I don't see how you can call it a "Stack Overflow for X" if it doesn't have voting.
Yeah and it is already full of terrible replies to questions with no way to downvote or even comment on why they are wrong.
XOR Swap - Stack Overflow for Tech Interview Questions
21–30 of 42 posts
Re: XOR Swap - Stack Overflow for Tech Interview Questions
#22Career Cup has been doing this for quite a while -- http://www.careercup.com/
Re: XOR Swap - Stack Overflow for Tech Interview Questions
#23Haha, this is just the logical successor to brain dumps http://mcse-braindumps.net/ "if you read our exam dumps Seriously, you will pass the exam 100%" vs "candidates will be able to leap through the common hurdles of technical interviews" These sites do neither candidates nor interviewers any favours.
It depends on the type of technical interview. If it's the sort of drivel that HR throws at coders then the less in the world the better. There are circumstances where this would be beneficial however. For my Google internship interview I searched for examples of the questions they'd ask both to put myself at ease and also to practice. I didn't go searching for questions so I could recite the answer during the interv…
Side note, but stretching before exercise increases the chance of injury.
http://sportsmedicine.about.com/cs/flexibility/a/aa022102a.h...
Re: XOR Swap - Stack Overflow for Tech Interview Questions
#24Sites 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 m…
more tech savvy guys don't want to waste time with interviews
"I had all sorts of perverse incentives to not interview people."
"If you wanted to get promoted for these non-engineering tasks, move into management."
The HN thread was exellent as well with 135 comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1865099
Re: XOR Swap - Stack Overflow for Tech Interview Questions
#25I 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…
I think that's a good idea but I don't know if it would work. Some of these questions would take a TON of work to actually complete. I think people are answering them in the way they would answer it in an interview.
One of the questions is 'Design a Twitter-like social network web application'. This is obviously not a small or quick project. I'm guessing Google asks this in the hopes of getting a hand-wavy answer and analyzing you based on that. I'm not saying your idea shouldn't happen (it would make an interesting site) but I don't know that it would work for all the questions.
Re: XOR Swap - Stack Overflow for Tech Interview Questions
#26What'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…
It's pretty easy to tell when a candidate has the answer memorized, and it is pretty easy to push them to explain their answer beyond what sites like this give. If they can't tell you things about how their answer would scale, what the tradeoffs are, why they used data structures they did, and what they'd do with slight modifications to the question, they probably won't just skate through the interview.
Re: XOR Swap - Stack Overflow for Tech Interview Questions
#27I 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/
Kinda sorta... code golf is all about making the smallest solution, which is an interesting challenge, but not one you'd necessarily want to use in practice. Most of the winning answers have a high degree of obfuscation.
Re: XOR Swap - Stack Overflow for Tech Interview Questions
#28Most 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.
I agree with you. If the point of "prep" for an interview is memorizing and reviewing stuff you haven't used in years, and will likely never use while you're employed at the place where you are interviewing, then it's largely meaningless. It's just cramming for an exam, instead of meaningfully understanding and using concepts. And don't get me started on "brain teasers," which don't tell you anything at all meaningful about a candidate.
Better questions work something like this: what's the most challenging technical problem you had to solve in your last job? Why was it so challenging? What did you have to learn to solve it?
Re: XOR Swap - Stack Overflow for Tech Interview Questions
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
The actual Stack Exchange for Progamming Puzzles / Interview Questions / etc is at http://codegolf.stackexchange.com/
Kinda sorta... code golf is all about making the smallest solution, which is an interesting challenge, but not one you'd necessarily want to use in practice. Most of the winning answers have a high degree of obfuscation.
True, that's what the definition of codegolf is but that particular site actually allows more than just codegolf (including puzzles that would be given on interviews). The name is not encompassing of what the site is about (I'm sure they've been discussing this problem on the meta).
Re: XOR Swap - Stack Overflow for Tech Interview Questions
#30I welcome sites like this. By spreading the answers to these largely contrived questions, perhaps we can get employers to move to methods which actually reveal one's ability to get stuff done and create value.