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Caltech's CS interview prep course

courses.cms.caltech.edu

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Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#71
post #40

My career path in tech so far has been junior engineer -> mid level -> senior -> tech lead. As I've progressed through that path, I have had literally no opportunities of applying the stuff I've learnt on HackerRank, save for a couple of interviews. At this point I'm convinced that the focus of those interviews was entirely wrong. Once you pass those tests and get hired, you will be dealing with tons of legacy code r…

What’s your suggested alternative? Please remember that while some of us would do well and prefer some live pair programming or debugging sessions, it stresses the hell out of some folks and penalizes them unfairly. Take home tests penalizes people with families and other responsibilities and probably has a racial bias as well in countries where different races have different societal loads.

In the end, even if these coding challenges might not reflect the actual work you do, they might still be predictive of success in the job, as much as any other method can be when we look for unbiased markers.

This is similar to how the entrance exams to the IITs in india are pretty much completely discordant to what you actually end up having to know, the rigor and preparation you need to do ends up reasonably selecting for well performing students anyway. Not perfect though. Any system can be gamed but it works alright.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you want a license? The whole allure of software development is in its accessibility, that it's easy to get started with nothing more than a laptop and an Internet connection. Putting up artificial barriers to entry is anathema to that. What you'll end up with, in practice, is one of two outcomes: 1. A race to the bottom where licenses become easier and easier to get, until it becomes no more a demonstratio…

By license I mean the current Leetcode interview process except you do it once and are good for at least five years. Obviously when candidates are interviewed there would still be technical questions asked, but perhaps those would be more domain-specific. The whole point is to avoid the redundancy of the existing interview process.

Yea, think of it less as a "government issued license allowing you to do software" and more of a certificate that says "I recently passed a level $LEVEL leetcode grind, you only need to test me for specialized skills or for a level greater than $LEVEL." If it actually worked and couldn't be gamed/cheated (good luck with that), it could reduce interviews to a simple check of domain knowledge not covered by the certificate.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Symphonic musician. The first stage is nailing a blind audition, perfectly.

Not anymore! Blind auditions are now a thing of the past: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition... However, since you can't choose your parents or where you were born, there's little you can do to prepare for the Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity goals. (I could probably get a lift by changing my religion. People with the exact same ethnicity and appearance as me but of a different faith are con…

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Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#74
post #40

My career path in tech so far has been junior engineer -> mid level -> senior -> tech lead. As I've progressed through that path, I have had literally no opportunities of applying the stuff I've learnt on HackerRank, save for a couple of interviews. At this point I'm convinced that the focus of those interviews was entirely wrong. Once you pass those tests and get hired, you will be dealing with tons of legacy code r…

The next big tech interview craze, I have long thought:

Here is a fucked up environment.

Here are logins for each role.

Here is your team.

Here is your role.

Each of you has a chance at each role. There are three of you. So three challenges.

The environment is experiencing the following symptoms. Diagnose, report, fix.

---

Then throw them at some broken stack with admin rights and figure why its broken and fix it.

Create various stack models to throw at teams based on team skill-set.

Never hire individuals. Hire strong individuals who can work in a team.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#75
post #46

So wait you are smart enough to get into caltech, smart enough to graduate with a degree in CS. And yet the curriculum on its own does not do a good job enough on its own to prepare you for getting a job? Very hard to graduate with a decent GPA in CS at caltech and not be able to thrive as an entry level engineer. If you got B’s in caltech CS I’d make you an offer for 200k+ without blinking or even asking you anythin…

The industry recreates the problem every so often with different variants. Previously it was the Microsoft/Google “thought problems” such as “Why are manhole covers round?” and “How would you estimate the number of gas stations in a city?”.

Thet change when they realise the current method doesn't actually work. They're not recreating the problem; they're looking for a solution.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#76
post #3

If you don't think modern interviewing practices are a problem, this should be proof enough. Not only do we have an entire programming book sub-genre dedicated to this nonsense, but now we're also wasting class time on memorizing sorting algorithms. Fantastic. Of course, we're going to see the inevitable arguments that "40% of the people I interview lie on resumes" or "I interviewed this guy once, and he couldn't eve…

> Not only do we have an entire programming book sub-genre dedicated to this nonsense... Mate, wake up: ~billion dollar "interview prep" start-ups are a thing.

