141–150 of 740 posts
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This is just ridiculous. BFS is such a useful building block. If you're stubborn enough to not spend 10 mins on this the best of luck.
The creator of ruby on rails wouldn't pass a whiteboard interview. Ruby on Rails had more of an impact at Twitter, Github, Airbnb than BFS is my guess DHH's tweet https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1085987159406927872
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There are plenty of people who feel the same way about all the useless startups in SV that exist solely to take VC money. At least Facebook actually provides something of value to the hundreds of millions people who use it.
There is a robust debate about whether or not facebook provides negative value to its users. In my opinion, it's charitable to say that the question of whether Facebook harms its users is open to debate. There seems to be a clear correlation between use of facebook and negative mental health outcomes. The fact that people use a product is absolutely not evidence that it provides value to its consumers, especially whe…
"After about a month of consistently practicing problems each day (maybe 2–3 hours/day, more on weekends)..." I'm reading this as a guy with a wife, kids, full-time job, and rusty whiteboarding skills. My inability to make this kind of time investment makes me feel trapped at my current position.
Here are a few of things to be aware of that may make you feel better:
- tech companies in the bay area have extremely high churn rates (2-4 yrs is not uncommon)
- unicorns often hire constantly and in high volume (e.g. Facebook increased head count by some 8k people last year alone), so the likelihood that all hires for all unicorns are all "cream of the crop" is far lower than most will admit.
- many companies here are willing to spend significantly more on hiring process than companies in other cities/countries: I've been flown in for on-sites from Toronto on multiple occasions and when I accepted my current role, I received a generous amount of money for moving expenses ($7500) for my family of 4, in addition to getting legal support for visa/immigration procedures. This makes physical location a much smaller hurdle than one might expect.
- not all roles have algorithm-centric interviews (e.g. in my experience, interviews for web-related roles tend to be much more about day-to-day experience), and even for more "traditional" roles, there may be variations in interviewers' expectations (this is exacerbated by the high churn rate from point 1)
- interviewing doesn't need to be that intensive or stressful. I only did a few passively over several years. An interview process typically starts w/ a 1 hour phone screen, so you don't necessarily have to commit to whole-day interview marathons right off the bat. In that one hour you often get a chance to ask more about the role and get a feel for yourself if it'd be a good fit (it often isn't!) Doing this kind of fishing every once in a blue moon is fairly manageable.
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This is just ridiculous. BFS is such a useful building block. If you're stubborn enough to not spend 10 mins on this the best of luck.
The creator of ruby on rails wouldn't pass a whiteboard interview. Ruby on Rails had more of an impact at Twitter, Github, Airbnb than BFS is my guess DHH's tweet https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1085987159406927872
I'm working on preparing for an interview gauntlet but in no way would I do 6 interviews in 6 days. A full day of interviewing is such a draining experience mentally and physically, after interviewing with Google in 2014 I just wanted to get a glass of water for my parched throat and go to sleep. Congratulations to the OP, I have EPI as well and it's certainly a challenging book.
I would bet that with time and repeated practice the process becomes less stressful and draining, but I have no intention of testing my hypothesis any time soon.
> If it’s of any use: I was interviewing for my second job out of college with about two and a half years of experience without any particularly notable internships or employers on my resume; I went to a very small school that had zero known software companies at their “career fair”; I started preparing in late April and started applying in June/July; and, lastly, a few months in, my job is everything I could have po…
Programmer distillation. Companies need to admit that only trying to hire a single type of person is not going to work. It's just like with petroleum: there's nothing wrong with the other products you get from the mix. You just have to appreciate what there is and make the most of it. I bet you're quite good at something (perhaps multiple things), but they don't value it. Their loss. I'm glad you found something that…
Um.. have you looked at their stock? Investors would probly want them to continue coding puzzles if they knew about that.
I find it shocking that Facebook would still be considered as a peer to these other companies in terms of desirability as an employer. I would only accept a position at Facebook, which seems to be building a fundamentally destructive product while going out of its way to behave unethically in many dimensions, if it was an absolutely last resort to pay the medical bills of some dying loved one or something. Why would…
It's really surprising to see how hard people fall down on even the simplest part of this exercise. People with lots of experience, people who work in big-name companies (including the ones mentioned here), you name it.
This experience has really caused me to soften my erstwhile stance of "tech hiring is broken and inhumane", because it really makes me suspect that no matter how simple or common the problem is, many people will fall all over themselves attempting to solve it. Even if the problem is nerves, how much can you really ease someone's nerves over a video chat?
This is basically the lesson of FizzBuzz.
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The whole process is a roll of the dice. The more senior the role, the less fair that roll of the dice will be. If you can accept this fact, you don't have to be "trapped". That's how I think of it anyway: I never spend more than 2 weeks (_very_ part time) preparing. I do get rejected sometimes, but I get plenty of good offers too.
I've been in a ton of debriefs at this point. I no longer feel bad about any rejection I've had from any big company. "Dice roll" is a perfect way to describe it. The number of things that someone will raise an arbitrary red flag over is endless and largely down to personal bias / mood of the interviewer. I've seen people discredited for not setting up some large inheritance hierarchy for their whiteboard design ques…
There's really no way to prepare for the full set of eventualities, and unless you do something spectacular (chances of which are slim in a high-stress situation), their opinion of you is formed in the first few minutes of the interview anyway.