Stanford CS9: Problem-Solving for the CS Technical Interview • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by pjmlp » Mon, Jan 15, 2018, 9:55 AM UTC

walshemj wrote: post #199

pjmlp wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because in countries like US, one can call himself/herself engineer, without any actual meaning. At least in Europe things are a bit more strict.

And which countries invented the computer pray? ok I know about Zuze but he was effectively ignored. In terms of PE / CENG status its more who you know that what you know :-)

Well, computing has lots to thank to UK, Germany, Finland, France, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark.

Sorry if I forgot anything, fellow Europeans.

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

#202

Post by avip » Mon, Jan 15, 2018, 10:20 AM UTC

virgilp wrote: post #187

qwerty456127 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality is the majority of tech interviews today are filled with questions/tasks that have little or nothing to do with the actual job you are going to be assigned. In fact an average programmer doesn't actually need to know a single piece of computer science or math (almost all such stuff is abstracted by common libraries and frameworks, whatever is not can be looked up on demand) nor to memorize anything (thank…

> and their GitHub profile. I have nothing in my GitHub profile. Some toy repos of no particular significance, one contribution to Rust that I've made before realizing it takes too much of my spare time... and that's it. I don't think that should make me un-hireable ... people that have kids tend to not have much spare time besides work, learning new stuff to stay relevant, and taking care of said kids. Not to mentio…

Having less time to "learning new stuff to stay relevant" makes us de-facto less hirable. The "github" thingy is just a proxy (as is the "whiteboard CS exercise").

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

#203

Post by profalseidol » Mon, Jan 15, 2018, 10:33 AM UTC

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…

I blame the limited time that Capitalism provides. Every minute you use when interviewing is capital being used up. Capital that needs to grow.

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

#204

Post by expertentipp » Mon, Jan 15, 2018, 10:33 AM UTC

BHSPitMonkey wrote: post #177

Rebelgecko wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At Google, the recruiter who schedules your interview specifically recommends reading books written about passing Google's interviews. It's a little unbelievable.

Similar experience, spent the same time preparing for the interview as for any other company + couple of hours of browsing some slides from university classes on data structures (sorry Google, you are not a special snowflake) - rejected after the first call:)

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

#205

Post by virgilp » Mon, Jan 15, 2018, 10:37 AM UTC

avip wrote: post #202

virgilp wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and their GitHub profile. I have nothing in my GitHub profile. Some toy repos of no particular significance, one contribution to Rust that I've made before realizing it takes too much of my spare time... and that's it. I don't think that should make me un-hireable ... people that have kids tend to not have much spare time besides work, learning new stuff to stay relevant, and taking care of said kids. Not to mentio…

Having less time to "learning new stuff to stay relevant" makes us de-facto less hirable. The "github" thingy is just a proxy (as is the "whiteboard CS exercise").

I actually do learn new stuff. While on the current job, I've been doing:

- Code-hinting (semantic analysis) in an IDE - Product management - Low-level JIT codegen & optimisation (for ARM Neon & Intel SSE) - Some datascience (technology/ product evaluation for a 8-digit aquisition) - One of the early contributors to a web standard - Distributed systems, bigdata (mostly graph-processing at quite big scale - Facebook-big)

and probably other stuff I can't remember right now. I worked in half dozen different programming languages. I'm pretty sure I've "stayed relevant" more than the average Joe, but you wouldn't know it from github.

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

#206

Post by qwerty456127 » Mon, Jan 15, 2018, 10:42 AM UTC

mamon wrote: post #194

flor1s wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think these kind of coding interviews are given to average programmers though, and if they are I'm sure they are taken with a pinch of salt (or with a lot of help from the recruiter, or using simple tasks such as FizzBuzz [1]). In my experience, having been an average programmer (and maybe still being, I hope that by now I'm at least slightly above average) who worked in The Netherlands at a "system integrato…

FizzBuzz test is actually pretty great interview question, but most interviewers miss one crucial ingredient: time pressure. Original idea was that any competent programmer should be able to solve it in under 1 minute (only limiting factor being your own writing/typing speed). It is a good indicator of familiarity with the basic programming constructs (loops, conditionals, print statements). It's like writing down th…

> I have seen many developers who fail to do that.

