repo name is on point
A guide to learning algorithms through LeetCode
161–170 of 222 posts
Re: A guide to learning algorithms through LeetCode
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the big unspoken reasons these questions stick around: they cause little imposter syndrome anxiety for the senior engineers who need to conduct the interview. You ask a candidate to code a toy problem, and the candidate either knows the "trick" to solving it quickly or they don't -- very little risk for you as the interviewer, you're just watching things play out. But if your interview requires you to pair pro…
>And that's a shame because the live coding exercise is both a better predictor of hands-on job success and it's a better recruiting tactic I'm very interested in this claim. Every interviewing-is-broken thread, someone mentions that pairing, or take-home exercises, or work samples, or their favorite method, are better predictors than algorithm problems. On the one hand I doubt any but the biggest companies could con…
Even for the biggest companies the analysis is only going to be as good as the internal performance measuring system and how can a company gain confidence that is working?
There was a long discussion in the GCP thread yesterday about what google has been hiring and promoting for over the last ten years and what culture that produced. Any look-back at hiring methodology vs success at google is going to embed that implicit strategy. Among other things that means another company should very much not extrapolate from Google’s experience—-even if it is based on solid data analysis—-unless they are trying to replicate that culture.
Re: A guide to learning algorithms through LeetCode
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
> why do you have to prove it for every next job Obviously, each company can't blindly trust the interviewing practices of everyone's previous employer. > Ageism - not many seniors are desperate enough or have a free time for Competitive Programming preps. In my experience, senior developers don't need anywhere near as much prep as junior developers for these interviews. Leetcode problems are difficult when you're a…
> Obviously, each company can't blindly trust the interviewing practices of everyone's previous employer. Yet, they copycat each other on this. > after you've been programming for 10 years ...as I said, you're not desperate enough, so you become picky how you spend your time. > Companies aren't going out of their way to make it harder to hire good employees into their own companies. Lowering the churn rate has a high…
Very few companies to need people that have very strong CS skills. CS skills are mostly useful for doing CS. For example designing and analyzing an algorithm that’s more efficient than any other algorithm at sorting integers with an average of 10^40 digits on a three tag Turing machine.
While CP skills also aren’t terrible useful for most companies, they are closer than CS skills. What’s really needed are software engineering skills but unfortunately our most prestigious institutions think it’s beneath them to teach that.
Re: A guide to learning algorithms through LeetCode
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
The bonus is pretty formulaic with fixed performance multipliers - if you're doing poorly enough to get substantially less than the target bonus, you're at risk of losing your job and comp is the least of your worries. And you absolutely can pay the bills by selling the stock when it vests. Agreed on the mortgage part though.
What's the typical vesting schedule? The companies I spoke you would get the equity after four years. Not even a part each year. The offered 0.00[0]5 equity is not great. I think the packages in US are just much better compared to UK/Europe or maybe they just gave me shitty deals. My offer at one of the FAANG in UK was £85k + 50 stock + discretionary bonus (they didn't give details).
For a FB offer in the US I saw but ended up not taking the RSUs started vesting in the first month. I treated that part of the offer as cash equivalent but with an uncertainty factor (could be more, could be less but wasn’t going to be nothing.)
Re: A guide to learning algorithms through LeetCode
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
The popular sentiment on computer science knowledge has done a complete 180 in the past several years. Not that long ago, it was popular to complain that junior SWEs didn't really understand the algorithms, the data structures, and what was going on behind the scenes. The complaint was that they were just copy and pasting from internet searches until things sort of worked on their machine, but they couldn't recognize…
> Personally, I've never met anyone who was good at Leetcode yet produced bad code in production. I'm sure there's someone out there who knows a guy who knows a guy who can somehow ace Leetcode but can't write an efficient website backend, but it's not the norm. Weird. Ability to leetcode doesn't mean you know what is happening in e.g. an RDBMS. We've had people good at leetcode write a single query to delete hundred…
> We've had people good at leetcode write a single query to delete hundreds of millions of records in a table with billions of records that was being constantly updated by the live website.
You didn't have anyone reviewing their code and mentoring them? No one reviewed their design before it went into production? If no, why not? If yes, why wasn't the problem caught then?
Re: A guide to learning algorithms through LeetCode
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
>And that's a shame because the live coding exercise is both a better predictor of hands-on job success and it's a better recruiting tactic I'm very interested in this claim. Every interviewing-is-broken thread, someone mentions that pairing, or take-home exercises, or work samples, or their favorite method, are better predictors than algorithm problems. On the one hand I doubt any but the biggest companies could con…
Even for the biggest companies the analysis is only going to be as good as the internal performance measuring system and how can a company gain confidence that is working? There was a long discussion in the GCP thread yesterday about what google has been hiring and promoting for over the last ten years and what culture that produced. Any look-back at hiring methodology vs success at google is going to embed that impl…
can you link to that thread? Does it dig into how a focus on rote memorization of leetcode, has made a subtle influence in how the interface/systems are designed?
Re: A guide to learning algorithms through LeetCode
#167[deleted]
Re: A guide to learning algorithms through LeetCode
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even for the biggest companies the analysis is only going to be as good as the internal performance measuring system and how can a company gain confidence that is working? There was a long discussion in the GCP thread yesterday about what google has been hiring and promoting for over the last ten years and what culture that produced. Any look-back at hiring methodology vs success at google is going to embed that impl…
can you link to that thread? Does it dig into how a focus on rote memorization of leetcode, has made a subtle influence in how the interface/systems are designed?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24167260
It’s more about building new things vs maintaining / improving existing things.
Re: A guide to learning algorithms through LeetCode
#16916+ years of experience and won several awards and designed multiple highly scalable systems in retail. Still cannot get into faang. These coding interviews gate keeping me..
Re: A guide to learning algorithms through LeetCode
#170Thank you for your guide. I do apologize in advance, but this tutorial, like others, simply goes into the _what_ to do and doesn't explain the _why_.
Forever math will be about memorizing these "tricks" and not understanding it intuitively - can someone please help offer some suggestions to me?