Programming interviews aren't pass/fail, they're match/no match. Imagine how it would read if this said "how to pass a first date".
If dates involved asking questions with a definite right answer, that article might exist.
How to Pass a Programming Interview
161–170 of 570 posts
Re: How to Pass a Programming Interview
#162> candidates who have worked at a top company or studied at a top school go on to pass interviews at a 30% higher rate than programmers who don’t have these credentials (for a given level of performance on our credential-blind screen). Welcome to Silicon Valley meritocracy. And it's much worse for founders seeking investment, where there are no hard skills to test at all. It's almost purely about being the same class…
Gotta say, this is incredibly discouraging for someone like me.
On the positive side, no one can stop you from making lots of money using the internet. And if you have something that really takes off, those same investors will line up at your door.
Re: How to Pass a Programming Interview
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've had people interview claiming to know X and then not code in X correctly. So... that's a red flag. We allow interviewees to pick their strongest language. But if you end up picking something that doesn't exist, well, you aren't earning yourself any points.
I don't get why. When I'm organizing my thoughts in code, I normally write something pythonish, but not really any real language. Stopping to think about the correct syntax does not make me solve the problem any faster or any better, and since I am writting on paper or a board I am going to have to rewrite everything anyhow. Maybe I'll even have an IDE to do most of that meaningless effort for me. It's like lazy synt…
I've been writing a comment as a placeholder for real code stating the problem in simple English when I'm stuck lately. Usually going through putting it into words really guides the code. It'll usually look something like:
# the problem is that our query only matches rows where the ID from foo table equals the ID from bar table, but we want rows from foo table that match the first part of our query regardless
This also makes it easy to ask for help, since now you've turned your "it no workie" into a question which you could ask another person on your team or in e.g. IRC for help with. They might then have additional questions, but I've found more often than not that simply getting a few minutes with someone else is enough for them to bring not-your-entrenched-perspective to the problem and hand you the (sometimes super obvious) solution in short order.
TL;DR https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging is great
Re: How to Pass a Programming Interview
#164"Whiteboard hazing" is the most apt description I've heard it called. Pass the wringer, you can join the club.
i often just refer to it as waterboarding.
Have you ever been waterboarded? Putting waterboarding on the same level as whiteboard coding interviews is minimizing the horrific experience of those who have been waterboarded.
Re: How to Pass a Programming Interview
#165It seems like there is a large middle area of concepts in between low-level algorithms/data structures and high-level system architecture that are left out of many of these interview prep guides:
* Principles and patterns of object-oriented (or functional) design
* Relational (or NoSQL or analytics) database design
* Unit, integration and system testing
* Logging, profiling and debugging
* Source control (e.g. branch/PR/merge flows)
* Deployment and devops
Do these subjects really not come up in some programming interviews?
Re: How to Pass a Programming Interview
#166How I did it for a Microsoft interview: cram for a weekend with a good algorithms text book. I do UI development where 99% of the work is figuring out the UI framework but the study session definitely got me into the right mindset for interviews.
It really makes the whole thing feel like school right? Every time I'm on the job hunt I have to study all the stuff I never actually use while I'm working.
I still think you can learn valuable things and become a better coder this way. Preparing for a Google interview was eye-opening for me, I learnt a ton of things that I immediately started applying day-to-day.
Re: How to Pass a Programming Interview
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can always preempt the whiteboard issue by bringing a laptop along. "Hey, I'm a lot more comfortable writing code on a keyboard and with an IDE. Lets program this together in a text editor instead of a whiteboard".
As a candidate, I feel that it is fair to stand up for this as well. If the interviewer wants psuedocode, I'm happy to whiteboard it. But I've been whiteboarding before and had the interviewer say, "that code wouldn't compile, you're missing a bracket." So I said, "If you want code that compiles, bring in a laptop and I'd be happy to put it in to Visual Studio [it was a .NET position] and have it be syntactically cor…
What was their response to this? I think it's perfectly valid to state this, and may even throw the balance of the interviewer/interviewee dynamics but I can also see other people seeing this as obtuse. But pointing out a missing bracket (in a nonconstructive manner) on a whiteboard is pretty obtuse too...
Re: How to Pass a Programming Interview
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've had this problem as well. I go back and forth between Obj-c, python, javascript, matlab etc. so much without spending a significant amount of time on any one language that I often feel intellectually deficient because I don't know the nitty-gritty details of any of them. Curious to see what others think - is this something I should stop and focus on? Or in today's development environment is it considered accepta…
http://exercism.io has helped me to write more idiomatic code (submit a thing, get comments, refactor, also comment on other people's code.) Maybe it'd help you for the languages they have examples for?
Thanks, I'll have to try that out.
Re: How to Pass a Programming Interview
#169A candidate has an impressive
STEM field educational background,
say, Bachelor's, Master's, or Ph.D.
degrees, has peer-reviewed publications
of original research in the STEM fields
including in computer science, has taught
computer science in world famous US
research universities, has created
original, fast algorithms in computer
science, has written successful software
for a wide variety of applications in
a wide variety of programming languages,
and, then, somehow needs to learn some
additional, special lessons on "how
to pass a programming interview"?
Such an interview is by the Queen in
Alice in Wonderland or from someone
well qualified in computing?
Why the heck the needs for special lessons to do what the candidate has been doing successfully for years?
Re: How to Pass a Programming Interview
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
This happened to a friend. He confirmed that pseudocode would be acceptable, but then as he was writing it out the interviewer got on him about not terminating lines with semicolons (I suppose the pseudocode looked C-ish). So yeah I'd say make this clear.
Ack. I'm not sure how I'd react to that. I interviewed quite a bit last year (on the hiring side). I was really surprised by the variation in pseudocode written by the candidates. Most wrote something JavaScript-like, a few stuck to mostly proper Java or C. But then one dumped a giant web of crazy on the board (but still made his point) and one wrote something that looked suspiciously like COBOL - still not sure if h…
"and one wrote something that looked suspiciously like COBOL - still not sure if he was trolling me."
That's brilliant. Now I have to learn myself some COBOL just for that.