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

I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today

reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 497 posts

Re: I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today

#221

Post by School-Cotton »

scarface74 wrote: post #199
Isamu wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For embedded programming you are more likely to be asked questions that require bit manipulation, shifting, masking, etc. Maybe low-level C, mapping structs to memory locations, etc. Maybe how you might go about implementing hardware interrupt handlers, or how you could put a microcontroller into low-power sleep and then wake up, etc. It is common for embedded software engineers to come from electrical engineering, a…

I interviewed for a position (and got the job) about four years ago for a C#/Angular senior developer and I was suppose to be “speaking my architectural experience into the team”. At the time, the only way I could document 10+ years of development experience was by putting a job I had worked at for a decade doing cross platform C and C++ with a little bit of assembly. Out of nowhere, after I thought the interview was…

I wasn't there, so I can't know how the interview went, but are you sure the motivation was "just to prove how smart he was" ?

If I'm already 100% sure I'll recommend a hire, it's not rare for me to go off-script and dig into random stuff in the candidate's experience, first of all because I find it interesting or fun to talk about, and second because having deep knowledge about anything is positive signal, regardless of whether it's useful for the job.

I have definitely been in this scenario and asked people who had relevant background to work out low-level performance details of their code. I hope they didn't think I was "drilling" them.

Re: I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today

#222

Post by School-Cotton »

diminoten wrote: post #190
52-6F-62 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm. I spoke with Amazon (AWS) recently (haven't interviewed yet), and they made the express point that if I were to accept an interview that I should brush up on my algos and HackerRank questions because they loved HackerRank and would surely use a series of those-style problems throughout the interview process. My last in-depth interview was a take-home/collaborative project (paid) for a smaller company here in Cana…

It's probably per-team, someone on here mentioned that's how Google works at least. Someone I know did an AWS interview round during business school, and they do this thing called "bar raising" (IIRC) that involves one of the interviewers literally doing something unpleasant to see how you react (e.g. picking their teeth in the camera, cutting you off when you speak). Very odd.

I have worked at Amazon, and can categorically say that this description of their interview process is false.

Re: I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today

#223

Post by chillacy »

matz1 wrote: post #42
arnvald wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter whether it's hard or not, it's at best a mediocre tool to determine programming skills. Also, it leads to a spiral of becoming worse: 1. being able to solve LeetCode tasks doesn't mean you're a good developer 2. not being able to solve these tasks doesn't mean you're a bad developer. So we have a tool that has a certain (IMHO high) rate of false positives and false negatives. 3. people start realisi…

These are more of the problem for the employer.

I think it's instructive to consider who the employer is too. Leetcode works well for Google. They pay top notch compensation and have a long line of people who want to work there. They can put horrible hoops up and enough people would still want to jump through them.

Most companies have cargo-culted the programming interview, even when they don't have the same amount of demand from candidates.

Re: I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today

#224

Post by granshaw »

jasonpeacock wrote: post #104
caymanjim wrote: post #85

Interviewing people is hard. Most people suck at it. I've interviewed over 100 people in my life, and I've been interviewed about ten times. I know I still suck at it. The code test is one of the more annoying facets of interviews. On the hiring side, it's an efficient way to screen and vet candidates for basic skills. It's relatively low cost to the employer to have a recruiter issue the test. If you come up with yo…

I've had interviews start very positively with such an approach of questions, but then "just to be thorough" I have them code something simple on the whiteboard and they completely fail. Some of them couldn't even get nested for loops to work correctly. If you're hiring someone to write code for you, you need to have them write code in the interview. There's no substitute for it. Obviously, you can improve the experi…

I went through a similar interview once - bring your own laptop, and code-up a bowling scorer which spanned two sets of interviewees. Was not the worst interview experience I've had.

Re: I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today

#225

Post by ryandrake »

caymanjim wrote: post #85

Interviewing people is hard. Most people suck at it. I've interviewed over 100 people in my life, and I've been interviewed about ten times. I know I still suck at it. The code test is one of the more annoying facets of interviews. On the hiring side, it's an efficient way to screen and vet candidates for basic skills. It's relatively low cost to the employer to have a recruiter issue the test. If you come up with yo…

When you need a doctor or lawyer or pilot, because they are certified, you at least know that they all have at least a bare minimum amount of competence. You may not know if they are elite ninja skilled, but you know they know the basics. Literally anyone can say they know how to program, and there is nothing on the resume that can confirm or deny this. I’ve interviewed Senior Software Engineers with years of experience who couldn’t complete a FizzBuzz-like task. Software engineering unfortunately does not have its own “bar exam” or board certification, so it has to be “Monkey Dance” over and over no matter how much experience you have. It’s frustrating both as an interviewer and as an interviewee, but until there exists a verifiable signal of competence for one’s resume, basic skills need to be tested over and over and over.

