How to Crack the Toughest Coding Interviews • Hacker News Board

Re: How to Crack the Toughest Coding Interviews

#141

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Oct 27, 2012, 9:19 PM UTC

Evbn wrote: post #127

robocop wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this approach would scale, due to the time investment required. It also suffers from making it hard to compare one candidate to another in a fair way, unless you have everyone fix the same bugs. Having a bunch of canned bugs to be fixed doesn't seem much better than asking a CS puzzle.

I Lways ask people to slave a simplified version of an actual problem I have worked on recently. Some times I even learn some thing. Comparing candidates is irrelevant. You just want N hires that can contribute in your environment.

[deleted]

Re: How to Crack the Toughest Coding Interviews

#142

Post by danielweber » Mon, Oct 29, 2012, 4:59 PM UTC

maeon3 wrote: post #104

danielweber wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Steve Yegge's well-known advice: He says: Don't say "choo choo choo" when you're "thinking". God damn it. Now I'm going to have to fight the urge to do that during interviews!

The "choo choo choo" people make my skin crawl. Not sure why. It could be subconscious because everyone I've met in life who did that was not good for my career to associate with them.

People do this for real? I thought Yegge met one person who did it and was making a joke at that guy's expense.

EDIT I suddenly got it. They're doing long exhales. I think my kids might do this when they're pretending to work. Then again, they are kids.

Re: How to Crack the Toughest Coding Interviews

#143

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 5:34 AM UTC

timr wrote: post #56

Swizec wrote: post #8

I shared my experience in a blogpost: http://swizec.com/blog/inside-a-google-onsite-interview/swiz... A few days ago I finally realized why they said I'm not good enough at big-O to play with them (despite saying my coding was excellent). For some reason I had a mental block that day and wanted to implement hash tables as prefix trees every single fucking time . I have no idea why. Of course I know a hash table is O(…

A hash table lookup is O(n), where n is the number of elements in the table. They have amortized constant time lookup (i.e. constant time in the average case).

[deleted]

Re: How to Crack the Toughest Coding Interviews

#144

Post by wting » Thu, Nov 01, 2012, 6:55 PM UTC

pjscott wrote: post #118

wting wrote: post #85

I'm kind of surprised at some of the negative comments people have towards these styles of interviews. I'm a current student still going through the interview process with Seattle / SV / Austin companies (big and small). Every interview is the same: - review resume - 0-2 behavioral questions - 1-3 technical questions covering design, data structures, algorithms, sometimes language specific (usually pointers) Here are…

> 1. How would you detect the largest sub array (i.e. max sum of adjacent numbers) given an example array: That's a fun one. The obvious solution is O(n^2), but there's a less obvious way to do it in O(n). (I'm not giving spoilers, because this actually is fun to solve.)

A sad fact is I had to look up the answer, and the algorithm is well known from one of my university's professors which I've had class with.