Sell shovels to the miners instead of mining for gold yourself.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#77

Tech interview discussions always seem to run the same course and hit the same points, so I'll repeat one of mine: What's wrong with the idea of turning the standard Leetcode algorithms interview into a license that only needs to be completed once, or maybe once every 5-8 years, similar to what physicians must undergo? Much more efficient than having to retake it with every single company during an interview cycle.

One way to bypass these interview tests is networking. If you are recommended by someone or get an interview through someone, you generally won't be given these tests. After my first job out of college, I've never had to do these types of interviews as I got my next jobs via former co-workers who moved onto other companies and personally recruited me to their new company.

I'm not sure if licensing will work. We already have "licensing" via Microsoft/etc certificates. And my experience is that we test these people with certificates even harder because of the poor reputation of these certificates.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#78
post #61

Tech interview discussions always seem to run the same course and hit the same points, so I'll repeat one of mine: What's wrong with the idea of turning the standard Leetcode algorithms interview into a license that only needs to be completed once, or maybe once every 5-8 years, similar to what physicians must undergo? Much more efficient than having to retake it with every single company during an interview cycle.

We tried that once. https://ncees.org/engineering/pe/software/ But nobody was interested. https://ncees.org/ncees-discontinuing-pe-software-engineerin... --- I've interviewed software developers who have on their resume "Oracle Java 8 certified", but aren't able to name three different spots where the static keyword appears in Java or the situations where they'd be used. There are certainly many possible reasons why…

This is a test on software engineering, not computer science.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#79
post #40

My career path in tech so far has been junior engineer -> mid level -> senior -> tech lead. As I've progressed through that path, I have had literally no opportunities of applying the stuff I've learnt on HackerRank, save for a couple of interviews. At this point I'm convinced that the focus of those interviews was entirely wrong. Once you pass those tests and get hired, you will be dealing with tons of legacy code r…

The whole psychology around tech interviews tends not to be focused on the right things. At least in the general sense, a lot of it appears to be people copying others without understanding the motivations.

The theory of interviewing should be to ask questions that are as predictive as possible e.g. success on the interview correlates as closely as possible with success on the job. The strengths needed will vary greatly by the role, company, and so on.

But what you tend to see is, everybody has a handful of "pet" questions that they ask over and over, without applying strict rationale for why its predictive to success.

Personally, any good interview question must both be iterative and highly correlated with actual work. Questions that have one "trick" and judging on that basis is a poor interview. Questions that focus on data structures or algorithms that aren't going to be relatively common are also poor. Questions which lack real world applications, also poor.

At least for me, I have a handful of questions, but one of my basic ones is to implement a certain data structure. And honestly, I care more about seeing the naive solution than the highly optimized one... because I care first and foremost that the candidate can code proficiently. The naive solution is super easy and requires little theoretical strength... but it becomes very obvious how proficient of a coder they are by seeing them write out the solution. How quickly can they write it? Do they make syntax errors? How long to grasp the intention of the question?

Some write the solution in 5 minutes, some take 40 minutes. That gap alone is probably the most strong predictor.

There is a more theoretically optimal solution, but I just followup at the end and we'll talk through what it could be. But if somebody can hammer out a naive solution with good code quality, quickly I weight that about 90%.

But my company also needs strong coders over particularly theoretical people. One of my best coworkers bombed on a tree interview questions I asked... but I could tell from all the supplemental details that he was very strong.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#80
post #40

My career path in tech so far has been junior engineer -> mid level -> senior -> tech lead. As I've progressed through that path, I have had literally no opportunities of applying the stuff I've learnt on HackerRank, save for a couple of interviews. At this point I'm convinced that the focus of those interviews was entirely wrong. Once you pass those tests and get hired, you will be dealing with tons of legacy code r…

What’s your suggested alternative? Please remember that while some of us would do well and prefer some live pair programming or debugging sessions, it stresses the hell out of some folks and penalizes them unfairly. Take home tests penalizes people with families and other responsibilities and probably has a racial bias as well in countries where different races have different societal loads. In the end, even if these…

grinding leetcode is just as bad, if not worse, than a take-home test
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