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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

#161

Post by analog31 »

syspec wrote: post #130
dionidium wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I really think you nailed it, will have to borrow this point in the future. A lot of it is about gauging the candidates aptitude, and of course their willingness to put in the work. It's like those kids in math class that say, "I'm never going to use this in real life."

Those kids are right. School math is mainly an attrition machine. Most students, including in STEM fields, look forward to forgetting all of their school math on graduation day. The math that engineers need is baked into their high level software. Most engineering teams have a "math person" who handles any higher math related problems that crop up. I'm one of those people at my workplace.

I was a college math major, but believe that the math curriculum is ripe for reform.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#162

Post by jfrbfbreudh »

samstave wrote: post #74
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 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. Cr…

I was recently given something like this as a phone screen. I was provided an ip address and some credentials and I was expected to ssh in and get some python scripts working.

I was only given this after passing a difficult HackerRank though.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#164

Post by naniwaduni »

Apocryphon wrote: post #150
majormajor wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Oh, boy, now let me tell you about medical school.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#165

Post by Kranar »

game_the0ry wrote: post #132
WalterBright wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have had literally no opportunities of applying the stuff I've learnt on HackerRank I have. Many times.

Yes, the opportunities are possible, but exceptional. For the most part, you will be wiring crud APIs or trying to figure out why your button is misaligned by 12 pixels. Those problems also pay better too, bc those are business problems. The hackerrank problems have mostly been solved. Think about that - you think Ed Dijkstra or Tony Hoare ever made more than a facebook swe?

Tony Hoare works at Microsoft as a Principal Researcher, as well as having won over 5 million dollars just in awards. I'm quite sure he makes more than a Facebook SWE.

Dijkstra won a similar amount of money in prizes and worked at UT Austin which according to their 1985 docket paid 110k a year ($287,418.96 adjusted for inflation) and also worked in private industry in a research role, so once again... likely made more than a FB SWE.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#166

Post by giantg2 »

sharpy wrote: post #156
giantg2 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went to an internal job interview about 5 years into working for the company. They were asking me all sorts of textbook questions about defining stuff like polymorphism and explaining some sort algorithms. I bombed. Many of these terms and algorithms had never been used during my 5 years, and I forgot many since they hadn't been used since college. I wanted to ask the interviewer if they actually use these terms in…

Haha. At some companies, they made the interviews tougher for internal candidates... Amazon used to require full loop, but last time I changed jobs there (I no longer wok there), all it took was conversations with some senior engineers, and somebody reviewing my work sample. And totally agree with the absurdity of the questions we ask in tech interviews. At least for my current employer, we use simplified versions of…

Well, there's really two ways it works at my company. The other way it works is managers making backroom deals and then it's just some conversation with the tech lead that counts as the interview for HR's sake. So sort of similar to what you described.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#167

Post by joe_the_user »

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…

I'd be OK with modern interviews if they reflected the job you will be doing to a reasonable degree. But knowing the state of the industry I feel that they fall somewhere between gatekeeping and a bait & switch scheme.

Yep,

Back in the 90s and early 2000s, the interview problems I got were often the actual problem I was meant to solve on the job. Which is to say that I don't think there's any barrier to coming up with questions like. Of course, if the job is as you describe, putting people through hoops is indeed a way to avoid actually telling people what they'll do.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#168

Post by kyawzazaw »

novok wrote: post #143
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…

The issue is the Greencard sponsoring through EB-3. You have to wait till the process reaches i-140 or I-485 or otherwise you have to restart the process. This is worse for Indian and Chinese citizens due to their priority date from the 7% rule.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#169

Post by erik_seaberg »

majormajor wrote: post #89
synthos wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Perhaps not everyone has to grind it so much. (I would wager they're the same people who do regularly find themselves thinking about computational and space complexity, and about using different datastructures and algorithms for problems, vs the ones who never see reason to!) A take home test requires spending free time for everyone. A whiteboard interview requires variable amounts of free time. I would wager that, o…

I’ve passed almost every interview loop I’ve had without ever studying leetcode. I have a (maybe uncharitable) suspicion that people who find they need to study are spending all their time at work gluing software together without actually writing any from scratch.
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