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Gaming CS Interviews

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Re: Gaming CS Interviews

#11

Post by ZephyrBlu »

leetrout wrote: post #2

> Guidance is expected; a great interview should be more of a conversation than a one-sided question and one-sided answer. I had a particularly awful interview at Google where the interviewer scoffed at me needing assistance. And in an interview at Twitter with a xoogler they asked me what I knew about number theory and I said "nothing" and they said they majored in it and proceeded to ask me number theory questions.…

I want to believe this is satire but I know it's not even an egregious example.

Re: Gaming CS Interviews

#12

Post by Cthulhu_ »

leetrout wrote: post #2

> Guidance is expected; a great interview should be more of a conversation than a one-sided question and one-sided answer. I had a particularly awful interview at Google where the interviewer scoffed at me needing assistance. And in an interview at Twitter with a xoogler they asked me what I knew about number theory and I said "nothing" and they said they majored in it and proceeded to ask me number theory questions.…

Really sounds like the guy wanted to talk about himself instead of actually interview you. I hope you were able to send some feedback to his superior, since they missed a hire because of his shit.

Re: Gaming CS Interviews

#13

Post by dubbel »

mckirk wrote: post #6

I was already halfway through the article when I realized I'd misunderstood the title: It's not about about using games to interview people (Factorio style), which still might have made sense to test self-taught engineers, but about how to game the interview process.

And honestly, it's not really about gaming the process, but succeeding in it. Gaming the process sounds to me like you are abusing some weakness in the system without doing the work required. That is not the case here imho.

Re: Gaming CS Interviews

#14

Post by Planktonne »

Jensson wrote: post #9
Planktonne wrote: post #7

If you're using an interview that bares 'little relevance to an employee’s day-to-day work' and that requires dedicated prep to pass, then what you're doing is optimising a process for finding people who will tick boxes and jump through meaningless hoops. That's fine - some jobs do require that - but it does mean that any 'best and brightest' rhetoric should be shelved. Everyone knows that tech hiring is broken, but…

> If you're using an interview that bares 'little relevance to an employee’s day-to-day work' and that requires dedicated prep to pass, then what you're doing is optimising a process for finding people who will tick boxes and jump through meaningless hoops. You mean all those jobs requiring college degrees? Or is that different somehow? The main reason is that difficult tests has positive signal even if they are part…

> The main reason is that difficult tests has positive signal

They provide a signal, but I don't think the evidence suggests that it's necessarily a positive one. "Can you play Czardas on the tuba" is a difficult task that would provide a strong hire/no hire signal, but that doesn't mean it would be a good signal to use when looking for developers.

The big tech companies themselves admit that a bunch of their employees are not sufficiently competent [1]; clearly, current hiring practices are suboptimal. Just because a test exists doesn't mean it's valid.

> You mean all those jobs requiring college degrees

There are many jobs where high performance doesn't require a college degree, and for those jobs, requiring a degree is again an exercise in box-ticking that should be replaced with a more meaningful measure. There are also jobs were significant education in the topic is important, and a degree provides better evidence of that that many other things, so can be a useful signal.

We know that tech hiring is broken, but whenever it's criticised, the people invested in this system get outraged. "What do you want us to do, just hire everyone?" etc. No one is saying - or has ever said - that assessing applicant competence is a bad idea, just that assessing the ability to rote learn is not the best use of time when hiring developers.

The current system is not the only way, and for an industry that prides itself on being filled with problem solvers and hackers, it's bizarre to me how much people rest on the idea that the existing system is imperfect but present, and so should be left alone.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-meta-girds-fier...

Re: Gaming CS Interviews

#15

Post by unwind »

felixr wrote: post #8

> a sorting algorithm may take O(n log(n)) runtime which is pretty common but be able to operate on an array in-place, only requiring O(n) storage. If it's in-place the sorting might only require constant space and it can be O(1 ) [edit: in terms of space complexity]

Did you mean O(n)? It seems hard to sort n items without at least touching all of them once, which would make the time complexity linear (O(n)) instead of constant (O(1)). Or are you talking about storage needs? Then it sounds very hard to go sub-linear ... I'm confused.

I'm certainly not a good theoretical computer scientist, but I did quickly google this and I couldn't find any trace of constant-time sorting (unless you goalpost it to have O(n log n) processors, but that is kind of cheating, here).

Re: Gaming CS Interviews

#16

Post by tempodox »

felixr wrote: post #8

> a sorting algorithm may take O(n log(n)) runtime which is pretty common but be able to operate on an array in-place, only requiring O(n) storage. If it's in-place the sorting might only require constant space and it can be O(1 ) [edit: in terms of space complexity]

O(1) would mean same storage requirement regardless of element count.

Re: Gaming CS Interviews

#17

Post by hardware2win »

Planktonne wrote: post #14
Jensson wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're using an interview that bares 'little relevance to an employee’s day-to-day work' and that requires dedicated prep to pass, then what you're doing is optimising a process for finding people who will tick boxes and jump through meaningless hoops. You mean all those jobs requiring college degrees? Or is that different somehow? The main reason is that difficult tests has positive signal even if they are part…

> The main reason is that difficult tests has positive signal They provide a signal, but I don't think the evidence suggests that it's necessarily a positive one. "Can you play Czardas on the tuba" is a difficult task that would provide a strong hire/no hire signal, but that doesn't mean it would be a good signal to use when looking for developers. The big tech companies themselves admit that a bunch of their employe…

Maybe it is not the best system, but isnt it at least relatively fair and transparent in compare to "having luck on interviewer's stack/xp"?

Re: Gaming CS Interviews

#19

Post by bradlys »

hardware2win wrote: post #3

So basic data structures and their Os, trees, proficiency with strings, sorting and recursion? It doesnt feel like something really hard

The issue isn't telling people about basic things like you learn in a CS major - it's about taking random problems and solving them on a whiteboard without any errors (syntactically or otherwise) while explaining the solution, alternative solutions, and figuring out any gotchas that they love to throw in less than 20 minutes. An easier one would be something like this - https://leetcode.com/problems/combination-sum-ii/

By the time they've stated the problem and you went through the usual gotcha questions - you've already lost 5 minutes of the It's just very intense and allows for very little margin of error. You have to be exceptionally on your game and used to solving these types of questions outside of an interview in <10 minutes.

Re: Gaming CS Interviews

#20

Post by atoav »

leetrout wrote: post #2

> Guidance is expected; a great interview should be more of a conversation than a one-sided question and one-sided answer. I had a particularly awful interview at Google where the interviewer scoffed at me needing assistance. And in an interview at Twitter with a xoogler they asked me what I knew about number theory and I said "nothing" and they said they majored in it and proceeded to ask me number theory questions.…

In such situations I tend to ask that question directly:

"It was my understanding that you looking for someone who will help you with Django tooling. I can do that. Although number theory sounds interesting, I never felt the need of diving into it in order to solve any Django-related issue. I would be happy to learn more about how you think number theory relates to Django tooling should I start working here."

When people try to be important like that, it is paramount to take them at face value. In a lot of geek environments this happens all the time. People trying to push that one niche topic they really know about, because this is their comfort zone. The problem is: that one niche topic will rarely be a natural fit for any given conversation. More often than not just asking how they think this relates to the conversation at hand is enough to tame them a little bit.

Many times the stuff people say will contradict with the stated (or implicit) goals of a conversation. in this case the chosen topic was one with which the interviewer felt at home.

So another approach would have been to make it even more about them by e.g. instead of answering their question showing that you did your research: "Ah number theory! I saw you majored in number theory, I admittedly never had the need to dive too much into it — what role does number theory play in $Companyname?"

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