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The greatest resume I've ever seen

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Re: The greatest resume I've ever seen

#81

Post by vxNsr »

arenaninja wrote: post #29
monster_group wrote: post #7

Interviewer - "That's impressive Daniel. Now can you invert a binary tree on the whiteboard?"

Recently I went through a phone screen by a gentleman I imagine to be in his 50s or 60s and it was an immensely pleasant experience. No gotcha questions and any time I mentioned how his problem reminded me of so-and-so tech he would gush in excitement that he also worked in that tech Compare to a recent interview with the world's best employer (tm): the interviewer was young, was upset that my solution wasn't written…

> I described it as charts and he didn't know what that was. I described it as graphs and he also didn't know what that was. The interviewer had a bit of an accent so maybe it was a language issue but I had never run into someone who hasn't heard of a chart!

It’s at this point that I would end the interview and let them know it doesn’t feel like it would be a good fit.

Re: The greatest resume I've ever seen

#82

Post by Arcuru »

recursive wrote: post #73
moron4hire wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jesus christ. Inverting a binary tree is not hard. That people keep using this as a joke is more a testament to the stubbornness of people believing they shouldn't have to do no learnin' no more than it is bad interviewing practices.

Wait, inverting a tree is a real thing? What does that even mean? All the terminal leaf nodes become roots? That can't be right. I thought part of the joke was that it was impossible.

The root is still the root, but everything else is just flipped: https://leetcode.com/problems/invert-binary-tree/

It is also extremely simple:

  TreeNode* invertTree(TreeNode* root) {
    if (root) {
      invertTree(root->left);
      invertTree(root->right);
      std::swap(root->left, root->right);
    }
    return root;
  }

Re: The greatest resume I've ever seen

#83

Post by andrei_says_ »

moron4hire wrote: post #43
monster_group wrote: post #7

Interviewer - "That's impressive Daniel. Now can you invert a binary tree on the whiteboard?"

Jesus christ. Inverting a binary tree is not hard. That people keep using this as a joke is more a testament to the stubbornness of people believing they shouldn't have to do no learnin' no more than it is bad interviewing practices.

I’ve never in my 10+ year career needed to invert a binary tree.

Re: The greatest resume I've ever seen

#85

Post by vxNsr »

wpietri wrote: post #17
engmgrmgr wrote: post #11

It’s a small sample size, but highly motivated self taught folks who come from tough blue collar careers that I’ve seen have been pretty reliable and committed. I presume it’s a lot easier to appreciate the working conditions and compensation package, as well as tolerate the political dramas, when you have some perspective on how life is for most other people.

For sure. My summer jobs were in restaurants and factories. It deeply shaped my notion of what work is. It's been a long time, and I'm still excited I get to work from my house basically solving puzzles. It has downsides, though. One thing you learn in blue-collar businesses is that the direct work is primary, with other stuff secondary. In a restaurant, nobody shuts down during the lunch rush to talk with everybody.…

> So it's maddening to me that in most office contexts, my schedule fills up with meetings and I'm expected to get my work done around them. And that nobody sees that as a problem, because that's just office culture.

Block out portions of your calendar with recurring work time, and let them schedule their meetings around that.

Re: The greatest resume I've ever seen

#86

Post by mediaman »

jasonpeacock wrote: post #71
sdoering wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just came of a call with a a potential hire. I recommended her to a second round because of three things: * She would culturally fit while still bringing something new to the tam * She doesn't know Web Analytics, but has done market research, built html prototypes and has basic knowledge in JS, python, html, SPSS and some other things * She is self motivated and shows this because she actually learned all these ski…

> She would culturally fit What does this mean? This is a very loaded term, and without qualitative data it results in biased hiring. Usually, it means "she's young, white, and college educated, just like the rest of us". People don't need to culturally fit to excel at a role.

I agree, "cultural fit" often has biased results.

But "cultural fit" is still necessary but must be defined carefully. If a company doesn't care about culture fit when hiring people, it will become a very bad place to work.

Questions to address when determining cultural fit:

  - How does this person resolve conflict with peers? With managers? 
  - How does this person advocate for change in the workplace? 
  - Does this person share credit, and praise others? 
  - How does this person take responsibility when something bad happens? 
  - How does this person respond to something they heard but don't quite understand? Do they pretend to understand and go on, or stop and clarify at the risk of sounding unknowledgeable?
Questions that sometimes get confused for cultural fit:

  - Does this person watch the same television shows as me? 
  - Will this person understand the same cultural in-jokes as me? 
  - Did this person go to the same college as me? 
  - Did this person have a similar life journey as me (religion, or where they grew up, etc)?

