111–120 of 524 posts
> When studying CLRS or PP, it’s essential to solve the exercises at the end of each chapter.
I spent the last 2-3 weeks of 2020 going through these exact chapters, 22-26 (solving every exercise and problem) and it took me about 15 hours a day. Toward the end of chapter 26, it got extremely difficult (Goldberg and Tarjan's push relabel algorithm for max flow).
There are two interesting things in this post. The first is that a senior developer at Facebook believes every single senior developer looking for a role at Facebook can revise the same things. Clearly the author believes that Facebook are looking for programmers who fit a very specific mould, to the point that they're willing to go out in public and state exactly that. I'd argue that points to a massive monoculture…
I couldn't disagree more with your post. The author is basically just putting out a detailed study plan for passing an exam. If a doctor posted a plan for passing the medical boards would your first thought be "Wow, look at that massive medical monoculture problem!" That seems like a ridiculous stretch in my opinion. To your second point, I hear this all the time in threads about tech interviewing: "Tech interviews a…
Facebook stopped being a /cool/ company to work for about 4 years ago. How can they expect to attract the best when they’re so lacking in corporate ethics? Don’t say it’s the almighty dollar because anyone with the chops to make $200k/yr from Facebook could start their own SaaS and make $400k/yr without too much effort. So what’s left to be proud of about working at FB? You don’t even get a private office anymore. Do…
> anyone with the chops to make $200k/yr from Facebook could start their own SaaS and make $400k/yr without too much effort. Or, I mean, they could start their own SaaS that for any one of a thousand reasons ends up making them $0k/yr.
Most of the people I know who did competitive programming in high school spent a just a few evenings preparing for FAANG interviews and still got offers in the end. I have the feeling that all the bitterness towards this interview process comes from people who refuse to do the initial investment of time to learn the foundation for solving coding challenges. Once you go through and understand a few hundred coding chal…
However, what exactly are you hoping to achieve with this when hiring a senior engineer who is likely to have 10+ years of experience in the field? With verifiable references?
You are only wasting everyone's time. Sorry but I am really not going to spend a month preparing for a single interview where I have no guarantee of neither an offer and not even knowledge of the team/project I would be working on (Google recruiter calling me seriously thought that this is normal - you apply "blind" and only after passing through their hiring "torture test" of 7 or how many interview rounds you get told which position may be "the best" for you. I said "No, thank you" and hung up.)
The issue with this is that you are both testing the wrong skills (senior engineer really shouldn't be doing basic algorithms but system design, leading teams and managing projects!) and that this is "senior engineer" position is likely senior only in name because the recruiters want to attract more competent people. In reality it is an entry level job ...
There are two interesting things in this post. The first is that a senior developer at Facebook believes every single senior developer looking for a role at Facebook can revise the same things. Clearly the author believes that Facebook are looking for programmers who fit a very specific mould, to the point that they're willing to go out in public and state exactly that. I'd argue that points to a massive monoculture…
I couldn't disagree more with your post. The author is basically just putting out a detailed study plan for passing an exam. If a doctor posted a plan for passing the medical boards would your first thought be "Wow, look at that massive medical monoculture problem!" That seems like a ridiculous stretch in my opinion. To your second point, I hear this all the time in threads about tech interviewing: "Tech interviews a…
It's more like an oncologist posting that every doctor needs to revise cancer treatments for a month before applying for a role in a hospital without realising that other doctors have spent 10 years specialising in different areas of medicine, and then the hospital being amazing at treating cancer but wondering why they're absolutely terrible at mending broken arms.
In this analogy cancer is advertising, and broken arms is privacy.
CLRS is over 1000 very dense pages. I assume the author just did a fairly casual reading and didn't work through many problems. Even still, this is a full month of study just for the interview process, and little of this sticks unless you practice it. This basically says to me that big companies just want to hire new grads or people who have copious amounts of free time to waste on studying, or perhaps enough wealth…
> CLRS is over 1000 very dense pages. I assume the author just did a fairly casual reading and didn't work through many problems. When I saw his day to day plan include things like chapters 22-26 of CLRS, I thought the same and casual might be an understatement unless he has read this book multiple times already. DDIA was by far the preparation reading I've enjoyed the most. I'm currently reading it again. It is so e…
> When studying CLRS or PP, it’s essential to solve the exercises at the end of each chapter. That will help you to solidify what you have learned into your brain.
That's what boggled my mind when I read this. There's no way that he read multiple chapters of CLRS a night and did all of the problems at the end of the chapter. I've done most of those exercises; some of them took a long while to get through.
I guess that's why I take issue with the advice that is given in the article. It is kind of unrealistic for any 30+ professional with a family, children, etc. to study this much for an interview.
Every time I read these posts I find them very depressing. Crunch through an enormous bunch of algorithm problems in order to perform well on some unrealistic whiteboard programming (I think the system engineering problems are actually more useful though) - as usual we've focused on the easy to measure metric rather than anything actually useful. Maybe these things are meant to be a proxy for how good you are at othe…
After 20 years in software, I had a phone interview with an Amazon guy who sounded half my age (at most). Asked me to write some kind of function to do something, sort some stuff or some such. I described verbally how I would do it, almost line by line, in pseudo-code. He said "I need you to write it out in [some language]". I said "But why? I just told you how I'd do it." But he needed me to literally write the code…
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I tend to be on your side of the fence but I have to nitpick your argument: At these companies, algorithms and the basics are fundamentally important. Because you tend to work on tiny parts of a massive whole, there is no tolerance for cowboy-coding and not following best-practices. IMO the interviews test that you can fall in line and follow the patterns that have been in place for decades. With regards to using API…
That all makes sense for hiring people to work on big existing systems, but many of these large companies are also trying to innovate and build new products with smaller, more agile teams. Sure, you’ll still need to integrate with established APIs and focus more on scalability than you would at a startup, but the kind of people who excel in each type of role will have very different personalities and skillsets. Gradi…
Which innovation of Facebook are you describing? Instagram, WhatsApp, or the stories?
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I couldn't disagree more with your post. The author is basically just putting out a detailed study plan for passing an exam. If a doctor posted a plan for passing the medical boards would your first thought be "Wow, look at that massive medical monoculture problem!" That seems like a ridiculous stretch in my opinion. To your second point, I hear this all the time in threads about tech interviewing: "Tech interviews a…
>in most cases doctors have many, many thousands of hours under their belt in training before still needing to study a ton to pass their boards The difference is that what the doctors put so much time into learning can actually be quite useful for their job. The vast majority of competitive coding stuff isn't. Interview procedures based around it completely fail to assess some of the most important abilities in softw…
I completely agree that being good at designing new APIs is one of the most valuable qualities of a programmer and I have never seen a job interview or test that could check this.