181–190 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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I have started asking this, since I have not heard it asked in awhile (like almost 2 decades), and it is interesting to hear the responses.
It's clichéd question, but in my opinion it's a very good one and would still be useful if it wasn't so overused. The reason why is because there's one big reason why manhole covers are round and maybe 3-4 subsidiary and less important reasons why. A person who can 1/ identify that there's more than one reason, name them all and 2/ sort and rank the reasons correctly in order of importance reveals a person's clarity…
But, I would say the majority had not heard the question before.
This is a younger cohort.
I feel this way because I've seen hiring for non-technical roles, e.g., project management, etc. They basically end up being friends hiring friends, with minimal domain expertise.
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 with Amazon many years ago but my takeaway was "don't work at Amazon" not "don't do technical interviews". I've had great technical interviews (Google, Square) and terrible ones (Amazon, Stripe). Companies you want to work for are cognizant of this and spend time developing their process and training their interviewers to make sure their experience is one of the good ones.
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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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 abo…
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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…
I hope his google doesn't land on this thread: The US 25 cent denomination coin or 'Quarter' has eleven ridges
"Every step, conversation and question must be pertinent to the day-to-day of the role" While I agree with the author's 'golden rule', I believe the complex data structure questions are just a way to filter interviewing candidates in a highly competitive job market. It's akin to the highly competitive Indian Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) where hundreds of thousands of students solve complex problems in Math, Physi…
I just rejected one company because they had 4 pages of NDA and were small company.
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…
They created a puzzle where you needed to ask for more information. Intentionally or not, they were discovering if they could communicate with you. That the communication failed doesn't mean your somehow less then them. It means you just have a different background.
Now to the problem, the problem people don't set good goals. It probably doesn't make sense to hire a carbon copy of yourself.