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Inverting Binary Trees Considered Harmful

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Re: Inverting Binary Trees Considered Harmful

#71

Post by CamperBob2 »

This passage gives me a good idea:

  The OPower guy said they had a ton of problems where they 
  will be using Scalding, so I asked him what they are 
  doing in its absence. He said Oh we pojo it. Then he said 
  pojo this and pojo that, and soon I was drowning in 
  pojos, so I asked, Sorry, what exactly is a pojo ? Now, 
  bear in mind I am a Scala programmer and haven't touched 
  Java in ages, and they knew that. Their whole pitch was 
  they wanted to inject some new Scala blood into their 
  tired Java veins, and that's why I interviewed there. So 
  the guy is agape, and says, you don't know what a pojo is?
  When was the last time you wrote Java?
When interviewing a candidate, use some wacky made-up term like "pojo" a lot in offhand conversation, and reject anyone who doesn't ask what it is.

Re: Inverting Binary Trees Considered Harmful

#72

Post by x0x0 »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #71

This passage gives me a good idea: The OPower guy said they had a ton of problems where they will be using Scalding, so I asked him what they are doing in its absence. He said Oh we pojo it. Then he said pojo this and pojo that, and soon I was drowning in pojos, so I asked, Sorry, what exactly is a pojo ? Now, bear in mind I am a Scala programmer and haven't touched Java in ages, and they knew that. Their whole pitch…

pojo is a common term for java devs, at least any who have been molested by spring

Re: Inverting Binary Trees Considered Harmful

#73

Post by tobico »

seletz wrote: post #23
smaili wrote: post #8

While I'm completely, 100%, against these kinds of questions, how else can a company that receives thousands of resumes a day filter out the good from bad?

It's actually not that hard -- invite them to work with you on a small project. Pay them reasonably. See how they work in RL. Then decide, and -- by all means -- give them honest feedback even when not hiring.

This method doesn't work well for hiring people that already have a full-time job elsewhere.

Re: Inverting Binary Trees Considered Harmful

#74

Post by x0x0 »

melling wrote: post #50
rdtsc wrote: post #11

Yeah I remember the Google interview a few years back. I did it mostly for fun, and because their recruiters kept contacting me. So there we were, building a tree out of a forest of existing smaller trees or such. That was after they couldn't find my resume, and used a 5 year old one they found some place. They seemed annoyed and tired. By that time I felt nothing short of me proving P!=NP would have help changed the…

I was told by someone many years ago to always take a copy of my resume with me to an interview. That advice has paid off a couple of times. These days I also keep an email draft ready to send.

While that's good advice, I don't follow it.

If a company doesn't have their shit together enough to coordinate an interview schedule and get the right people into the right room at the right time with my resume in their hands, ideally in their hands ahead of time, I don't want to work there. It's a basic competence test.

Re: Inverting Binary Trees Considered Harmful

#75

Post by mikekchar »

seletz wrote: post #23
smaili wrote: post #8

While I'm completely, 100%, against these kinds of questions, how else can a company that receives thousands of resumes a day filter out the good from bad?

It's actually not that hard -- invite them to work with you on a small project. Pay them reasonably. See how they work in RL. Then decide, and -- by all means -- give them honest feedback even when not hiring.

We did that one time. On the one had it worked very well. The person wasn't a good fit on the team so we declined. On the other hand it was emotionally draining because the guy was a really nice guy. It's really, really hard to work with someone, get to know them a bit and then at the end say, "Sorry, you're just not for us". I think it was even harder for the candidate who didn't clue in that they weren't doing very well. They met the team, got to know people a bit, got to feel the atmosphere and started to imagine what it would be like to work with us.

In the end it was such an upsetting experience for everybody that we agreed never to do it again. I think there are probably ways to make it work, but you need to be really careful to maintain some distance... But then, will you get the result you are looking for if you do?

Re: Inverting Binary Trees Considered Harmful

#76

Post by sangnoir »

seletz wrote: post #23
smaili wrote: post #8

While I'm completely, 100%, against these kinds of questions, how else can a company that receives thousands of resumes a day filter out the good from bad?

It's actually not that hard -- invite them to work with you on a small project. Pay them reasonably. See how they work in RL. Then decide, and -- by all means -- give them honest feedback even when not hiring.

This sounds like a huge time-sink on both sides. The interviewee will need to clear up a lot of time to work on the small project (which is not always possible).

This does not scale - the number of people that can be interviewed per unit time will go down drastically.

This wastes interviewers time, they could be spending the time working on real work (unless the project is real work).

If the project is a real work for hiring organisation, it likely would reveal to outsider things the company probably wants to keep secret (infrastructure, technology, processes, etc).

Re: Inverting Binary Trees Considered Harmful

#77

Post by asuffield »

wyldfire wrote: post #17

I enjoy the challenge of programming interviews. When I interviewed in Mountain View, I thought it was just super cool to have been invited. It was like the mother ship had summoned me home! I was mega-underwhelmed when I botched the last session, though. And after doing so poorly, no one escorted me out or summed things up. Efficient, I suppose -- I'd met with the recruiter at the beginning of the day and there was…

To fill in one gap - our hiring process has an extra layer of insulation to better control individual biases. Your interviewers all submit feedback and an independent hiring committee makes the decision, on a different day, with all due deliberation.

The reason nobody has anything to say to you at the end of the day is because none of that has happened so nobody knows what to say at that point, and I don't think it's likely to make you feel better to have somebody give you a completely generic speech that has got nothing to do with you.

As for the more general thing that keeps popping up - do people seriously believe that all the thousands of Google engineers who do interviews haven't figured out that people writing code on a whiteboard under stress aren't the same thing as people sat at their desk grinding out code?

Re: Inverting Binary Trees Considered Harmful

#78

Post by BinaryIdiot »

BobTheCoder wrote: post #27

A lot of these posts don't actually address the problem of hiring and filtering people. If you think whiteboard tests or logic puzzles are not effective, why do you think this and what is a better alternative? I personally think they are ok, but should more be a means to test if the candidate can reason intelligently and it shouldn't matter much if the end answer they get is correct or not.

Personally I think there are two good ways, in combination, to determining if a person is a good hire.

1. Ask questions about past projects. Probing questions to make sure their resume sounds accurate. Get a sense for how they solved problems in the past and explain them.

2. Give them something to code. On a computer. Some small example. Even better if you can try a pair programming exercise to see how they code and how they can communicate with others on a team.

Asking academic questions has been entirely useless in my opinion. I've worked with multiple people who can pass all the academic questions about algorithms and data set and couldn't write an application to save their live...and the vice versa too. I'd rather see how they can code, now and how they can communicate about projects (active and in the past).

Re: Inverting Binary Trees Considered Harmful

#79

Post by sown »

This burns a little as I got turned down for a job I think I would have done really well at. I'm wondering what I did wrong exactly. I accepted defeat as graciously as I could but I don't know what my future holds.

I love programming but I'm wondering if programming doesn't love me.

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