How do they happen to be developers then? Doesn't being unable to implement a FizzBuzz quickly imply they can't code anything that is more complex, by definition?

By the way although I do understand programming (OOP, FP, SQL) and can develop a considerably complex app from scratch in an IDE like Visual Studio with ReSharper or IntelliJ Idea that would expand code snippets, offer auto-completion and highlight errors on the fly I doubt I can code anything more complex than a "hello world" using just Notepad and expect it to compile and run without errors immediately - I use to make small typos and miss some syntactical elements all the time thanks to my ADHD (but modern IDEs solve this problem). Also, a person standing behind my shoulder watching me code and counting time would decrease my performance by an order of magnitude at best. Does this count as a failure from your point of view?

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

#207

Post by tzahola » Mon, Jan 15, 2018, 10:45 AM UTC

motherdearest wrote: post #126

bitL wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a fitness test. Are you going to bring me value, or are you on the verge of burnout with outdated skills, trying to live off your past? "What did you do for me today?" is what matters for company to stay afloat and brutal competition is the way to achieve it. What kind of society it creates is another question.

I'm a proponent of whiteboard tests and am in charge of conducting for potential hires on my team. However I don't see how they guard against an outdated skillset? My company employees five Infor Sys21 RPG programmers who thought the term "web service" was synonymous with SOAP until I ran a workshop.4 out of 5 worked most of their career for IBM and all have bachelor's or masters in CS, EE, or Math. With a weekend of…

How did you get Adderall legally?

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

#208

Post by jjkk0101 » Mon, Jan 15, 2018, 10:51 AM UTC

Bukhmanizer wrote: post #150

colmvp wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In design school, we had one class which involved things like developing your portfolio, learning how to present yourselves to companies, interviews with Creative Directors, etc. Given that technical interviews a common method of partially evaluating engineers/developers, it doesn't strike me as particularly odd for a practical course to exist that helps students maximize their ability to get a job. As you mentioned,…

I don't think most people have a problem with the class itself. It's more that the technical interview has gotten away from a practical method of showing what you know, and is now becoming a skill to maximize itself, whether or not it actually demonstrates if you can do the job. To take an absurd example, imagine if for some reason Law firms started requiring an Irish Stepdancing component to their hiring process. I'…

hehe. My typical example for how a technical interview can go absurd is cartwheels.

Again, nothing wrong with someone trying to get it right but at the end of day we all lose.

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

#209

Post by kulu2002 » Mon, Jan 15, 2018, 11:03 AM UTC

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…

Till today I haven't asked anyone to write actual code on whiteboard. Recently I had a chance to interview a Stanford grad who had previously worked on embedded sys in some start-up. I asked him to draw system level architecture of his product in OSI layer format like where HAL/ firmware, RTOS, insys mem, db, application, UI are placed and how they are communicating with each other ...and this guy was staring at me like I am asking him to jump down from 10th floor. Then I thought did I do something wrong... I mean if you have really worked on/experienced something then you should know that thing thoroughly and then you don't need any special prep for interviews

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

#210

Post by rimliu » Mon, Jan 15, 2018, 11:03 AM UTC

sjg007 wrote: post #71

firstplacelast wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sister is a travel nurse. She does not prepare for interviews and typically has several a year. Her entire interview process goes: call the agency and tell them she is looking for a new position, have one to several 30-45minute phone calls with hiring managers at the hospitals she is interested in (she actually took one once in the middle of a wine tasting - and got the job), then wait to hear back. That's what it's…

Right but she is licensed, this is the main issue.

The industry is different, that is another issue. Programmers do not deal with just the small variations of the mostly the same code base (human body) which broke down (got ill) for some reason, but most bugs have pretty well documented symptoms and prescriptions how to fix them.