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Caltech's CS interview prep course

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Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#191

Post by saagarjha »

erik_seaberg wrote: post #169
majormajor wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

(Speaking as someone who uses theoretical computer science fairly often) I wonder what the solution to this would be, honestly. It seems like there are a lot of jobs where we just expect that gluing things together is an acceptable, productive, necessary task to be done. Should we interview for these differently? Can we avoid a stigma being attached to this (productive) work?

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#192

Post by saagarjha »

Nimitz14 wrote: post #175
NERD_ALERT wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computer Science is not Software Engineering. A PhD does not translate to real world engineering skills. If you just go through a bachelors CS curriculum, designed to give a survey of all topics in academic computer science, that wouldn't make you a competent engineer. This is especially true now that through the internet, just about anyone with a laptop can get as good as they want at software engineering without ev…

Nobody is a "competent engineer" fresh out of university.

They are if they learned how to be an engineer in parallel.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#193

Post by novok »

dilyevsky wrote: post #187
kyawzazaw wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At least in my day if you changed the employer without changing the role you didn’t lose your place in line after PERM application was completed. I knew many Indians/Chinese nationals who changed several jobs while waiting EB2/3 to come through. Frankly I think green card golden handcuffs are heavily played up in these discussions to advance a specific narrative

Yeah the start to perm process to get your priority number is a 6 month - 1 year thing, and you only really need to do it once. And once your priority date is up maybe you have to stay there for 1 year.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#194

Post by dilyevsky »

singron wrote: post #83
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.

An equivalent idea is to hire anyone who has worked at any well-known company with similarly rigorous interviews. But people from those places still perform really poorly in interviews at about the same rate as everyone else. I wish I knew if it was a fluke that they bombed this time or that they passed the original.

> But people from those places still perform really poorly in interviews at about the same rate as everyone else

This doesn’t match my experience at all at least wrt to coding sessions. I don’t think I ever had someone from goog/fb bomb a coding part but I regularly had tenured engs from other well known shops not being able to code 2 nested for-loops // I did 200+ of interviews not counting when I worked for goog myself

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#195

Post by saagarjha »

yodsanklai wrote: post #149
majormajor wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

> 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.

It’s definitely possible. Mostly you’d want to learn your algorithms well in college and continue to exercise them in your work. The rest of the interview is a lot about how you present yourself, which is mostly along the lines of “work out the problems out loud and ask questions”.

Also, FWIW, I’ve had a decent amount of opportunities for creativity on Leetcode-style questions. When permitted I often pick the language that I feel would make the solution simpler or easier to understand. When doing things like linked list or graph traversal you’re often asked to define the datastructure you’ll be using, which is a good chance to use different types of polymorphism or algebraic datatypes that can make your task easier. Even if you’re just churning out for loops, a lot of them can be replaced with functional methods or selective application of interesting utilities such as array rotation.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#196

Post by ipaddr »

cutenewt wrote: post #134
honksillet wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who is licensed in a different field, awful idea. Each state tends to have their own (often quite different) license requirements. They tend to be expensive to get and need to be renewed frequently (more $$$). There are usually other hoops you have to jump through to get both license and relicensed. I would never wish licensure on my own profession.

I agree on the downsides, but I believe licensing is a good forcing function to get others to 1) gain knowledge and 2) standardize training for a base level of competence.

We've tried that and mscd factories popped up and gave a bad name to that process.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#197

Post by erik_seaberg »

saagarjha wrote: post #191
erik_seaberg wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

(Speaking as someone who uses theoretical computer science fairly often) I wonder what the solution to this would be, honestly. It seems like there are a lot of jobs where we just expect that gluing things together is an acceptable, productive, necessary task to be done. Should we interview for these differently? Can we avoid a stigma being attached to this (productive) work?

I think we should automate this work away, or at least figure out what’s preventing that. Boilerplate is a problem, not a good investment of human effort.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#198

Post by saagarjha »

yodsanklai wrote: post #94
majormajor wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here we see what the alternative to whiteboard interviews: credentialism. Get into the right school and muddle through and get a guaranteed 200k! Is there more to you than your high school performance? Push back against this if so! (Calling the interview Leetcode is misleading IME, since I've rarely been asked something that would be near the upper tiers of that site's difficulty). Top-tier tech companies face a LOT…

> 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…

> 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.

There’s a whole lot of spread at any college. Assuming a hypothetical ranking from 1-100 with 1 being unable to program or problem solve and 100 being your Jeff Dean/Fabrice Bellard/Linus Torvalds programming god of choice an average state school might give you people from 30-70 and a top school might be 40-80. Lots of smart people go to state schools and lots of idiots come out of top ones.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#199

Post by saagarjha »

tjpnz wrote: post #158
qiskit wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 alrea…

>One way to bypass these interview tests is networking. Has that ever worked at a FAANG?

Networking will often get you past a phone screen, to be fair. (But not the offsite which is usually algorithms-heavy.)

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#200

Post by game_the0ry »

mhh__ wrote: post #178
game_the0ry wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alrigt, alright, I stand corrected. Here's your upvote.

You're still right overall though. Most programmers don't get to use the theory they (should still) know

Picking 2 famous computer scientists was not a good comparison on my part. I'll own that.
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