Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Can engineers from Google or Facebook solve whiteboard questions easily?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 206 posts

Re: Ask HN: Can engineers from Google or Facebook solve whiteboard questions easily?

#121

Post by franzwong »

sadamznintern wrote: post #79
hzay wrote: post #75

I worked for FB. I like the whiteboard problems and many other engineers like them too, and I enjoyed discussing or solving similar problems over lunch. That's probably why they're so prevalent in interviews -- I don't believe they actually predict a candidate's success in a company. Btw in college, I used to compete on websites like topcoder, spoj, etc for fun. The interview processes of many companies drastically f…

How do I force myself to find doing those problems to be fun? To me they just seem painful because they really expose how stupid I am even if I know he basics.

I have the same problem. I can't say my approach works or not because I am still trying.

My approach is to keep writing the basic algorithm, data structure, common questions again and again. Do it once every 2-3 weeks. When I know every part of them, then I can start twisting or go deeper.

I am not that top talent. Sometimes even a 0-based or 1-based array can bug me a while.

Re: Ask HN: Can engineers from Google or Facebook solve whiteboard questions easily?

#122

Post by jarsin »

jfasi wrote: post #101
habosa wrote: post #36

I work at Google and no it's not easy for us either. I've heard many of my coworkers joke that if they went through the interview process again they'd probably fail. That said I see two kinds of interviewers. One kind (the good kind) takes a medium difficulty question and uses it to explore the candidate's coding, algorithms, communication, and problem solving skills. The other kind has a super hard question with a s…

I also work at Google and what mystifies me when I do interviews is just how consistently people manage to screw up even the medium difficulty questions. I used to love asking this question until it was banned: https://programmingpraxis.com/2012/01/20/knights-on-a-keypad... This is a great question because it has several levels of solutions: 1. A recursive solution that iterates over all sequences, exponential time a…

> t's shocking how few candidates actually got as far as solution

How many people in the real world sit around and practice dynamic programming questions all day?? The answer is ZERO!

Re: Ask HN: Can engineers from Google or Facebook solve whiteboard questions easily?

#123

Post by dekhn »

UncleMeat wrote: post #96
kamaal wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those look like software design skills. Also the type of systems you describes use something like Hadoop, and use things like Hive and Pig on top of it. Once you get the data out you use Python or R. And you generally use a standard library to work with. That really SQL + general programming. What new problems are you working on that require you to invent novel algorithmic techniques?

Does your standard library have persistent functional thread safe radix trees? Because mine didn't so we had to write it.

now I'm curious. What's the use case?

Re: Ask HN: Can engineers from Google or Facebook solve whiteboard questions easily?

#124

Post by vonmoltke »

zeveb wrote: post #87
ryandrake wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've heard many of my coworkers joke that if they went through the interview process again they'd probably fail. I’ve heard this joke at a lot of tech companies. Also, “the hardest thing I’ve ever done at my job was pass the interview.” Just shows how divorced from day-to-day work skills interviewing has become. I think most tech companies severely overestimate the cost of false positives, particularly in the USA w…

> I think most tech companies severely overestimate the cost of false positives, particularly in the USA where it’s trivially easy to fire someone who turns out to be a dud. I don't think that's actually true. People who are net-negative on a team may be very personable and hence emotionally difficult to fire. And of course the U.S. does have a number of protected classes, who can be very difficult & expensive to fir…

> People who are net-negative on a team may be very personable and hence emotionally difficult to fire.

Those people are rare and generally caught by much lighter screening.

> And of course the U.S. does have a number of protected classes, who can be very difficult & expensive to fire for cause (because the assumption is that they were not fired for cause).

I don't think you are using "for cause" in the proper legal sense. Firing "for cause" is indeed an time-consuming and potentially expensive process because of the effects on things like unemployment benefits. Firing "without cause" is not, and is permissible in almost every state.

What you are describing are potential accusations of illegal discrimination. This is largely orthogonal to cause.

Re: Ask HN: Can engineers from Google or Facebook solve whiteboard questions easily?

