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Caltech's CS interview prep course

courses.cms.caltech.edu

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Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#21

Post by xiii1408 »

turbinerneiter wrote: post #14

No clue if this is even remotely true, but here is what I think: the most successful companies can basically pick and chose from a really large set of applicants. Given this luxury, the can, in essence, filter by any kind of metric they want and still get loads of suitable people. I short: if you have a million applications you can sort by GPA and still have a hundred people to chose from. Sorting by GPA means you wi…

Yeah, I'd say this is exactly what's going on at big tech companies. Add to that the need for an interview process that is very standardized for (1) scalability in a large company and (2) legal protection against discrimination (at least nominally), and it makes a load of sense.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#22

Post by amznbyebyebye »

So wait you are smart enough to get into caltech, smart enough to graduate with a degree in CS. And yet the curriculum on its own does not do a good job enough on its own to prepare you for getting a job? Very hard to graduate with a decent GPA in CS at caltech and not be able to thrive as an entry level engineer. If you got B’s in caltech CS I’d make you an offer for 200k+ without blinking or even asking you anything.

I have a small friend circle, I would say they’re all smarter than I am on raw problem solving and intellect capability. They came out with better degrees from better institutions. All have PhDs and yet they’re all facing delays when landing a job. There is something definitely broken. I think the industry has created this problem and the industry should fix it.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#23

Post by mattkrause »

barry-cotter wrote: post #16
im_down_w_otp wrote: post #5

Are there other major economic sectors which have circled the wagons around making job applicants do remedial coursework as live performance art?

No. Normal economic sectors without decades long explosive growth have some kind of licensing system to keep people out so that insiders make more money. Merely being able to teach, engineer or reason about the law taking into account precedent is not sufficient to get a license for it. In some cases this probably has some attached quality control implications but we know education degrees have no effect on teacher e…

I wonder how many “engineering” jobs actually require PE.

Biotech is an another counterexample to this: there’s no licensing requirement (though many jobs do require a masters or PhD) and the interviews also (mostly) aren’t quiz show lunacy. You usually talk about your past work and answer questions about how you’d approach new problems; no one makes you (say) sketch crystal structures on the board or recite the Krebs Cycle.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#24

Post by Swizec »

dvt wrote: post #3

If you don't think modern interviewing practices are a problem, this should be proof enough. Not only do we have an entire programming book sub-genre dedicated to this nonsense, but now we're also wasting class time on memorizing sorting algorithms. Fantastic. Of course, we're going to see the inevitable arguments that "40% of the people I interview lie on resumes" or "I interviewed this guy once, and he couldn't eve…

The problem with looking at OSS and publications is that this penalizes a lot of people with real lives outside of work. Especially problematic if you’re into equitable hiring processes aiming to hire people who aren’t in their 20’s anymore.

Looking at past work penalizes people who primarily have experience in large systems where their work is NDA’d, impossible to understand without a loooot of background, or simply unshareable for any number of reasons. Also really bad for new entrants into the industry. They don’t have past work.

The take-home exam penalizes people who have lives.

The “do smol thing together so we can talk about it” interview penalizes people with performance anxiety.

There is no silver bullet. But if I’d have to choose, I’d pick the least bad typical interview approach that judges everyone based on their performance on a small job-relevant task. At least you avoid a lot of bias.

source: I’ve interviewed over 100 engineers over the past 18 months as we scaled the engineering org roughly 3x. I honestly don’t even look at candidates’ resumes anymore (this is after initial screens have been made) because it always leads to bias.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#25

Post by barry-cotter »

dvt wrote: post #18
barry-cotter wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've interviewed dozens of people and never had that experience, because I check OSS contributions, professional history, and ask for code samples before I even engage with a candidate in a technical discussion. How are you supposed to hire 50,000 people a year with a process like that? It seems unlikely there are much more than 100,000 people with significant OSS contributions in total. Published material isn’t go…

> How are you supposed to hire 50,000 people a year with a process like that? This is a straw-man. What company has to hire 50,000 engineers a year? Facebook has (in total) ~10,000 engineers (hired over a decade+). Someone has nothing published and no OSS? Great, ask for code samples and the candidate to walk you through the code. It's completely trivial to fix the busted status quo, but people are invested in this n…

If it is completely trivial to fix the busted status quo you should be able to make a great deal of money doing so. Those companies you named exist to get people hired. If you have an alternative system that works you will be fishing from a different pool of candidates. That didn’t work for starfighter.io. If you can make it work for you you’ll get very rich.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#27

Post by interview_anon »

dvt wrote: post #3

If you don't think modern interviewing practices are a problem, this should be proof enough. Not only do we have an entire programming book sub-genre dedicated to this nonsense, but now we're also wasting class time on memorizing sorting algorithms. Fantastic. Of course, we're going to see the inevitable arguments that "40% of the people I interview lie on resumes" or "I interviewed this guy once, and he couldn't eve…

No post body was provided.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#28

Post by Apocryphon »

Tech interview discussions always seem to run the same course and hit the same points, so I'll repeat one of mine:

What's wrong with the idea of turning the standard Leetcode algorithms interview into a license that only needs to be completed once, or maybe once every 5-8 years, similar to what physicians must undergo? Much more efficient than having to retake it with every single company during an interview cycle.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#29

Post by fortran77 »

analog31 wrote: post #20
fermentation wrote: post #12

Sometime around my Junior year of college my goals shifted from "I'm here because I want to learn" to "I'm here because I want a job". I was surprised to find that doing well at learning (getting As) not only wasn't good enough for an entry level job, it wasn't even really correlated. The more time I spent on coursework the less time I had to grind through interview questions. I wonder if there are any other industri…

Symphonic musician. The first stage is nailing a blind audition, perfectly.

Not anymore! Blind auditions are now a thing of the past:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition...

However, since you can't choose your parents or where you were born, there's little you can do to prepare for the Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity goals. (I could probably get a lift by changing my religion. People with the exact same ethnicity and appearance as me but of a different faith are considered "people of color" by most DEI committees)

I started out wanting a career in music but quickly switched to a math major. While I still perform at amateur recitals, I'm glad I didn't try to prusue a professional career.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#30

Post by VirusNewbie »

amznbyebyebye wrote: post #22

So wait you are smart enough to get into caltech, smart enough to graduate with a degree in CS. And yet the curriculum on its own does not do a good job enough on its own to prepare you for getting a job? Very hard to graduate with a decent GPA in CS at caltech and not be able to thrive as an entry level engineer. If you got B’s in caltech CS I’d make you an offer for 200k+ without blinking or even asking you anythin…

Its possible that this is another sign interviewing for software jobs is broken, but it is equally possible that this shows the skills required to excel in high school and be accepted to college are easily gamed and Cal Tech isn’t exactly filled with the most intelligent problem solvers.
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