I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today • Hacker News Board

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

#391

Post by sokoloff » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 9:56 PM UTC

pault wrote: post #348

ikiris wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... so you're not paying enough to entice them. Which is what was said three posts up.

Thanks. Unfortunately we can't afford to pay front end developers $300k/year. And what we are paying is more than competitive. It's not an issue of pay, it's an issue of availability and not having the resources to stalk and poach developers from other companies. We also have a generous internal referral bonus, and various recruiters sourcing candidates. Is there something else I'm missing? Edit: I don't think you ar…

If you have budget for two poor front end devs, IMO you’re way better off paying 1.5x and getting one good one, if comp is the sticking point for landing a good front-end dev.

“We can’t afford that!” “But you can waste money on two crappy devs?!”

(If you only have budget for one, the cash flow doesn’t work, of course.)

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

#392

Post by janee » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 9:58 PM UTC

achenatx wrote: post #345

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…

ok Im stumped :) Would be interested to read some clarification on this. the try always throws an exception, and if i If continue returns to the beginning of the for loop then I could see that the code is pointless. But if continue resumes execution inside of dosomething the line after the exception was thrown, then it could actually be useful. Is your issue that the code does actually work, but conceptually it is ho…

Yeah it's pretty weird. Was trying to think of something that would need this exact behavior, assuming it's legit...maybe parsing some piece of text where you expect a fourth part only if the third was parsed successfully and you don't care about the outcome of the previous two ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Scenarios like this scare the bejubus outta me, it's like a business logic landmine waiting for a refactor tractor to drive over

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

#393

Post by blub » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 9:58 PM UTC

billti wrote: post #322

malvosenior wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience (also interviewing hundreds of people) this is totally an urban (internet) legend. Not once has someone been able to talk intelligently and at length about a project they built and the underlying technology choices and then been unable to deliver. Once you gain experience building things yourself, it's pretty easy to suss out whether someone is any good just by talking to them. No coding tests needed…

I've interviewed hundreds of candidates over more than 20 years. I've lost count of the number of times that a candidate has talked-the-talk so well that I'm thinking "This guy/girl is amazing. They're a shoe-in. Better do a little coding just to make sure"... and then they literally couldn't even get close to solving something like fizz-buzz. I agree asking highly specialized, deep CS-algorithm type problems is usua…

My guess is that either your interview is too much fluff, and not enough technical detail, or you're intimidating the candidates and they get lost.

It makes zero sense that someone can have a deep technical discussion but they're not able to write fizz buzz (which by the way is a crap exercise). Sure, if one is asking general questions about agile, TDD, SOLID and other fluff, anyone can answer those.

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

#394

Post by scarface74 » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 9:59 PM UTC

varjag wrote: post #385

blub wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I must have written a couple dozen sorts, but only in high-school or when preparing for interviews. It's the one thing that is very well supported in most programming languages. C++ has stable/unstable sorts, partial sorts, whatever you want. Accepting things like bubble sort also makes the exercise doubly pointless.

Since people still fail it, even with all might of Google at their command, even with bubblesort allowed , it's anything but pointless. And if you are unable to sort an array it's a strong signal that command in all other areas of CS is lacking. Does C++ has a standard library for RSTP? Do you think a person who can't sort an array after 5 years of school would be able to fix a bug in a switch' spanning tree implemen…

It depends on the position. If I’m looking for a developer for yet another software as a service CRUD app, I may not need anyone that understands “CS fundamentals”. Heck it’s been 20+ years since I graduated from college with my CS degree and over a decade since I’ve had to do any low level programming.

Does C++ has a standard library for RSTP?

Maybe not, but I know that there are very few new problems under the sun that most people face and someone has solved the problem before. I also know how to use Google.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1460010/best-c-rtp-rtsp-...

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

#395

Post by varjag » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 10:01 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #394

varjag wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since people still fail it, even with all might of Google at their command, even with bubblesort allowed , it's anything but pointless. And if you are unable to sort an array it's a strong signal that command in all other areas of CS is lacking. Does C++ has a standard library for RSTP? Do you think a person who can't sort an array after 5 years of school would be able to fix a bug in a switch' spanning tree implemen…

It depends on the position. If I’m looking for a developer for yet another software as a service CRUD app, I may not need anyone that understands “CS fundamentals”. Heck it’s been 20+ years since I graduated from college with my CS degree and over a decade since I’ve had to do any low level programming. Does C++ has a standard library for RSTP? Maybe not, but I know that there are very few new problems under the sun…

You mixed up RSTP with RTSP, I would revisit my Googling skills if I were you.. making a beautiful case though for this kind of interview process.

