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I'm a C+/B- developer. I've been doing this stuff for touching two decades, and these questions gave me a prickly sweat down my back. There is a part of me that feels very lucky to have plopped onto the Earth right when I did, before there was an organized process to weed me out. I'm entrenched enough that interviews are generally just culture fit interviews. I think I'd need ulcer medicine to get a job with no reput…
These sort of challenges are great for learning some of the theory behind computer science and getting you thinking, but they're not a useful part of the interview process imo.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really. If anything it just makes coding challenges useless for distinguishing between people who can think, and people who can regurgitate. It's one thing to "know" how to balance a binary tree because you've read up on and practiced the most common challenges - it's something else entirely to actually think through and understand a problem, then come up with a solution. I'd much rather have someone who can desc…
Sure I agree as well. That there are so many resources and tools available to answer these coding challenges that if for whatever reason such a challenge was presented the minimum is to be able to answer thr challenge. Going beyond would be to know when to use such a data structure or its inherent strengths and weaknesses etc.
I don't understand code challenges. Can you even program without Google and Stack Overflow anymore? And god-forbid being experienced in a dozen frameworks and libraries if it's not the exact combination the company uses.
There are some however here that you really shouldn't be, like remembering specific algorithms - if you're just memorizing 20 different sorting algorithm's exactly implementation, clearly that's not producing much if any value for you.
If someone however was to give you this Algorithm section https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/donnemartin/interactive-... and tell you to implement it, that would prove whether you had the skills needed to properly use Google and StackOverflow for anything but a direct copy+paste and could be a very good test for a programmer.
Basic data structures, knowing when to apply them and how to solve fairly straightforward challenges like "does this string contain any duplicate characters" when you have full use of Python's builtin data structures are completely fair interview questions in my opinion.
Just picking 1 or 2 of these questions that seems vaguely related to your work is enough, combined with asking some basic technical stuff like "What's the difference between a class and an object?" can weed out a shocking number of people, showing they don't even have conversationally useful knowledge about a topic.
Isn't it far more important to know how to design a modern, maintainable, scalable web application? Know how an when to cache stuff. How to design a API. How to integrate with third party APIs. How to setup logging. How to sanitize data and other common security problems. How to setup test/build/deploy structures. Et cetera, you get the point.
If, while building a web application, i encounter a "big data"/"data processing" problem, i will find a appropriate solution using CS best practices. But hell, i would struggle to implement a simple array sorting algorithm under pressure.
I'm a C+/B- developer. I've been doing this stuff for touching two decades, and these questions gave me a prickly sweat down my back. There is a part of me that feels very lucky to have plopped onto the Earth right when I did, before there was an organized process to weed me out. I'm entrenched enough that interviews are generally just culture fit interviews. I think I'd need ulcer medicine to get a job with no reput…
How often have you had to code up solutions to any of these challenges in the last two decades? These sort of challenges are great for learning some of the theory behind computer science and getting you thinking, but they're not a useful part of the interview process imo.
Semi off-topic, but i am curious. How much of CS fundamentals do you expect a backend (or fullstack) developer to recite in an job interview? I did all CS theory stuff many years ago at university, but i could not pass a interview test full with these CS basics. Isn't it far more important to know how to design a modern, maintainable, scalable web application? Know how an when to cache stuff. How to design a API. How…
Big company? You almost certainly need to have your CS challenge question toolbox full.
Smaller company? Many follow the big company interview methodology, but some don't, so more likely you can get away with not breaking the spine on your Cracking the Coding Interview.