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

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

#441

Post by andreareina »

tptacek wrote: post #346
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…

The problem is, your resume doesn't speak for itself, or, more accurately, resumes in general don't speak for themselves. It's not because people lie on their resumes, but because there's a pattern in this industry of people failing laterally and upwards. It takes much longer than people assume to get a dysfunctional team member off the payroll. In most shops, new hires spend months in a (reasonable!) reduced-expecta…

How do you assess juniors? I feel like the desired quality there is how coachable they are and their capacity to develop said technical chops, but that feels even murkier to suss out, especially in the time-limited recruitment/interview process.

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

#442

Post by rswail »

wyclif wrote: post #430
tptacek wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, your resume doesn't speak for itself, or, more accurately, resumes in general don't speak for themselves. It's not because people lie on their resumes, but because there's a pattern in this industry of people failing laterally and upwards. It takes much longer than people assume to get a dysfunctional team member off the payroll. In most shops, new hires spend months in a (reasonable!) reduced-expecta…

For a technical/IC role (really, any role), I'd be alarmed if I wasn't given practical tests to verify I can actually back up my talk Agreed, and let me offer an anecdotal, real-world example. Before I was in this racket, I used to be a land surveyor. Because it's both technical and licensed (and btw, I'm not going to make an argument for licensure, just mentioning it as a qualifier), you had to take a written test a…

This lays out the actual problem with programming "education" these days. Most people are not doing "computer science", they're doing a subject called "software engineering" when there's no actual engineering discipline involved. Programmers have "title inflation".

We would be much better off if the craft of programming was treated like other trades, requiring training and formal apprenticeships, with the necessary mentoring and signoff.

Programming is to CS as plumbing is to fluid dynamics. Knowing how to write a bubble sort is an irrelevant skill.

Knowing how to use the standard library in the environment is much more relevant.

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

#443

Post by mixmastamyk »

kevstev wrote: post #359
mixmastamyk wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> top tier talent at... Must be looking to get out for some reason. Doing a small side-project shouldn't be a big impediment. > I would avoid ever getting myself put into that position. Extreme risk-averse behavior can cause problems on the other side. Easy enough to give a small-project a try and cut out early when red-flags are actually encountered. Just the cost of doing business, IMHO.

They may be looking to get out, but you are essentially asking them to leave their current job so they can spend a month (or whatever) on a paid interview at your company. You are not only giving up your previous job, you are essentially giving up your ability to interview elsewhere as well. If this doesn't work out, either because you don't like me, or I don't like you, your business, the tech stack, whatever, I am…

Not sure what the other guy implied, but that’s not what I had in mind. Rather a side project type of thing. Little risk for anyone. No one has to quit.

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

#444

Post by rswail »

Isamu wrote: post #73
scottLobster wrote: post #12

In a few months I'm going to be sniffing around for embedded software engineering positions (c on microcontrollers, DSP, maybe even some PCB or FPGA design). I'm still buying a copy of cracking the coding interview and doing leetcode in the weeks leading up to applying for precisely this reason. It's dumb but I'm not going to give up an otherwise promising opportunity in protest, although in the interview I might pol…

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…

If I was hiring for this sort of position, I'd want them to talk about the difference between hard and soft real time. I'd want to know whether or not they were familiar with embedded software development standards and what sort of things are restricted from "normal" environments when you are working in the embedded environment.

The last thing I would want to see is lines of code on a whiteboard. I'd want to see how they'd structure their code, not whether or not they remember C/C++/Rust/language-de-jour syntax.

All of the proposals for questions that I've seen in this thread are for basic programming skills. Not whether or not the person knows the environment we are hiring for.

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

#445

Post by mixmastamyk »

Scarblac wrote: post #376
mixmastamyk wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> huge risk Folks do side projects all the time. How often do they describe it as a "huge risk?"

No, some folk do side projects all the time. Mostly very young folks without families or substantial hobbies.

We make time for things that are important. If not to you no problem, but not the impossible burden you make it sound.

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

#446

Post by rswail »

devanl wrote: post #439
maxxxxx wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s my impression too. I would expect more handcrafted code on embedded systems and you need more awareness of computational complexity and memory needs.

It's not as important as you would expect for a couple of reasons: 1. The size of the data is often much smaller - the savings from using an nlogn time algorithm vs a n^2 algorithm are much smaller when n=10 versus n=10000. There's a good chance that the constant time setup will dominate for those smaller datasets. 2. To a certain extent, embedded systems don't need to be as fast as possible - they just need to be "g…

This. If I'm in embedded land, especially hard real time, I don't care how quick something is, as long as it complies with the real time requirements.

Programmers will endlessly prematurely optimize. I'd much prefer to see simple code that can be understood and optimized where needed, rather than squirrely code that runs fast but is unmaintainable.

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

#447

Post by rswail »

bwoj wrote: post #69
reallydontask wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Companies that ask leet coding questions for DevOps probably have no idea what they're looking for and probably don't know what they're doing. I think it's a more a case of cargo culting rather than not necessarily knowing what they are doing, although that might also be the case in some instances.

Cargo-culting is literally not knowing what you're doing.

Cargo culting is knowing exactly what you are doing, but having a completely incorrect understanding of the potential result.

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

#448

Post by mixmastamyk »

scarface74 wrote: post #429
mixmastamyk wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't, but it does. We all know small businesses don't care about code quality. Ditto that best practices take a long time to trickle down from ivory towers to business, academia, to bootcamps. Companies pushing the status quo tend to cluster. Poster probably shouldn't have picked on the midwest, it could be anywhere outside "cutting-edge" software centers.

If you heard about all of the bad code at Twitter pre-IPO, large companies don’t care about code quality either.

Startups are a bit different in that it doesn’t make sense to pay down most debt until a profit stream is found.

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

#449

Post by kamaal »

pault wrote: post #205
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…

> 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…

Every body writes something like this. Every body. Just because some devs don't write this in a single block of code, and scatter them across program logic doesn't make them any better.

I've had developers balk at other developer's code for writing a series of like 100 if-else's until I show them, they do it themselves only that they scatter it. You could say this thing about nearly every OO programmer out there.

Everybody writes code that mutates state in a way that produces the kind of code you mentioned as an example.

It's only that some developers think they can never write bad code, while thinking other's almost always do.

This is one reason why some shops hire only OCaml, or Haskell or Clojure devs because bad devs tend to use those languages less. So you buy into a great community by default.

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

#450

Post by kamaal »

confusedcoder wrote: post #417
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…

Forgive me because I have used a similar idom when dealing with io. I do something like: for i=0; i Am I doing something stupid here?

Nothing. Probably the original developer was trying to do the same thing. There is always a context to what some one is doing.
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