131–140 of 206 posts
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?
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Not sure how common but this has happened to me as well. Coding challenge complete, follow-up interview scheduled... then cancelled. Rescheduled... then ghosted. It was a cheap way of figuring out I shouldn’t even consider working there.
> It was a cheap way of figuring out I shouldn’t even consider working there. I mean - all you're experiencing is the HR/recruitment side of the pipeline at that point. You can't really say that an entire company is shit just because some subset of its HR/recruiters do shitty things. How many CTO's actually give a shit about IC interviewing experience and dig into the entire methodology that recruiters use when inter…
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I don't know what the interviewers expect, but, generally, your "reward" for admitting you've seen the problem before is a harder question to answer. It seems more in the candidate's interest to pretend to work out the solution than to be honest.
Yeah, I've been asked a lot of leetcode questions and always pause for a couple minutes before the answer hits me in a "brilliant" stroke of insight. This con works really well.
It was at this point that I realized I have no chance of getting into FAANG when I'm playing low-level tactics like just trying to just solve two medium problems in <40 minutes with the most optimal answer. :( (Or 1 hard problem in 30-35 minutes)
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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.
It's an interview. Just like any other engineering problem: use the right tool.
If you go off tangent and don't solve the problem, then that raises the question: "Ok, the engineer seems to be able to code, but they didn't finish. Will they finish other work? Will they regularly get caught up in irrelevancies?"
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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…
The tradeoff with this approach, if you fail to build a good rapport with the interviewer, you'll get labeled as not a good culture fit. Calling them out for a dumb question or critiquing the expectation of an 'expected answer' is not going to get you the job.
In this case, it sounds like the mood was right in the room for it to be taken well candidly.
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I hate that post interview ghosting too. Is super inconsiderate.
I’ve never experienced it before now - how common is this? Is it a west coast thing? This was my first interview with a west coast shop. I don’t need an essay on why they thought it wasn’t a good fit, but radio silence seems eminently unprofessional.
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…
you can often give a company a pass for a shitty interview, but you should name & out them for ghosting you as that is a far more systemic problem indicator. When I'm interviewing I want the poeple we don't hire to go away and have good things to say about us because they will tell many people about their experience. Companies that are disrespectful and inconsiderate to the point of just cutting off contact should pa…
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…
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Not sure how common but this has happened to me as well. Coding challenge complete, follow-up interview scheduled... then cancelled. Rescheduled... then ghosted. It was a cheap way of figuring out I shouldn’t even consider working there.
> It was a cheap way of figuring out I shouldn’t even consider working there. I mean - all you're experiencing is the HR/recruitment side of the pipeline at that point. You can't really say that an entire company is shit just because some subset of its HR/recruiters do shitty things. How many CTO's actually give a shit about IC interviewing experience and dig into the entire methodology that recruiters use when inter…
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If you want to test somebody's ability to think a problem and not just bullshit 100%, why not ask them questions like "Given two integer variables x and y, write a function to swap their values without using a third variable"? 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 ne…
Nice puzzle. Snarky python solution: x, y = y, x Legit solution (I think): x = x + y y = x - y x = x - y Actually, using bitwise xor would be even easier: x = x ^ y y = x ^ y x = x ^ y
For example, in Javascript with:
x = 2
y = 9007199254740991
x = x + y // 9007199254740992
y = x - y // 1 (!!!)
x = x - y // 9007199254740991
% cat test.c
#include
int main() {
int x = 2;
int y = 2147483647;
x = x + y;
y = x - y;
x = x - y;
printf( "%d %d\n", x, y );
}
% gcc -fsanitize=undefined -O0 -g -o test test.c && ./test
test.c:5:7: runtime error: signed integer overflow: 2 + 2147483647 cannot be represented in type 'int'
test.c:6:7: runtime error: signed integer overflow: -2147483647 - 2147483647 cannot be represented in type 'int'
test.c:7:7: runtime error: signed integer overflow: -2147483647 - 2 cannot be represented in type 'int'