141–150 of 289 posts
Getting a job in Silicon Valley, as an outsider, isn't hard. Getting a good job is hard. Many offers will come through at a lower level just because, whatever you did, you didn't do it in the Valley. That's Cali arrogance for ya. Hedge fund interviews are a lot more intense and technically difficult (and you feel good when you pass) but don't come with the VC-fueled, youthful arrogance of a proper Valley company. Hed…
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You should know enough to avoid doing nested loops to find the intersection of two lists. Things like that come up on a regular basis for me, although I don't work at any tech giant.
You mean like this built-in from Ruby's standard Array class? intersection = ary1 & ary2
(sorry for sidetracking the excellent piece but...) When I examine the ~13,000 hours I've spent programming I find it hilarious that interviews should centre around algorithmic problems. I've been guilty of it myself and failing FizzBuzz is definitely a true negative but it's so little of a true positive it's not even funny. What I would really love to know about you as a candidate is: - do you know how to actually n…
Most software isn't hard to invent; all software is hard to maintain. For the overwhelming majority of software development, being organised is more important than being clever.
How is your H1B still valid after you lost(?) your job and left the country? H1B is tied to an employer and a specific job, so I don't know how it's still active. Are you sure that your H1B hasn't expired yet? If you try to enter on an expired H1B, you might get banned from entering for 10 years (this happened to my friend 6 months ago) so make sure your immigration status is rock solid.
I do not understand how could he quit his job and search for another job for 3 months using the same H1B.
I might be missing something here.
> “Design the infrastructure for a link-shortener.” I'm wondering how to answer that? * Get a short and memorizable url. * When you enter an URL hash it, put it in a hash table and use the hash for the link. > “If I type https://google.com into my browser and press enter, what happens?” How would you guys answer this one? I'm not sure I've enough knowledge to do that. I'd say: * first TLS handshake thanks to RSA to s…
> How would you guys answer this one? I've had it twice. The first time, with Google, they were genuinely interested to know how deep I could go, so I talked about DNS, TCP, SSL, HTTP etc, but I also talked about application event loops and keyboard drivers and interrupt handlers. The second time, with Rackspace, I presumed they want the same, but they were a bit bewildered and wanted to keep it higher level (protoco…
(sorry for sidetracking the excellent piece but...) When I examine the ~13,000 hours I've spent programming I find it hilarious that interviews should centre around algorithmic problems. I've been guilty of it myself and failing FizzBuzz is definitely a true negative but it's so little of a true positive it's not even funny. What I would really love to know about you as a candidate is: - do you know how to actually n…
I think most interviews don't focus enough on systems. I expect every software engineer to know: - How virtual memory works - How threads work - How TCP works - How ports work - How ethernet works - How DNS works - How a web server works. And so on. A lot of these things are more important than theory (but I think theory is important, too!).
"sum of the numbers from 1 to N is O(N^2)" Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but no it isn't. it's O(N) if you have to traverse a list of numbers it's actually constant time if the numbers are sequential.
You can use that result to conclude that algorithms like for example bubble sort has a worst case running time of O(n^2), since it does (n-1) + (n-2) + ... + 1 swaps in the worst case during the whole sorting.
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Given that, as an employee, you are the seller in the relationship, that would be like Walmart not posting prices on any items and making you suggest what it is worth at the checkout. It is not usually how business is done. About the only exception that I can think of is in sales of commodities, where the buyer typically does make the offer. I'm not sure you want to treat yourself and career as a commodity, do you? W…
> Given that, as an employee, you are the seller in the relationship Very serious question: Is that actually true, and why do you believe it? Is it "I'm not the one with hard cash, therefore I am obligated to negotiate like a big box retailer"? Don't be fooled into adopting an unhelpful paradigm or power-relationship just because what you are bartering is harder to quanitfy. In many ways your employer is much more li…
>Very serious question: Is that actually true, and why do you believe it?
Because we don't talk about the "buyer" of USD except in a currency exchange context - you don't say, "I just bought $100 with my old bike."