Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Inverting Binary Trees Considered Harmful

jasq.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 225 posts

Re: Inverting Binary Trees Considered Harmful

#141

Post by sriram_sun »

discardorama wrote: post #133
sriram_sun wrote: post #64

The rules are pretty clear on what the interview will cover. The recruiter tells you months before the interview and they (Google) even send you a list of what books and papers to read before you consider yourself ready. That is more than fair. I just joined a start up. It consists of 3 non-minorities and 3 minorities. All three non-minorities were recruited early on because they all knew someone within the company (…

> The recruiter tells you months before the interview and they (Google) even send you a list of what books and papers to read before you consider yourself ready. Right, because I have nothing better do in those months than to rehash CS 101 and waste my time inverting trees and reversing strings.

Nobody is telling you to spend all your free time on CS101 for months. It shouldn't take months. Go back, pick up an OS textbook and read a few pages without all that academic pressure. I bet you'll appreciate the writing a little more.

Re: Inverting Binary Trees Considered Harmful

#142

Post by therealidiot »

epalm wrote: post #90
x0x0 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One reason bringing your resume is a good idea is because scumbag recruiters sometimes modify your resume, inserting the right keywords to get you the interview in the first place.

I find if you use PDFs it happens significantly less

Re: Inverting Binary Trees Considered Harmful

#144

Post by Bootvis »

therealidiot wrote: post #142
epalm wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One reason bringing your resume is a good idea is because scumbag recruiters sometimes modify your resume, inserting the right keywords to get you the interview in the first place.

I find if you use PDFs it happens significantly less

Unfortunately and apparently some recruiters have interns to convert those PDF's into their shitty doc-template. It happened to me a few times. Every time I had my CV ready and this seemed to help. Knowing LaTeX reflects very positively on you in some circles.

Re: Inverting Binary Trees Considered Harmful

#145

Post by ccortes »

istvan__ wrote: post #86

Twitter interview went sideways, I got one shot with a question (that I won't share) that required finding Hamiltonian path in a tree, over the phone of course. I am not sure what is the mindset of the interviewer. I am hiring engineers (systems, software and security) in the last 5 years, got trained up on recruiting by Amazon, so I would say I have a pretty good understanding on hiring. The right approach with thes…

>I got one shot with a question (that I won't share) that required finding Hamiltonian path in a tree

I'm guessing this is not the complete question, rigth? Because you can only find a Hamiltonian path if the tree itself is a path.

Re: Inverting Binary Trees Considered Harmful

#146

Post by BinaryIdiot »

vidarh wrote: post #111
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That actually sounds like a decent way to do things. The only thing I'd change is making it shorter and trying to incorporate some pair programming at least to some minor degree to see how well they communicate along with developing.

Pair programming is incredibly divisive. In a company that does pair programming, sure, do that, because those of us that hate pair programming would then instantly tell them we're not interested and leave rather than waste time on an interview somewhere we won't want to work. But likewise, if you're not actually doing pair programming day to day, don't do it in an interview setting.

Erm, okay, I used the wrong terminology. I simply meant two people working on the same project. I didn't mean on the same workstation, that would be terrible.

Re: Inverting Binary Trees Considered Harmful

#147

Post by datashovel »

epalm wrote: post #90
x0x0 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One reason bringing your resume is a good idea is because scumbag recruiters sometimes modify your resume, inserting the right keywords to get you the interview in the first place.

I try to avoid headhunters who think keywords matter (which, sadly, is most of them).

Re: Inverting Binary Trees Considered Harmful

#149

Post by kozukumi »

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…

Oh God this brings back memories. I was actually offered a job at Google (by some miracle) but turned it down. The interviews (7 in total) were an awful experience.

I had to solve problems that I had not looked at since my masters and were mostly theoretical CS things which nobody outside of academia ever has to actually use.

I had a brief read through of their coding style a few days before so I solved it in a very Google way which is what most likely got me the job. Even though doing it their way was just awful (in terms of implementation).

There is no doubt that Google's search algorithms are the best but I can't help but think the rest of their services are only high performing because they can through their enormous data centre resources at the problem.

I also hated the attitude of the interviewers and engineers I met. They were so up their own asses. Their way was the best possible way and if you didn't agree well fuck you!

I have only turned down two jobs in my career that I 100% do not regret and Google is one of them.

Re: Inverting Binary Trees Considered Harmful

#150

Post by Ricker »

datashovel wrote: post #147
epalm wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One reason bringing your resume is a good idea is because scumbag recruiters sometimes modify your resume, inserting the right keywords to get you the interview in the first place.

I try to avoid headhunters who think keywords matter (which, sadly, is most of them).

Exactly, I find it's just ticking off every item that's mentioned in the job description. Using the exact same words works best.
Post reply on HN