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FWIW the second example of finding halfway points in https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs9/sample_probs/ListShufflin... is buggy. Crashes if the list have odd number of elements.
"Your job is to write a function that accepts as input a pointer to a linked list with an even number of elements "
FWIW the second example of finding halfway points in https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs9/sample_probs/ListShufflin... is buggy. Crashes if the list have odd number of elements.
"Your job is to write a function that accepts as input a pointer to a linked list with an even number of elements "
If a candidate has shown an ability to solve several hundred medium+ DS & Algo questions on the spot, that gives him an edge up in day to day to programming. Not everybody can do that.
You can supplement that with other areas (concurrency; distributed systems; execution latency, memory management etc; quirks of and design ideas behind your favorite programming language).
I think this class can be a good prep for day to day programming.
This makes me very, very sad. I will never subject one of my potential hires to this nonsense. These concepts are valuable and academically interesting, for sure, but for the practical kind of engineering that's done at most companies it's simply not needed. Either that or it's already implemented in a library. What a waste of time.
I'm sympathetic to this viewpoint but looking at the cost/benefit for a Stanford student I think the benefit to studying for these interviews is clear - its a bit of a simplification, but for Facebook if you can do 3-6 problems over the course of 2 60 minute internship interviews you have the ability to get a $75k-$100k signing bonus if you convert to full time in addition to more shares over 4 years. Granted this de…
What I'm saying is: unless these students just want to sit around repeating their DS&A course(s) over and over again the rest of their lives, this sort of interview, job, and prep course is counterproductive in the long term.
I think this is terrible. I feel there are many good engineers that can't possibly compete for decent jobs in tech companies because they haven't spent 6-12 months reading cracking the code interview, doing this Stanford course, practicing mock interviews in crowdsourced websites, getting their leetcode rank up, attending bootcamps where they pad their githubs and practicing any single interview question they can scr…
It's kind of sad that there's a trick that needs to be learned to solve technical interviews without testing the candidates' inherent knowledge, but at the moment, this could seem like the most logical way to get a good job for a Stanford CS student with no knowledge on technical interviews.
Mock interviews, resume writing and critiques, life at startups, how to answer team/behavioral questions, and panels of employers and employees are all covered with sample whiteboard/coding problems only being given one week of attention. This is simply preparation for how to professionally navigate the job landscape.
I think this is terrible. I feel there are many good engineers that can't possibly compete for decent jobs in tech companies because they haven't spent 6-12 months reading cracking the code interview, doing this Stanford course, practicing mock interviews in crowdsourced websites, getting their leetcode rank up, attending bootcamps where they pad their githubs and practicing any single interview question they can scr…
It's really not that hard. I suppose there might be a few companies with insane expectations, but most interviews don't require that level of preparation.
This is what I was afraid of. I always thought interviews were something where you present your abilities, experience and knowledge. It should not be something you "prepare" for because then you're not showing off your skills, instead you're just regurgitating what you are trained to do. I do somewhat blame the whiteboard culture, but I guess that's the one that has given the best results so far. I've no doubt that i…