(before you go on googling again, the algorithm operates over the switch port forwarding fabric, you can't really use a library)

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

#396

Post by titusjohnson » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 10:01 PM UTC

pault wrote: post #365

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This question is really tricky, though: depending on your frontend stack, the answer could be in an event handler prop (e.g. onClick). In mapDispatchToProps, in a thunk, in a saga, etc.

Correct. Any one of those answers would be acceptable :) (except mapDispatchToProps, that will fire the API request every time an action is dispatched anywhere in your app). Also, the context of the question is very specifically "within redux", and all I'm looking for is an understanding that redux is synchronous by default and asynchronous logic has to be performed in a middleware. If your answer is "put it in liter…

Plumbers with 3 years of experience fixing toilets are usually still in their Apprenticeship programs. Around year 4 or 5 they'll graduate to Journeyman at which point they're authorized to work without the supervision of a more senior plumber. You hired a plumber to fix your toilet, but you have a waterless composting toilet and your plumber's knowledge is still at the level of "water and poo goes down the pipes".

Your hiring woes will get easier to handle once you start treating the Competent Sr React+Redux Developer role as rare. React is certainly popular tech, but solid knowledge of the ecosystem is still far from common. All the places I've done react at had ~10 frontend capable devs, but only 1 or 2 people who really knew what was going on.

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

#397

Post by pault » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 10:02 PM UTC

geebee wrote: post #367

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…

Wow. That's a hell of a loop. That said, this does seem like another reiteration of the "senior engineer couldn't write fizz buzz" story, though this particular example is amusing. I can write fizz buzz. Hell, I've interviewed enough that I can print all permutations of a string (or all permutations of a set and/or subsets of that set). I used to be able to implement merge sort in 45 minutes at the whiteboard, but I…

That's all true, but it's not really relevant to what I was saying. We don't do whiteboard interviews; that was some code I found during a code review. My original comment was in response to the assertion "my resume speaks for itself", and was simply meant to serve as a counter example. A lot of people seem to have interpreted it as "interviews should involve complex whiteboard programming" and/or "you should always use redux for your back office CRUD apps".

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

#398

Post by scarface74 » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 10:04 PM UTC

blub wrote: post #390

scarface74 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 “D…

Ummm... weren't you claiming in a comment the other day that you use FizzBuzz to interview candidates?

No, I was defending the use of FizzBuzz as a “Bozo filter”. But FizzBuzz is so commonplace that it is meaningless.

I have been able to weed out candidates by asking them to do an isOdd() function as part of a pair programming exercise. It was still the Bozo filter before I gave them harder problems. Similar in complexity. But even that, I’ve done with an IDE with a skeletal class and failing corresponding unit tests.

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

#399

Post by pault » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 10:05 PM UTC

titusjohnson wrote: post #379

pault wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what we've resigned ourselves to, but it's very expensive. We're building crud apps, not doing cutting edge research, so I assumed we would be able to find someone that is already up to speed on the language and frameworks. You also have to factor in the cost of senior developer time spent coaching, the lost productivity, and the code quality suffering in the meantime.

You might be shooting yourself in the foot by having not picking an ecosystem that better supports your business case. No one I know who's good at React+Redux would pick a CRUD app as the domain they'd like to exercise those skills in.

The app in question is used by retail employees at hundreds of locations to manage inventory. It runs on a tablet, has to work offline, and has a very dynamic UI that has to keep thousands of complex relational entities in local state, and perform aggregate functions on them in real time. It's still a CRUD app, but it's very much the use case for a SPA.

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

#400

Post by blub » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 10:09 PM UTC

hjk05 wrote: post #338

docker_up wrote: post #280

I am preparing myself for a week of onsite interviews as we speak. Of course I hate them, but what other choice do I have? The biggest problem is that the questions are so random and span almost anything. Will I get asked: a pthread question? implement mergesort or quicksort? implement a Read/Write lock? implement a smart pointer? a bit manipulation question? topological search? dynamic programming? graph question? b…

> It's utterly insane the expectations that interviewers have. Not really though. They always manage to fill the position. Interview’s see the system as unfair because they think their interview happens in a vacuum. You get x questions answer all correctly and your awarded with a job. So naturally you complain when you feel half the questions are too advanced or that more brain understanding is enough. In reality the…

> In reality the interviews are just a sorting, and when everyone can answer the relevant questions you start asking harder ones because “we picked a candidate at random from those who got the questions right” is just not a satisfying endstate.

That's just silly. If they can answer the relevant questions, they're qualified period.