Re: I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today

#226

Post by granshaw »

HorizonXP wrote: post #215
pault wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My resume speaks for itself. At the time of this writing, I am working with someone who has 10+ years of experience, including former positions as a lead developer. I was involved in the interview process and made the recommendation to hire, as they were able to answer a lot of domain-specific questions very well and had a good knowledge of the ecosystem. Fast-forward three months, and I am spending hours per day s…

Would a better interview test be to ask the candidate to review code rather than write it themselves? That is, give them a code sample, describe what it aims to do, and ask: 1) Does this code accomplish the goal? 2) How would you improve this code to make it more readable? More efficient? Personally, I think I'd rather work with people that know how to review code and provide feedback/commentary, since that usually m…

I think both the ability to write, and (read+understand+effectively explain and give an opinion on existing code) are important, and the latter is severely under-appreciated in interviews

Re: I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today

#227

Post by jahewson »

collyw wrote: post #140
coleifer wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I studied for an interview and it paid off huge. Just treat it like a cs exam and you'll be fine.

I did that nearly 20 years ago. Why do I need to do it now?

Why did you do it 20 years ago?

Re: I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today

#229

Post by scarface74 »

SubuSS wrote: post #209
scarface74 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Acing an algorithm type interview has little to do with answering questions like can you translate business problems into working systems? Do you know whether you should be writing this code at all or use a third party solution? Do you know how not to gold plate a solution and ship software? Can you solve a performance issue with a process that may not involve code but involve another part of the stack?

We have ~4 hours to judge a candidate. Like it or not, we are going to have to choose :) The complex questions, if I can get answers are awesome. They are also the ones that are hard to objectively describe. Based on the number of blogs read, candidate charisma, my own work pressures - there is a big chance a senior enough person can wave their hands through those. Hence the tilt towards the surety of coding. Also TB…

I’m on the opposite end of the spectrum. I work for small companies mostly and I’ve conducted interviews for small companies. We have a limited budget for a limited number of positions. One developer can be working on a project that can individually move the needle. We need to hire “engineers” in the truest sense of the word not “coders”.

For instance, currently my title is “senior software engineer”. But I am the “Directly Responsible Individual” for a project that one of our clients is paying for. It will be added to our core product.

This means that I’m expected to interact with the client and BA to come up with the SOW, work with the product manager/UX person to design the interface, do some of the web work, write the backend using one of our approved languages (C#, Javascript, Python) , design the database schema, do all of the CI/CD setup and to know the AWS fiddly bits and know which services are appropriate for the asynchronous processing requirements.

I’m no special snowflake, this is life in small companies since my first job 20 years ago.

I don’t interview candidates for algorithms. I interview them to know whether they can hit the ground running on as much of our (industry standard) technology stack as possible, will they make good architectural decisions, can they ship a feature across the finish line, how fast they pick up new frameworks and will they embarrass us with customers and senior management.

LeetCode ability does us no good. I want to know whether you can translate real world business requirements into a working system - including knowing which questions to ask when customers/product managers come to you with “XY Problems”.

Re: I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today

#230

Post by Stronico »

drugme wrote: post #217
Stronico wrote: post #110

When interviewing people I usually push until I get the candidate to answer "I don't know" on SOMETHING, just to see if they can do it. Not everyone can, and a lot of people will happily come up with a technical word salad to hide their perfectly understandable ignorance on some obscure technical problem I just came up with. That way you get to hear how they ask technical questions. Asking questions is a valuable (an…

When interviewing people I usually push until I get the candidate to answer "I don't know" on SOMETHING, "just because I can". To me this technique comes off as condescending and manipulative, and smells like a power play basically. Not to mention - the better candidates will pick up on it, and your company will eventually get a reputation it doesn't want to have. And really there's no need for it. Time and time agai…

Not just because I can - interviews are always time limited, and technical conversations always (pleasantly) meander across many topics, usually the strengths of the people talking. It's easy to for someone to spend an hour talking about their strengths - interviews usually need some sort of direction to get useful information.

And it would be manipulative if there were some answer I was going for that wasn't true - I'm trying to elicit an honest response.

Post reply on HN