Re: The greatest resume I've ever seen

#87

Post by moron4hire »

approxim8ion wrote: post #66
moron4hire wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jesus christ. Inverting a binary tree is not hard. That people keep using this as a joke is more a testament to the stubbornness of people believing they shouldn't have to do no learnin' no more than it is bad interviewing practices.

The difficulty isn't the point. Your ability to invert a binary tree has very, very little to do with you writing CRUD applications.

I see this attitude all the time. It's usually from people who don't know anything about basic data structures like trees. How would you know that they don't apply?

It does apply. GUIs are fundamentally tree structures. Relational databases are fundamentally tree structures. JSON documents are fundamentally tree structures. Almost everything you're touching in a CRUD app is some kind of tree and you think knowing how to work with trees has "very, very little to do" with writing them? Again, how would you know?

I'm so serious that not knowing how to invert a binary tree is ludicrously bad. It's just a swap operation. You walk the tree and you swap the left and right branches of every branch you find. That's it. It's not black magic.

    invert(tree):
      if(tree not null):
        temp := tree.left
        tree.left
That's why it's used as an interview question. It's not meant to be a test of skill. It's a shiboleth. It's one of the easiest ways to quickly answer, "is this the sort of 'programmer' who is likely to import a whole package for padding strings with spaces?"

Re: The greatest resume I've ever seen

#88

Post by wvenable »

strgcmc wrote: post #50
stuff4ben wrote: post #14

So... smart and gets things done. Honestly that's all I look for on a resume. You also have to talk about it in an interview. I couldn't care less if you can invert a binary tree. One of the greatest developers I've ever worked with, I hired straight out of college. He graduated with an electrical engineering degree but his senior year he took a course in Java and liked it and decided to be a programmer. Couldn't tel…

The trouble is, this "je ne sais quoi" that you speak of, that you "could tell he had the chops to figure things out", is unquantifiable and almost totally subjective. To be a bit blunt and cynical, this way of evaluating candidates basically boils down to, "do I like this candidate?" Your criteria for liking someone happens to be that you look for these nebulous "chops for figuring things out". What about the other…

This mysterious robust process that can deterministically fit humans into the "hire" and "no hire" box doesn't exist. Everything you can describe that's negative about human intuition, I can use to describe whatever robust process you can think of.

I want candidates to succeed -- I always start out rooting for them. The interview is not a place to beat people down but it give them opportunities to show their strengths.

Re: The greatest resume I've ever seen

#89

Post by otterley »

dahart wrote: post #67
mcntsh wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> shouldn't have to do no learnin' Expecting engineers to develop skills they don't learn/use in their actual professions to prove they're capable of working a job makes no sense. If these leetcode puzzles were actually relevant, why do so many engineers have to spend time outside of work "grinding" in order to get better at them?

> Expecting engineers to develop skills they don’t learn/use in their actual professions to prove they’re capable of working a job makes no sense. I used to feel this way, but I think I’ve changed my mind. Interviews aren’t really primarily testing for skills you’ll use day to day, they’re testing for breadth of skills and knowledge and more importantly breadth of understanding. When I’m interviewing, knowing if the…

How do these questions give you any indication that the candidate can do the essential job functions of shipping working code that is actually useful to your business and being a good teammate?

Re: The greatest resume I've ever seen

#90

Post by krapp »

moron4hire wrote: post #87
approxim8ion wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difficulty isn't the point. Your ability to invert a binary tree has very, very little to do with you writing CRUD applications.

I see this attitude all the time. It's usually from people who don't know anything about basic data structures like trees. How would you know that they don't apply? It does apply. GUIs are fundamentally tree structures. Relational databases are fundamentally tree structures. JSON documents are fundamentally tree structures. Almost everything you're touching in a CRUD app is some kind of tree and you think knowing how…

>It's one of the easiest ways to quickly answer, "is this the sort of 'programmer' who is likely to import a whole package for padding strings with spaces?"

But that's the sort of programmer who gets hired, because SOP for Javascript development (and oftentimes elsewhere) is to import the existing library, and any developer who insists on writing that code themselves would be considered a code cowboy wasting company time and resources, and likely writing less safe code in the process.

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