161–170 of 174 posts
I left after "elemental awesomium," someone TL;DR?
TL;DR: You'll never work at Facebook because you don't have the attention span required to spend 5 minutes reading an article.
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From the post: "Good coding problems are fractal in nature. They can be extended arbitrarily to gauge the depth of your knowledge. For example, you might be asked to solve a problem any way you want. Then you'll be asked to solve it again in constant space or sub-linear time." You could prepare for months but if you don't understand the core CS concepts then it's difficult to hack these kinds of interview problems. H…
I don't disagree with anything you say. As I mentioned earlier that all people who hack such interviews do have basic understanding/skills requisite for the corp, quite enough to play the gymnastics of the interviews. A good interviewer does try to gauge whether the answer was known to the interviewee. But I have seen that happen far more at hot startups than big companies- primarily because of their more stringent p…
I do think there are false negatives through this process but that's the trade off, I believe, for efficiency. Considering how time consuming interviews are (for the interviewer), there has to be some ways of reducing the wheat from the chaff.
After all, many use a university degree (from a prestigious university) as an initial filter. However, I'm sure there are many talented people who don't have degrees. But when looking at the probabilities, your chances of finding a great candidate are significantly higher if you filtered on that degree.
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Is there a linear time solution? The normal solution is O(N^3) in the number of windows (and does not depend on W,H at all).
Facebook Hacker Cup had a similar problem: https://www.facebook.com/hackercup/problems.php?pid=53250625... I almost solved it; after screwing around for a while trying to record only one value for each square, I realized you need to store two values for each square. If we’re looking for the upper-left corner we can put a window, each dead pixel/pixel “poisons” all the pixels less than the width of the window to the l…
> Give feedback. We regularly survey candidates about the interview process and take feedback seriously. Yet so few companies give feedback.
From a legal perspective, that's a dangerous move. There are any number of ways an interviewer's feedback could be misinterpreted (or correctly interpreted, I suppose) as being an illegal reason for issuing a no-hire. Even if you're careful, there's a non-zero chance of a really bad outcome. It just isn't worth it.
By the way, I'm wondering why do some people insist of working at a company which doesn't want them? Besides money from a lawsuit, of course. Even if the interview wasn't "fair", it's someone else's company, so they should be able to hire whoever they want.
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It reads like a category error to me. My experience is that the coming times that require A-level work from memory are emergencies and the "$X billion times a day query parser" ones are not, allowing more iteration and collaboration.
You may be right, but all I know is my own experience. The query parser example is real; I had to do something like that recently in order to more deeply analyze some performance bugs.
Was your query parser work done under the pressure and constraints of an interview environment? Would you have been able to write that parser in the same form at a white board during your actual interview?
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If people who already work in software feel the need to study for an interview, it's a pretty decent indication that the interview itself is... not ideal.
Please share what is the ideal interview.
At least this type of interview seems to solve the problem of developers strangely needing to study for an interview, and I would guess it also better represents coding ability.
Alternate versions can include "debug this" and "design this" (which is pretty popular AFAIK).
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You may be right, but all I know is my own experience. The query parser example is real; I had to do something like that recently in order to more deeply analyze some performance bugs.
The process you describe in the essay is portrayed as one of policy and iterated improvement at Facebook, oriented around "How We Do It," with your GP example meant as support for that process as relates to "prep mode" approaches to interviewing at FB. It sounds like you're backing away from that, though. Was your query parser work done under the pressure and constraints of an interview environment? Would you have be…
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(Author of the post) Consider this: In any job you're going to do "normal" stuff the majority of the time. The other times, you have to pull out A-level work. It's not 24x7, but when the time comes you have to be able to do it, eg writing a parser for an obscure query language that will get executed $X billion times per day, so it better be small, correct, and fast. We ask people to prep because we want to know if yo…
Well, that sounds just weird. Either you expect the people being interviewed as part of their prep to learn and remember forever everything they ever may need at Facebook and that could possibly be asked in the interview, or your argument doesn't make sense. If I hadn't any contact with parsers/compilers for a while I will need to look stuff up. When you have no frame of reference in my process when getting the infor…
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The main downside of these kind of interviews is that the candidate has to prepare . This may be well suited for fresh grads, but not for mid-career senior engineers. You should seek good candidates as is. But, you already assume that one needs to prepare...
Hi, author here. With respect, I am a mid-career senior engineer too. I trained for a few weeks before interviewing at Facebook because, well, changing jobs is important. There is zero harm spending some time warming up mentally. I recommend that people prepare because I've seen many many obviously smart people not make it through. It's like showing up for a singing audition without warming up your voice. You might h…
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Another reason I am not fond of this- it is easily hackable. I know some pretty average people who prepared for months, went through all questions they could find online, ignored their day jobs and cleared the interviews, while some really talented people could not. Funny that this got brought on the Facebook thread. Though I never applied at FB, I have 'mentored' two people who made it through the process. Mentoring…
Why couldn't talented people also game the interview?