111–120 of 348 posts
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No, I meant O(n) but used the wrong word for it. Marking items visited can actually work, because on any(?) modern OS the memory for the elements in the list would be allocated at even addresses, meaning the low order bit of the Next pointer is always zero and can be reused as a marker.
Your solution isn't thread safe :)
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This sounds like you're having the wrong conversations. With all your experience, why are you still going into companies through the front door? Where's your network? Fundamentally: Why are you having the "Can you code your way out of a wet paper bag" conversation instead of the "How much value can you add to this company" conversation? Perhaps my experience as a consultant/freelancer is breaking my perspective. It's…
> Fundamentally: Why are you having the "Can you code your way out of a wet paper bag" conversation instead of the "How much value can you add to this company" conversation? Because people lie. It's that simple. Referrals lie, CVs lie, friends lie to get friends in a position. Do understand that there's a fundamentally different set of problem a 40.000 FTE company has to deal with in comparison to a 30 person startup…
I have to do a little more to satisfy the process, of course, but I'd be more satisfied if more interviewers didn't just accept the process (as you kind of have to do as an interviewee if you want certain jobs) and continuously asked themselves how they can make things better within their own influence. I could only throw up my hands and sigh when a coworker asked me for interviewer advice, we had a big discussion about interviews, and in the end he just grabbed a random problem off some interview problems site that he hadn't even tested if he could solve himself in the time limit and gave that.
Depending on what you do, maybe most of the time interview-like problems won't rise up, but not everyone is ok taking the risk of poor algorithm design on production. While it won't happen that a single engineer will need to do everything without any design or code reviews, if you keep "lowering" the bar you risk breaking the review failsafe. Maybe scaling the review process can enable teams having more engineers working "safely" as the hard problems will still be reviewed by the "elite" engineers those companies try hard to get.
I hope this takes some pressure away on pretending to have "real" interviews needlessly. There's too many problems to be solved out there to be overly picky on who can work on them.
It would be nice to hear back from MS after they a few years.
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I tech screened at Facebook and the whiteboard question was to partially implement a regex parser.
How partially? I could probably do a very simple one, without backtracking (though they'd need a big whiteboard if they want full code there) but if it's something like PCRE then I don't think Facebook headquarters have enough whiteboards to fit the code :)
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I interviewed at Facebook and the tech part was completely sane and appropriate, the technical task was a bit fizzbuzzy but not something you'd need to spend nights digging into obscure algorithms book, but rather simple task which required some thinking, but not too much of it. No experience with Google or Netflix. As of looking at CV, I've seen people with great CVs that proved utterly useless and of course the opp…
I tech screened at Facebook and the whiteboard question was to partially implement a regex parser.
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No, I meant O(n) but used the wrong word for it. Marking items visited can actually work, because on any(?) modern OS the memory for the elements in the list would be allocated at even addresses, meaning the low order bit of the Next pointer is always zero and can be reused as a marker.
Your solution isn't thread safe :)
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Since you mention Google, my understanding is that you still go through the standard hiring process
Again, always? If they buy the company that you built specifically to get access to you, do you think you'll still end up getting screened out by some junior dev on a whiteboard? All policies have exceptions. Your goal is to be exceptional.
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If you apply for a full-time software engineering position at a large company today, you will be run through the all-day series-of-hourlong-interviews, even if you are a referral. It is possible for the hiring manager to work closely with recruiter and recruiting coordinator to craft a more customized interview process, but that's rare (and, impossible at a place like Google, which decentralizes hiring). The value of…
You use the term "apply for a job", which might explain the disconnect. The post you reply to isn't about applying for jobs. You don't want to "apply" for things. You want your google VP to be having a beer with your ex-boss and worrying that his pet project was going to fail because they just can't find a guy who can really $X. But your ex boss knows a guy who absoulutely can $X, and just finished $X'ing his company…
No, HR will be told to get that guy into the interview pipeline as soon as possible, so he can go through the same process everybody else does for a similar position.
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You use the term "apply for a job", which might explain the disconnect. The post you reply to isn't about applying for jobs. You don't want to "apply" for things. You want your google VP to be having a beer with your ex-boss and worrying that his pet project was going to fail because they just can't find a guy who can really $X. But your ex boss knows a guy who absoulutely can $X, and just finished $X'ing his company…
You've essentially described nepotism here - if FAANG would follow this model, they would never hire some of their best contributors because those contributors didn't live in the Valley their whole life to network with bosses. I prefer a process that's at least basically meritocratic to the old boys club type of hiring at any time.