the number of positions is smaller than the applicant pool, isn't gaming the system the expected outcome?

If people at Google were interviewed by juggling raquetballs, there would be books, courses, etc. on how to juggle better. People are willing to pay for this prep because they want to work at Google. Eventually most everyone interviewing at Google would be very well prepared to juggle.

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

#42

Post by jdiaz5513 »

sidlls wrote: post #24
akhilcacharya wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 de…

I recently got a promotion to management. I have different responsibilities, but I get paid more and have more influence over solutions to interesting engineering and technical problems. This role feels even more like what my engineer friends in real engineering disciplines do than my role as Lead did: leverage their education and experience to solve complex, large scale problems. These interviews are good at testing…

Careful. Software engineering is very much a real engineering discipline, and it is a major cultural failing to not recognize it as such.

Required viewing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDEpeWQHtFU

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

#43

Post by bearforcenine »

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.

It's very tempting to say this. However, trying to find an alternative that is not equally or more gameable is very challenging.

Take home assignments are easy to cheat on and take a lot of time.

Asking questions about someone's experience is a great way to find someone who is a great conversationalist that can't code.

Asking someone to program at a computer in a limited amount of time falls victim to the same issues that the competitive programming, whiteboard interviews currently do.

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

#44

Post by SmirkingRevenge »

cabaalis wrote: post #22
stephencanon wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Would writing it to handle odd numbers of elements as well cause the employer to move forward with a different candidate?

Maybe. All other things being equal, they might need a reason to cut you, and hire the other guy.

If you failed to complete the problem or took longer than expected to complete it because of extra complexity entailed by a more "correct", out-of-scope solution, it may especially cost you - even if in the end, your solution was "smarter".

Maybe the other guy noted that there are a couple of ways to solve the problem, and asked a clarifying question about it.

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

#46

Post by bearforcenine »

davesque wrote: post #38

The on-the-spot technical interview is the biggest waste of time in the history of humanity. Everyone underperforms in technical interviews. I've conducted a number of them and I've never learned a single thing other than the fact that people make surprising mistakes when under pressure in contrived situations. Here's something that I think works much better: come up with a novel challenge that requires a couple hour…

How do you prevent cheating? Someone can very easily have a friend complete the challenge and walk them through it in a lot of detail. They could prep well enough that you hire someone who is massively under-qualified.

Then if your company is large enough, your novel challenge gets leaked and everyone knows it ahead of time. Solutions start being sold or distributed. Then your interview is meaningless.

I'm all for a viable alternative to the whiteboard interview, but I haven't encountered one yet.

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

#47

Post by fecak »

I'm glad they are teaching students about resume writing, and hopefully the professors are versed in hiring outside academia. I write hundreds of resumes a year for my clients, and a high percentage of young clients are using really poor resumes when they engage my services.

It seems many new grads are being drawn to highly-visualized resumes with fancy templates, often featuring a bar graph for skills ranking (some ranking themselves as "8 out of 10 in JavaScript", which comes across as laughable and out of touch).

My feelings on memorizing data structures aside, the resume lessons may at least help some grads get interviews that they wouldn't have otherwise, and that's a good thing.

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

#48

Post by bearforcenine »

MollyR wrote: post #31

A whole class for technical interviews seems like overkill. It also gives me an uneasy feeling of being in a tech bubble.

This kind of prep has been common place in other desirable fields for many years. Law, medicine, finance. They all have books, classes, etc. that you can take to prepare for interviewing, taking the bar, mcat, etc. Compared to college admissions, the CS interview process looks downright sane.

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

#49

Post by tw1010 »

This is a natural response to the incentive structure that has evolved. But fear not, the fact that this metric is being overemphasized to this large a degree surely must mean that the adversarial species (the industry) will respond by changing their strategy. The more universities focus on vanity metrics (helping students build their peacock tail), the more likely it is that the industry realizes the kink in their armour and shifts to some wiser signaling measure.

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

#50

Post by lz400 »

bearforcenine wrote: post #41
lz400 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know. If all the candidates are that well prepared, then if you are not you are at a disadvantage, even if it didn't used to require it. And at companies where people want to work for, like Google/amazon/FB/Netflix, etc. and startups many people come prepared.

No matter what system you use to interview people, if the position is desirable enough, and the number of positions is smaller than the applicant pool, isn't gaming the system the expected outcome? If people at Google were interviewed by juggling raquetballs, there would be books, courses, etc. on how to juggle better. People are willing to pay for this prep because they want to work at Google. Eventually most everyo…

Sure but if that were the case wouldn't you think it's silly that you need to train months to be able to juggle to land a SWE position? wouldn't it be stupid? the current interview culture in those companies is not as silly as juggling but is also not a fair representation of candidates, with too much weight being in algorithmic puzzles and behavioral checkboxes you can train for.

Obviously if the process was a 100% fair assessment of knowledge and potential and people do better than you then good for them.

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