731–740 of 1001 posts
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As i mentioned in another post, don't forget to work in those LP's otherwise you get 0 Bezos points and your experience is worthless. Edit: Meant LP's. Leadership Principles.
What's GP? Gaussian process? General practitioner? Or, most commonly on HN, grandparent [post]? Or maybe the whole point of using that abbreviation is to exclude those outside Amazon?
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I've never written a sort from scratch since my college days, over 30 years ago. Also never had a job interview that asked me do to so, or any other coding questions. I'm planning more for retirement than a next job at this point, but I shake my head at what my younger colleagues need to go through these days for the opportunity to write JavaScript with IDEs that do most of the work for you.
I liken it to what lawyers go through with the bar here in CA. It's gatekeeping. Just like I don't think the CA bar should have a pass rate in the 20% range, I don't think coding interviews should ask riddles that are nearly impossible to solve on the fly unless you get lucky and memorized THAT riddle in your studying.
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At this point I'm pretty sure FAANG hiring is just a random walk. Every now again someone happens to have looked at all the questions they ask recently for that particular interview cycle (or avoid the trap ones like that) and that person gets hired (and then put on the ad targeting team or whatever).
The experiences that people describe here just confirm something that many of us has learned a long time ago: NOBODY HAS "FIGURED OUT" HIRING ! Not Google, not Apple, no one. Sure, some places (and individual interviewers) are better at it than others. But at the end of the day, hiring is a deeply subjective process with lots of error and uncertainty built into it's nature. The subjectivity is intrinsic. Places like…
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In my startup I interviewed a 48 years old senior Java programmer with excellent resume, who took 1hr to write a String.contains(), it only worked for the requested 4 letters, didn’t work if a letter was repeated twice, and didn’t work with Chinese characters. At least it had the JUnit. I asked an employee to do it too and he made his code pass the JUnit in 6 minutes. The candidate hated the interview, claiming it wa…
What was the goal of the question? Why did you want the person to implement a contains method? Did you really want to verify they understood String implementation in Java? And if the candidate was able to do this in 6 minutes, what would you have thought? "Great, let's hire"? In my humble opinion, the question is a waste of time either way. You'll get much further trying to probe what the candidate does know rather t…
This! When giving interviews last I really worried if the questions I asked where just indicative of my own Dunning-Kruger effect.
i.e. Do I only ask questions I already know the answer to and not questions I don't know the answer to?
If I do then am I just filtering for people with the same background and knowledge and missing out on people with other skills I don't know, because they're in my blind spot, I need yet?
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Is HackerRank so bad? If one does "whiteboard problems", HackerRank says, "boo, whiteboard interviews, just let me code and be able to search on Google, whiteboard is unrealistic!". Now if the company starts with a HackerRank test, that's also bad? I don't get it. Look, a lot of people have good-looking CVs and can't code shit. I don't know about you but my experience was that one really can't hire based on CV alone.…
There is so much more information gained about a candidate by an engineer interviewing another engineer than by a "pass" or "fail" score from a robot.
I am not one for LC type of problems, but at the least I have to admit they have the potential of being more objective than everything else during the interview process. You get the specs, you write the code and it gets tested via multiple test cases. It does not matter if the interviewer agrees your solution will work or not, and the interviewer won't have to copy&paste your code, compile and run it (like someone else mentioned in this thread).
On the other hand, what I particularly dislike about the LC problems is that many of them are essentially trick questions and brain teasers. Can't we just stick to problems that are relevant to an SWE?
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I had a similarly bad Google experience that I've talked about before[0] but will copy here: I was asked to do a task that eventually boiled down to a topological sort, and I thought the question consisted of recognizing that the answer was a topological sort and moving on because it was over the phone. However, that was not the case. The interviewer wanted me to code it all out over Google Docs, but I didn't remembe…
I've never written a sort from scratch since my college days, over 30 years ago. Also never had a job interview that asked me do to so, or any other coding questions. I'm planning more for retirement than a next job at this point, but I shake my head at what my younger colleagues need to go through these days for the opportunity to write JavaScript with IDEs that do most of the work for you.
I got the offer and took it because I do contracting and had just unexpectedly gotten a contract canceled early, so I was unemployed and have a family. At the end of the 3 month contract they offered me a full time position and I declined.
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Job training is not as much worth it for companies when employees can switch jobs at the drop of a hat.
Yep. Apprenticeships solved this problem in the past (and of course created many others). Actually it’s almost a fun little exercise in economics. Basically there’s two types of efficiency, investment efficiency and allocative efficiency. (There may also be other types I don’t know about.) Investment efficiency means people are incentivized to make positive-expected-value investments. Think about how people are incen…
But it makes Reginald the investor angry that his ROI isn't exactly 20% each quarter, so they jettison apprenticeships and start cooking the books to make that possible.
My one and only Google interview went this way years ago. Each round they'd send me more books to study, which frankly I couldn't be bothered to read given the circumstances. My experience ended when an interviewer in round 3 or 4 asked me an obviously scripted question. I answered sarcastically, he got peeved, and I never heard from them again. I'm not claiming I'm Google caliber, whatever that means. Obviously I'm…
I had a similarly bad Google experience that I've talked about before[0] but will copy here: I was asked to do a task that eventually boiled down to a topological sort, and I thought the question consisted of recognizing that the answer was a topological sort and moving on because it was over the phone. However, that was not the case. The interviewer wanted me to code it all out over Google Docs, but I didn't remembe…
I also complained that google's coding solution (docs, basically) was a terrible way to code, other companies use coderpad or whatever, but I expect that Google will never change this. They love to hire people who are excellent at coding CS approximate solutions, but have little to no judgement on how to do good software engineering.
My one and only Google interview went this way years ago. Each round they'd send me more books to study, which frankly I couldn't be bothered to read given the circumstances. My experience ended when an interviewer in round 3 or 4 asked me an obviously scripted question. I answered sarcastically, he got peeved, and I never heard from them again. I'm not claiming I'm Google caliber, whatever that means. Obviously I'm…