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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

#141

Post by tuckerman »

pthread_t wrote: post #128
tuckerman wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The class is being taught in the Computer Science department, not the software engineering or programming department. I think the bigger issue is the conflation of CS and SWE. To your point about how you interview, unless there is an alternative I would never be able to apply to your company. I have no open source contributions or code samples to share and no interest in writing a book. I also have no interest in app…

> without a commensurate investment of time on their part Doesn't grinding LeetCode apply here as well?

Perhaps it’s a bit of an unfair/vicious cycle, but I found doing interviews at my previous company was enough to keep me feeling practiced enough. While I have studied up a bit before previous interviews, I’ve never used LeetCode.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#142

Post by [deleted] »

shagie wrote: post #61
Apocryphon wrote: post #28

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…

[deleted]

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#143

Post by novok »

ozzythecat wrote: post #122

Interviewing is broken. When I was at Amazon, it became impossible to hire candidates, and generally the engineers we brought on board were non-US citizens. Typically they're Indians without U.S. residency status, often times U.S. college grads or often even transfers from Amazon's Indian offices. Not only did we pay below other FAANGs, but with these hires, we'd pay them at the low end of our own scale. What are the…

Unless your an L1 transfer, you can still change jobs fairly easily on an H1B, because everyone else in tech is also willing to do H1B transfer paperwork. So you can quit, it just takes longer...

And even as an L1, you can still apply at other jobs, because they will apply for the H1B for you and if successful, hire you then.

So yes between the waiting periods you do have to keep it up, but the barriers are not that high compared to citizens otherwise.

And this is my personal experience as a visa worker.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#145

Post by webmaven »

dionidium wrote: post #119
mkl95 wrote: 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 reason this complaint never changes anything, despite being very popular, is that these interviews serve two purposes that it doesn’t address: 1) they’re an intelligence test; 2) they’re a perseverance/conscientiousness test. Will you take the time and put in the work to pass one of these interviews? That measures perseverance and conscientiousness. Having put in the time, can you recall and adapt what you learne…

> The reason this complaint never changes anything, despite being very popular, is that these interviews serve two purposes that it doesn’t address: 1) they’re an intelligence test; 2) they’re a perseverance/conscientiousness test.

No argument on perseverance, but I don't think it measures conscientiousness. At least, not how I understand the term, which has connotations of intrinsic motivation rather than extrinsic.

Now, if measuring how a person responds to extrinsic motivation is your goal, then this type of interview does just fine. It measures a person's ability to delay gratification for a later reward (because you can have perseverance without that, which you can also call being stubborn or determination, eg. "I'm going to figure this out even if it kills me" ).

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#146

Post by erik_seaberg »

Apocryphon wrote: post #42
giantg2 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say cert, not license. I don't think anyone should have to pass a LeetCode exam to professionally code. But otherwise a good idea.

Sure, I'm using them interchangeably to mean an "officially-decided standard that allows you to not have to retake the same interview at every company." Whether that standard is created by some sort of industry consortium, the IEEE or ACM, CS academia, or some combination thereof, is left as an exercise to the discourse.

A cert provides formal evidence, but a license grants permission you wouldn’t otherwise have.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#147

Post by Apocryphon »

majormajor wrote: post #117
Apocryphon wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are talking about the nitty-gritty aspects of actual software engineering. I’m talking about doing away with the redundancy of having to retake the industry-wide Leetcode fizzbuzz portion instead of passing it once.

I'm asking that since the job itself is wildly unstandardized, how on earth are we supposed to standardize a single "industry-wide" credential for interviews? There's no "industry-wide Leetcode fizzbuzz portion" - Leetcode and fizzbuzz are famously on complete opposite sides of the whiteboard spectrum! I've only been asked actual fizzbuzz once, and can't immediately think of any other duplicate whiteboard problems I'…

Leetcode is the new fizzbuzz, I meant.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#148

Post by [deleted] »

ozzythecat wrote: post #122

Interviewing is broken. When I was at Amazon, it became impossible to hire candidates, and generally the engineers we brought on board were non-US citizens. Typically they're Indians without U.S. residency status, often times U.S. college grads or often even transfers from Amazon's Indian offices. Not only did we pay below other FAANGs, but with these hires, we'd pay them at the low end of our own scale. What are the…

[deleted]

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#149

Post by yodsanklai »

majormajor wrote: post #109
yodsanklai wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why should I trust the university selection process more than those corporate hiring ones? I don't know the US education system enough, but there are some schools out there which are much more selective than any SWE interview process. You can be guaranteed that the worst student from these top schools could nail any algorithm interview with minimal preparation. But these big companies hire many more people than the…

Needing to hire more than just the top schools graduate is certainly a reason companies can't limit themselves to university selection processes. But that's not all that's going on here! CalTech is pretty selective as far as US schools go (6% acceptance rate). Slightly more than MIT, slightly less than Stanford. SAT score stats all in the same 1500+ range. But they're offering this course, and that makes me think tha…

> But they're offering this course, and that makes me think that no, the worst student from these schools in the US, at least cannot nail any algorithm interview with minimal prep!

I think it's impossible to nail these interviews without minimal prep. It's very specific, and every candidates are well-prepared, many of them have done 500+ leetcode questions before interviewing.

Regarding the US universities, I'm not sure but I wonder if some students can somehow compensate a lack of academic mathematics excellence with extracurricular activities, or being rich or from a minority. Maybe companies want to filter those out?

As for creativity, leetcode interview questions is all about preparation. There's little creativity.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#150

Post by Apocryphon »

majormajor wrote: post #114
game_the0ry wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bingo. It should be telling that there are a number of, usually for-profit, resources for prepping for just the interview process: * leetcode * Cracking the Coding Interview * Elements of Programing Interviews * Interview Kickstart, which costs like $5500, is a bootcamp just for passing interviews * educative.io * algoexpert.io That being said, I might just play along with the DS / Algo interview game. Having an inte…

What is that supposed to be telling? There are a quite a few industries where there are profitable neighbor industries around breaking in to it. Even ones with licensing and blah blah blah instead of whiteboards. Hell, the cynics would call the entire current university system one! And if not that, than it least the massive industries around getting into better schools...

Why don’t other STEM fields have those neighbor/parasite industries?
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