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So I've always wondered about these leetcode interviews, having never suffered one myself, if you're given one you've seen before, are you still supposed to pretend you're working it out from first principles?
So I've always wondered about these leetcode interviews, having never suffered one myself, if you're given one you've seen before, are you still supposed to pretend you're working it out from first principles?
When I started practicing leetcode, I underestimate the amount of work to be ready (they say that you should solve 100 problems, I think it's much higher, but obviously some guys are smarter than others...).
That being said, I'm 50-75% of myself during an interview. I managed to fail at questions that I did several times before.
The experience is also different from one interviewer to the next. You can have a guy who asks an easy question, provides help, and still give very positive feedback because he was happy with the way you communicate and explain your algorithm. Then you can have an interviewer (usually more junior ones) who asks a "trick" question that there's no way of solving if you havent' seen it before.
This was my take on interviewing with Amazon at one point a long while ago. The initial interview itself was pretty straight forward, but it seemed like every answer I gave was "wrong" because the interviewer was looking for key phrases instead of understanding of the concepts. We talked about hashing, and when he asked if I knew what hashing was I said sure, its a one-way function to create a unique identifier. He a…
I don't take crap like this from interviewers. One time an interviewer asked me "how would you go about counting the ridges of a US quarter?" I rattled off some ideas about counting the ridges in an arc and then multiplying to get total ridges but the interviewer kept prodding and eventually ended the question and said he was looking for me to say "google it" (I didn't realize it was a known, fixed number). I just ro…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think this is representative. I did about 20+ technical interviews at Google/Facebook over the last 2 years. Overall, the interviewers were competent. Sometimes you could tell that they didn't really enjoy interviewing people but it was ok. I only had one interviewer I'd consider bad (gave confused advice to lead me to his solution), but maybe it was just a personality mismatch. I had better experience with m…
> I did about 20+ technical interviews at Google/Facebook over the last 2 years. That seems like a huge number of interviews. Are you counting each interviewer as a distinct interview? Even then, that seems like a lot for 2 years!
The guy in charge of those before me was the kind that use aha question with no relevance whatsoever. Pure ego trip. If that guy had interviewe me I would have said "I don't know" a few times and eventually get up and leave.
For my candidates, I tried a few things. Now I've got it down to explain to me your last project. I ask questions until I've understood every little detail of the project. Then we code a few simple "exercises" with increasing "difficulty". The candidate is allowed google, documentation, questions, anything. Then we read code. A piece of code with a "bug" or a feature to add.
The key is to make them talk about concept from impérative, fonctionnal and object paradigm and interact like a junior and senior dev would in a dev team.
I found that junior candidates react pretty well to these. Some of them thank me for having had the opportunity to learn about new things like functionnal programming. It's pretty cool and I feel that make them want to join us most of the time.
Articles like this always underestimate how many bullshit artists there are out there. The technical interview is not perfect but it is still far more meritocratic than many fields.
It's a pretty small problem, but it's still one that needs some thought to get. Also doesn't weed out people who don't know technical details of a red-black binary tree (for example) without necessarily getting rid of people who could quickly pick up what a red-black binary tree is.
This was my take on interviewing with Amazon at one point a long while ago. The initial interview itself was pretty straight forward, but it seemed like every answer I gave was "wrong" because the interviewer was looking for key phrases instead of understanding of the concepts. We talked about hashing, and when he asked if I knew what hashing was I said sure, its a one-way function to create a unique identifier. He a…
I had a similar experience at Apple where my experience lined up well with the position. I felt like the interviewers were hostile - repeatedly asking weirdly pointed questions about hashing too!
I agree. We recently got rid of our more traditional "tech screen" and replaced it with a 90 minute realistic programming interview. We have 3 tests we give depending on the role (game dev, backend, or SRE). The tests replicate typical work the engineer would be doing, such as adding functionality to a 2D game, developing out a web service for a given API, or debugging and optimizing a linux server. We provide a deve…
I agree. We recently got rid of our more traditional "tech screen" and replaced it with a 90 minute realistic programming interview. We have 3 tests we give depending on the role (game dev, backend, or SRE). The tests replicate typical work the engineer would be doing, such as adding functionality to a 2D game, developing out a web service for a given API, or debugging and optimizing a linux server. We provide a deve…
A fallback for shorter question is to ask for a something with many possible answers, as typically somebody more experienced will have many answers besides the most popular ones. (server A can't ping server B, what can be the reasons?)
Articles like this always underestimate how many bullshit artists there are out there. The technical interview is not perfect but it is still far more meritocratic than many fields.
Also, there's no correlation between the ability to pass a technical interview and the ability to do the job after you're hired. This has been well tested by just about all of the big 5 plus the interviewing.io blog.