The technical interview is an ego trip • Hacker News Board

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#111

Post by glangdale » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 1:04 AM UTC

commandlinefan wrote: post #66

glangdale wrote: post #47

Ego Trip is the right phrase. A lot of the traditional algorithms puzzler interviews amount to the material being covered in an adversarial, closed-book fashion for the interviewee, after the interviewer has themselves gotten to master the material in a "at your leisure" fashion with an open book. I wouldn't mind getting asked nasty questions about red-black trees or Krushkal vs Prim or something if I knew the person…

> Ego Trip is the right phrase Well, here's the thing about that, though... somebody does eventually pass these interviews. It may be a tough blow to your own ego to realize that you actually weren't the best candidate out there, or that somebody more qualified than you would be willing to accept a position that you yourself are just qualified enough for, but probing the competence of the candidate is entirely the po…

I like how you are assuming that I'm writing this out of sour grapes. I've never failed a technical interview. As always, there are an ample supply of folks (of, ahem, rather varying achievement levels) on Hacker News who always seem to fondly imagine themselves on peering dubiously over their glasses at my while I supplicate for a job. :-)

Maybe you could try to apply the supposed Hacker News rule of not assuming the person you are responding to is a complete idiot? I'm startled to think that you assume that I wouldn't understand that interviews are typically competitive processes where some people get hired in the end and (at sufficiently desirable jobs) most people don't.

Instead, you could maybe think through whether "competence" == "ability to pass typical BigCo coding interviews" and my actual point? Really, basically any of my points? I have met, and worked with, people in all 4 quadrants of that particular pair of qualities.

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#112

Post by lwigo » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 1:05 AM UTC

Impossible wrote: post #73

umvi wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's funny that his expected answer was "Google it". In most cases when people answer with that (it could be the answer for any tech interview question...) you get encouraged to actually do the problem, so it's a time waster. For the interviewer it gives them no signal outside of you having the ability and awareness of the existence of search engines, although there could be some vague behavioral signal that shows yo…

What was the answer?

Years ago Zynga asked me how would I design a vending machine for blind people which was annoying because I asked it immediately back and clearly they hadn't even thought about it themselves. But then I brought up Ian Bogost and it was a hard stop basically, lol.

edit: Is it health? Like health tracking / indication? Not all games require it but maybe in the right context this would be the most important. This is snarky but I think you could run with it (health being the most important "number").

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#113

Post by fancyfish » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 1:06 AM UTC

nilkn wrote: post #85

sushisource wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say this happens semi consistently to me when I get rejected. I did a tech screen (of which this is the first I've ever failed). I chose to do it in Rust as that's my main language these days. I probably should've reconsidered that decision as Rust is notoriously difficult when it comes to dealing with trees and I spend most of my time managing pointers. I described a solution to the tree problem quickly, impleme…

This is why Python is my dedicated coding interview language. You could do something far more impressive in C++ or Rust, but if you don't quite finish the full implementation it's an automatic fail with some interviewers even if you had to take into account many nuances that a Python solution wouldn't.

Agreed - I’ve learned that interviewers care more about getting the end result in the time window than demonstrating lower-level skills.

Choose 1) The easiest high level language you can, and 2) the language used by the interviewer/firm.

Think of it like trying to be as much like the interviewer himself/herself, in both coding and communication.

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#114

Post by tootie » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 1:08 AM UTC

TheCapn wrote: post #10

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…

Same. Worse is when they ask open-ended design questions. Like "How would you design 1-hour shipping?" which I was asked. I've done many, many new product designs and the process is deliberately meant to take weeks. I have, in real life, been asked to design a system on a 45-minute call and my professional answer was "no". I have no idea if they're looking for brainstorm, process, architecture or my ability to question. But honestly it's not enough time for even one of those.

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#115

Post by leafboi » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 1:09 AM UTC

roflc0ptic wrote: post #56

Man. I interviewed somewhere last week for a Scala position, advertising myself as a functional programmer. In the interview, they asked me, "What's the difference between fold left and fold right?" I said "Um, one of them starts on the left side of the data structure, one of them starts on the right. I never remember which is which." They said essentially: "okay. The answer I was looking for was that fold right is n…

Assuming the data structure is a singly linked list than yes it's not stack safe.

