Interviewing at Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Dropbox, Fog Creek, etc • Hacker News Board

Re: Interviewing at Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Dropbox, Fog Creek, etc

#121

Post by jrockway » Wed, May 23, 2012, 6:48 AM UTC

dockd wrote: post #102

thedufer wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Knowing how to code a mergesort" is specifically not what they're looking for, in my experience. The idea is to come up with a problem that requires an interesting algorithm that very few people will know, and see how the candidate reasons their way to an answer.

Are you saying they should be able to derive a little known algorithm by themselves? What do you make of Knuth's quote about how many people implement binary search wrong? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_Search#Implementation_is...

Many people implement it wrong. The best programmers know how to check their work, and will be asked during the interview to check.

Who doesn't know that (x + y) / 2 can overflow?

But the people who you really want to filter out have no idea or intuition that a problem can be solved by slicing it into two. That's the key idea behind binary search (and indeed, much of computer science).

Re: Interviewing at Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Dropbox, Fog Creek, etc

#122

Post by smikhanov » Wed, May 23, 2012, 11:19 AM UTC

BlackJack wrote: post #69

ajross wrote: post #10

"Hi, I'm Sean Haufler, rising senior at Yale [...] Position: Software Engineer Intern [...] I didn’t have much experience manipulating individual bits" Sometimes I want to cry for what the world has become. At least I can be content knowing I have job security. (To be fair: the ability to google the answer quickly and implement it is exactly the skill that kind of test is supposed to screen for. Still, three years at…

I'm a rising junior at Yale, and I know Sean well and we both took systems programming together. We definitely covered bit manipulation and bit tricks, as well as number representation and lots of other stuff. Sean's an incredibly bright guy but he's more interested in building world-changing apps and web dev. as opposed to low-level systems programming. There are other classes here where you have to code in assembly…

Why would anyone think they could write world-changing web apps without knowing bit-fiddling techniques?

Re: Interviewing at Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Dropbox, Fog Creek, etc

#123

Post by Cyndre » Wed, May 23, 2012, 9:59 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #112

Cyndre wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't believe the general attitude programmers are putting forward. Here is a person in the medical field that requires at least twice the schooling, huge entry barriers etc getting an hour interview. We are subjected to full day flights, multiple phone interviews etc. She deals with life, not code. This tells me one of two things. Either our hiring practices are severally broken, or its harder to program then be a…

Don't you think that it's possible that becoming a full MD doctor is a qualifications vouching system that programming lacks, and thus it's "every company for themselves" in terms of deciding who is actually qualified/worth hiring? The amount of sub-par candidates that are nearly constantly looking is absolutely appalling to me, and is probably shocking to most of the non-hiring-managers reading HN. Why is the interv…

The sheer idea that bad doctors don't get through the "qualification" area is insane. They have just as many bad people getting through the qualification period that you speak of. The main difference would be if you didn't have a CS course. Then you start to enter a grey area.

And also I myself have been to more bad doctors then good doctors. There is just as big of gap between the poor doctors and the good doctors as there is in programming.