#125

Post by driverdan »

hzay wrote: post #75

I worked for FB. I like the whiteboard problems and many other engineers like them too, and I enjoyed discussing or solving similar problems over lunch. That's probably why they're so prevalent in interviews -- I don't believe they actually predict a candidate's success in a company. Btw in college, I used to compete on websites like topcoder, spoj, etc for fun. The interview processes of many companies drastically f…

> I don't believe they actually predict a candidate's success in a company.

They often don't which is why they shouldn't be used.

Re: Ask HN: Can engineers from Google or Facebook solve whiteboard questions easily?

#126

Post by Arcten »

zeveb wrote: post #87
ryandrake wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've heard many of my coworkers joke that if they went through the interview process again they'd probably fail. I’ve heard this joke at a lot of tech companies. Also, “the hardest thing I’ve ever done at my job was pass the interview.” Just shows how divorced from day-to-day work skills interviewing has become. I think most tech companies severely overestimate the cost of false positives, particularly in the USA w…

> I think most tech companies severely overestimate the cost of false positives, particularly in the USA where it’s trivially easy to fire someone who turns out to be a dud. I don't think that's actually true. People who are net-negative on a team may be very personable and hence emotionally difficult to fire. And of course the U.S. does have a number of protected classes, who can be very difficult & expensive to fir…

>I'm a member of a protected class [...]

Technically speaking, we all are, no? We all have genders, sexual orientations, races, ethnicities? Of course you probably meant that you fall into a minority group in one of those classes, but pretty much anyone could allege they were discriminated against based on their protected characteristics, even if sometimes it's not a particularly believable claim.

Re: Ask HN: Can engineers from Google or Facebook solve whiteboard questions easily?

#127

Post by HillaryBriss »

vonmoltke wrote: post #57
habosa wrote: post #36

I work at Google and no it's not easy for us either. I've heard many of my coworkers joke that if they went through the interview process again they'd probably fail. That said I see two kinds of interviewers. One kind (the good kind) takes a medium difficulty question and uses it to explore the candidate's coding, algorithms, communication, and problem solving skills. The other kind has a super hard question with a s…

> I've heard many of my coworkers joke that if they went through the interview process again they'd probably fail. I don't see how companies that claim it's hard to find talent can be OK with a system that would reject more than a small portion ( Edit: fixed word sense ambiguity

> I don't see how companies that claim it's hard to find talent can be OK ...

I don't either, but it's an easy game to play: start a company with an impossibly difficult goal (e.g. build a more popular social network than Facebook in two years, colonize Neptune, cure cancer) and then complain that there isn't enough talent in the labor pool. Finally, blame the government.

Re: Ask HN: Can engineers from Google or Facebook solve whiteboard questions easily?

#129

Post by pcwalton »

jfasi wrote: post #12

I often do, both for fun and to prepare myself to give a question I'd like to use in an interview. The thing about interview questions at Google is there's a very fine line they need to walk: if they're too easy they give no useful information about the candidate, and if they're too hard they can never be solved in 45 minutes, again yielding no useful information. You also need to be able to provide some hints, becau…

> The best candidates are those who know their algorithms inside and out, have the ability to break down and transform a problem until they can apply something in their toolkit, and have the coding chops to translate their concept into an implementation.

I mean, I guess, but in the many hiring discussions I've been on I found that the interviewers who asked those questions and based their feedback on them had very noisy signals. They frequently gave "lean no hire" feedback on our best hires. The interviewers who actually asked questions relevant to the work had much better signals.

Re: Ask HN: Can engineers from Google or Facebook solve whiteboard questions easily?

#130

Post by vonmoltke »

tostitos1979 wrote: post #62
Spoom wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got the same response from an old friend who has worked for Google for the better part of a decade. FWIW my understanding is that the Hiring Committee tends to discard feedback from interviewers like your latter type here.

I had such an a-hole interviewer the last (and hence final) interview I did at Google. His attitude was ... oh .. you have a PhD, let me show you how smart I am. Just like getting into YC isn't necessary to be a successful founder, getting into Google isn't necessary to be a successful engineer. There are tons of companies out there, and many pay better than Google.

> many pay better than Google

Those would be? The only one I have actually seen (claimed) numbers out of that can beat Google is Facebook.

Post reply on HN