At a high level foldLeft and foldRight represent abstraction leakage. The Domain and Codomain for both functions are exactly the same. If there is no performance difference or side effects to consider then there is almost no point in having two fold functions as a plain fold has the exact same inputs and outputs as foldLeft or foldRight.

Typically for side effects you don't want to put it in a fold as you're integrating way too much IO with your functional computations. Rather functional languages tend to have something along the lines of "foreach" for using side effects on the content in a functor. That being said it's strange that scala has a foldLeft and a foldRight with identical performance characteristics. Maybe it's a legacy thing. I dunno, not a scala guy.

Just bringing that up. I still agree with you that the interview question sucked and that the interviewer was wrong. Personally I wouldn't have ever figured out that was what the interviewer was looking for even when I do possess the requisite knowledge.

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#116

Post by leafboi » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 1:13 AM UTC

x87678r wrote: post #17

One issue is very few people get interview training. I have interviewed maybe 100 people but had to figure it out for myself what works. I wish I could apologize to the first few dozen.

Another thing to consider is even if you interviewed that many people there's really know way to evaluate your interview accuracy and performance unless you work with all 100 people.

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#117

Post by stygiansonic » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 1:14 AM UTC

jameshush wrote: post #21

aphextron wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should just have a template to fill out for these posts

I'm smelling a great "Show HN: Using GPT-2 to create comments for a post about tech interviews" submission :)

The kicker is that such a submission should be generated by GPT-3 itself

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#118

Post by jaaron » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 1:15 AM UTC

lazyant wrote: post #79

jaaron wrote: post #26

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…

"scalable" (not sure about that name) questions or scenarios are the best to gauge competency. I do them although it's pretty hard to come up with good ones. 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?)

Yes, scalable problems are the best, but can be difficult to devise.

A lot of folks tend to go the "optimization" route, by having a problem with multiple ways of extracting more performance, typically by better algorithms or data structures. These are ok, but not great. Most candidates will reasonably start with a simple naive solution that works and then try to optimize, but time may not allow for that and the optimization may require significant rewriting of the solution. So unless you either start out with the optimized solution or you have a lot of time, you're unlikely to ever see those solutions.

I tend to prefer scaling via scope.

For example, for our game engineering test, we start with a half-finished 2D "game" (think something like pacman). We then have a list of functionality that can be added with increasing difficulty. This allows us to measure "seniority" by both (a) how far down the list they get and (b) the quality of the individual solutions.

Another example is starting with a single threaded solution and then extending into a multi-threaded or multi-process solution.

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#119

Post by whycombagator » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 1:16 AM UTC

yodsanklai wrote: post #74

eindiran wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

I applied two times at Facebook, and two times at Google (they contacted me each time at one year interval). Each time was 0 to 2 screening interviews, then 5 to 7 on-site interviews. Yes, I'm counting each interviewer as a separate interview (not counting discussions with the recruiter, but counting "culture fit" interviews).

Not entirely on topic, but could you share what your preparation was like for these interviews? Resources/timelines etc

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#120

Post by Impossible » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 1:20 AM UTC

lwigo wrote: post #112

Impossible wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny that his expected answer was "Google it". In most cases when people answer with that (it could be the answer for any tech interview question...) you get encouraged to actually do the problem, so it's a time waster. For the interviewer it gives them no signal outside of you having the ability and awareness of the existence of search engines, although there could be some vague behavioral signal that shows yo…

What was the answer? Years ago Zynga asked me how would I design a vending machine for blind people which was annoying because I asked it immediately back and clearly they hadn't even thought about it themselves. But then I brought up Ian Bogost and it was a hard stop basically, lol. edit: Is it health? Like health tracking / indication? Not all games require it but maybe in the right context this would be the most i…

The answer was 3 I think, referring to rock paper scissors balance relationships in RTS games, and fighting games, but it was Zynga in 2011 so they were mostly thinking about casual strategy. I think I said 1 at first because the question was kind of silly and I trend toward reductive answers with silly questions.

response to your edit: Your interpretation of the question makes a little more sense. He was talking about a specific number, not a concept\variable that is common in games. For Zynga I'd probably say energy or money or something, although any tracked resource that determines loss, victory or progression would work for your version.