I'd rather someone who knows which library has the required function already implemented in it rather then spending days enacting "not invented here"
The time spent on practising white board test may not be worthy
21–30 of 63 posts
Re: The time spent on practising white board test may not be worthy
#22Seems like the more employers complain about the lack of available labor, the more they ratchet up the pointless interview hazing. It's hard to take their claims of 'no one is available' when they're so capricious in tossing away potential employees.
Currently I see a lot of companies that are hiring but few that really need people. This might sound contradictory but most large tech companies seem to have a policy of constantly interviewing and assessing candidates if only to prevent them from joining the competition. Or, it is a matter of adding a sixth person to a five person team...nice to have, but not critical. This process gets it's liquidity from the unbelievable churn in our industry.
I can tell on the other hand when a company needs people badly...one phone screen, a short onsite...offer. A company in desperate need to hire is also too busy to lose an entire day interviewing candidates that will most likely be rejected. I feel that the FANG companies are in fact probably overstaffed but are also subject to the same churn they are exploiting.
But hey, ultimately this abusive process persists because we allow it to, and 99% of the time your interviewer just wants a giant ego massage. I usually dedicate a little time telling my interviewer how brilliant they are...this is what they want so just give it to them
Re: The time spent on practising white board test may not be worthy
#23[deleted]
Re: The time spent on practising white board test may not be worthy
#24I don't think it's a complete waste of time to do these practice interview problems. At the end of the day it reinforces your understanding of core computer science topics and helps you think out of the box(barring stupid problems where you need to know a specific formula). Then there are situations where you need a deep understanding of these algorithms to choose them for specific situations irrelevant of implementation.
Re: The time spent on practising white board test may not be worthy
#25Of course it isn't. An interview process that requires/rewards cramming for months ahead of time is fundamentally broken. I just gave up on getting hired at any tech company that uses whiteboard interviewing. It seems like, just as in college where there's always that one kid who aces every test and wrecks the curve for everyone else, in any candidate pool there is always one demigod of algorithms (and it isn't you,…
I think this is the only way to fight the white-boarding standard interview. Stop applying to these jobs.
I know the allure of a big paycheck is too much for most people, but why are ok with going through these ridiculous circus acts just for the "privileged" of working for Big N?
Re: The time spent on practising white board test may not be worthy
#26>You just need to call std::sort, and don’t care it is “bubble sort” or “quick sort” under the hood This is often the case, but not always. When you know things about the input data you may be able to get better performance than the generic sorts built into a language. Or, when you know more about sorting algorithms you may be better able to choose among the available sorts/sort options provided by a language or libr…
In case of sorting algorithm, it is important to know the trade-off. However, precisely knowing the details e.g. knowing the details of deleting a node from a balanced tree, is not really useful and that is exactly what is needed to pass whiteboard tests. In most cases(in my experience), i can always lookup details of some algorithm when i need it. Admittedly, my job doesn't require me to design algorithms, but imple…
which is quite right at my first job we didn't get our very expensive engineers (Oh rate was > 500%) to write our own fourier analysis we just brought one from NAG.
Re: The time spent on practising white board test may not be worthy
#27>You just need to call std::sort, and don’t care it is “bubble sort” or “quick sort” under the hood This is often the case, but not always. When you know things about the input data you may be able to get better performance than the generic sorts built into a language. Or, when you know more about sorting algorithms you may be better able to choose among the available sorts/sort options provided by a language or libr…
There is a lot of value in knowing that some algorithms are better for certain problems than others. But knowing them to the level that you can whiteboard them quickly without mistakes in an interview is just an exercise in memorization.
Re: The time spent on practising white board test may not be worthy
#28I don't think you understand the purpose of a whiteboard test. When I interview candidates, I'm looking for a lot of things that can't be practiced:
- How well can you converse about a technical topic
- How adaptable are you to design constraints
- Do you understand the fundamentals of threading, databases, data structures, ect?
- Can you "think in code?"
- How well do you really understand the language that you spent XX years of your career working in
The best way to improve your skills is by doing: specifically, choose a hobby project that involves an area that you want to learn. Reading a book will only get you about 10-15% of the way there. Books are useful to choose a technology to learn, but not to learn the specific technology.
Getting back to whiteboarding: I've used it to:
- Reject candidates who forget basic fundamentals of a language that they claim XX years in. (Seriously, if you can't construct an "if" statement or use a common collection class in a language you claim XX years in, then you don't belong on my team.)
- Reject candidates who can't learn an unfamiliar API. This is critical, because we need to discuss new APIs in design discussions; and because "old & working" code isn't always worth refactoring to use some shiny new API.
- Reject candidates who don't know how to use a database. (Frameworks / ORMs are not a replacement for knowing how a database works and how to program with one.)
- Reject candidates who don't know fundamentals of threading
Re: The time spent on practising white board test may not be worthy
#29>You just need to call std::sort, and don’t care it is “bubble sort” or “quick sort” under the hood This is often the case, but not always. When you know things about the input data you may be able to get better performance than the generic sorts built into a language. Or, when you know more about sorting algorithms you may be better able to choose among the available sorts/sort options provided by a language or libr…
I feel like #2 is caused more because people try to be #1. Instead of letting good programmers develop well-established libraries that everyone uses - you end up with NIHS and a bunch of mediocre developers creating mediocre libraries that only they use. I became a better Javascript developer when I began using well maintained libraries to solve problems instead of wasting time reinventing the wheel every time I had a problem that needed to be solved.
Time is hard. I don't like to deal with localizing time, formatting time, or converting time. Instead I use a library [0] to solve that problem for me. Because while I may need to localize time - localizing time is not the problem I am trying to solve. It's just a roadblock in the process of solving my actual problem.
Re: The time spent on practising white board test may not be worthy
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
I recently joined Blind and mostly follow the compensation discussions. 2 Takeaways: 1) Most of us are incredibly underpaid 2) A common question is when asking how candidates prepared that resulted in offers is "How many problems did you do on leetcode?" I'd never heard of leetcode but it seems if you want an offer from FANG, Uber, Lyft, etc then you put your time in practicing programming problems.
What's Blind?
Looks like an anonymous work oriented chat app: https://www.teamblind.com