I don't see how you can call it a "Stack Overflow for X" if it doesn't have voting.
Not that I agree with them, but it is a Q/A site which I see as the bare minimum for being compared to the stack exchange sites.
XOR Swap - Stack Overflow for Tech Interview Questions
11–20 of 42 posts
Re: XOR Swap - Stack Overflow for Tech Interview Questions
#12I think "XOR Swap" sums up my opinion on most Tech Interview Questions.
The only question I would ever ask about the XOR Swap trick would probably be "Give 3 reasons never to use this" (assuming you are in a language as least as high level as C).
Re: XOR Swap - Stack Overflow for Tech Interview Questions
#13Is this a Stackexchange site? Or a separate unaffiliated site that's, er, heavily influenced by Stackoverflow's ui?
Re: XOR Swap - Stack Overflow for Tech Interview Questions
#14Is this a Stackexchange site? Or a separate unaffiliated site that's, er, heavily influenced by Stackoverflow's ui?
It is not a Stack Exchange site. The closest SE site on this topic would be the programming puzzles site at http://codegolf.stackexchange.com/
Re: XOR Swap - Stack Overflow for Tech Interview Questions
#15I think this project would be far more useful as a computer-science-version of Project Euler (http://projecteuler.net/). People could then compete on full, working implementations of common interview questions in a variety of languages, that must execute on e.g. Codepad (http://codepad.org/), rather than posting what seem to be really wishy-washy, hand-wavy answers to puerile questions.
Then, perhaps with strong moderation, only questions that demand some compromises should be accepted. e.g. implement a container that can be traversed both forwards and backwards. What are the complexities of your container? How could you improve X, and what would the cost be? etc.
Re: XOR Swap - Stack Overflow for Tech Interview Questions
#16What's the goal of this site? I'm not sure I'd want to ask someone a question that they may have already read the answer to. When I interview someone, I want to know what they actually know or can figure out with hints, not whether they have Googled for the right list of questions. Edit: oh, even worse, it tags them by the company that asks the question. Great. I'm sure those companies will appreciate having to come…
Glassdoor has already been revealing companies' interview questions for years - I'm not sure why you're getting worked up now.
Re: XOR Swap - Stack Overflow for Tech Interview Questions
#17What's the goal of this site? I'm not sure I'd want to ask someone a question that they may have already read the answer to. When I interview someone, I want to know what they actually know or can figure out with hints, not whether they have Googled for the right list of questions. Edit: oh, even worse, it tags them by the company that asks the question. Great. I'm sure those companies will appreciate having to come…
Wouldn't hitting Google be the sensible option to answer a question that you are pretty sure that other developers are likely to have encountered before?
So you might as well test how well people can Google rather than solving a problem by themselves... :-)
Re: XOR Swap - Stack Overflow for Tech Interview Questions
#18Sites like this make me sad. For some reason it reminds me of an article I recently read in the New Yorker about Magnus Carlsen and his comments about how widespread use of chess software and databases is ruining human chess, because people have started to think like the computers. Too much reliance on information, less on originality.
Based on my experience, A lot of tech interviews in large companies nowadays are mostly done by young people who have limited understanding of what a good employee is (because more tech savvy guys don't want to waste time with interviews) and who therefore keep asking rote questions like: "how do you shuffle a deck of cards", or (my favorite) "What is the 'mutable' keyword do?" and string matching the answer to the right one in their minds. This in turn has affected the interview preparation process, consisting mostly of memorizing the answers to the rote questions.
Which (as the architect in The Matrix said) has led the would-be coders, inexorably, here and similar sites.
Re: XOR Swap - Stack Overflow for Tech Interview Questions
#19Most of the good candidates I have interviewed prepare a lot for interviews already so I doubt this helps them much. All of the bad candidates I have interviewed do no prep work at all so this won't help them either.
Correlation could mean causation--perhaps you think the candidates are good as a result of their prepping.
Re: XOR Swap - Stack Overflow for Tech Interview Questions
#20I don't see how you can call it a "Stack Overflow for X" if it doesn't have voting.
The actual Stack Exchange for Progamming Puzzles / Interview Questions / etc is at http://codegolf.stackexchange.com/