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How to Pass a Programming Interview

blog.triplebyte.com

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Re: How to Pass a Programming Interview

#201

Post by cableshaft »

illicium wrote: post #69
kelvin0 wrote: post #14

What if designers had to go through a similar interview process? Here are some colors, please arrange them in palette groups that are color coordinated for a given visual effect? Why is red font on blue background bad, please justify? That would simply be hilarious.

> Here are some colors, please arrange them in palette groups that are color coordinated for a given visual effect? "Please arrange these colors in complementary, analogous, and triadic color schemes". This is color theory 101 -- something every visual designer should now. > Why is red font on blue background bad, please justify? Again, a valid question. It all depends on the brightness/saturation of the colors, and…

I have a portfolio of past work (I made games that are still available, I even bring an iPad with them playable on them). I still get asked a ton of technical questions, and I'm lucky if I can even show them my past projects, because they never trust that I was the actual programmer on these projects (even though in the credits for a couple of them it says 'Lead Programmer: [cableshaft]').

It's a totally broken perception, and it needs to end. We're one of the few professions that are routinely asked to prove our abilities in every single interview we attend. It wastes so much time on both ends and there needs to be a new way.

Re: How to Pass a Programming Interview

#202

Post by richardwhiuk »

amorphid wrote: post #195
jkarneges wrote: post #25

Earlier 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.

I wrote some Ruby in an interview. It was so terse, I had to explain to the interviewer (who favored Java) what the code did, and why it was linear instead of O(n^2). That was actually kind of fun.

If your code is sufficiently terse that it's not very understandable (such that the complexity isn't very understandable) surely that's a realistic red flag?

Re: How to Pass a Programming Interview

#203

Post by jonesb6 »

thearn4 wrote: post #193
quanticle wrote: post #72

Being a good programmer has a surprisingly small role in passing programming interviews. And that just says it all, doesn't it? I agree that interviews should test candidates on certain basic skills, including (time/space) complexity analysis. But do you really learn anything by asking the candidate if they can recite the time complexity of a moving window average algorithm (as I was asked to do by an interviewer yes…

> I much prefer "homework" projects I helped a group within my organization with their hiring process recently, and we had pretty good success with assigning a short "take-home" exercise, vs. trying to haze them with a programming problem over a google hangout interview. A problem focusing on a small part of what that group does, but scoped to be doable with 1-2 hours of work.

Why don't companies offer it as an option?

"Hey here's a fizz buzz question, if you feel confident answering it now go for it, otherwise we'd be just as happy for you to do it in a take-home fashion?"

Re: How to Pass a Programming Interview

#204

Post by bakkoting »

pyb wrote: post #9

Another great post from Triplebyte, but I am confused about their model. Why would candidates want to apply to Triplebyte, if they still have to go through the companies' full interview process on top of the Triplebyte process ?

I think the main draw is that Triplebyte will get you past the initial screening mechanisms. This is particularly useful if you can write good code but have no formal education or otherwise cannot put together a resume.

Re: How to Pass a Programming Interview

#205

Post by kafkaesq »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #178
mech4bg wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take out any of that old stuff. It's not necessary. Your resume should fit on one page, two at absolute most, and only include things that you would expect to be grilled on. If you are annoyed about being tested on something on your resume, take it out.

It's interesting that different companies will want different things on a resume. This is why no two jobs I've applied for get the same resume. If they want lots of experience in a lot of different things, sometimes they DO want the laundry list of acronyms (make sure you know what they all stand for). You might not even get through the first selection if they use XSLT heavily and you didn't think it was relevant tha…

I've also had interviewers rip the other pages out of my resume in front of me,

Really? That's incredibly rude.

Re: How to Pass a Programming Interview

#206

Post by staunch »

runT1ME wrote: post #158
staunch wrote: post #108

> 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…

I don't know what other industry you have experience in, but this is fantastic compared to the rest of the world. In 'soft skill' jobs, I'd bet the house that credentials, prestige, and 'reputation' end up doing a lot more than a 30% higher acceptance rate. Should we improve it further? Absolutely, but to pretend that this isn't better than other industries is silly.

I've worked for LA and NY companies (among others) and never seen anything like the elitism that exists in Silicon Valley.

Silicon Valley is mostly funded by a few elite institutions, so it shouldn't be a surprise that they fund elite VCs, which then fund elite founders (and hire elite employees).

The funding sources in LA and NY are much larger and more diverse, so the elitism is far more diluted. It's a market opportunity that SV investors are so biased. Crowdfunding with equity might totally upset the applecart at some point.

Re: How to Pass a Programming Interview

#207

Post by peter303 »

noonespecial wrote: post #8

Interviewing should now be part of most CS educations, if not its own three class/semester course. Its that weird, and that important.

We used to have something called the "recitation class" one hour a week for solving homework problems out loud. I was under the impression these were making a comeback as classes "flipped" to watching the lectures outside of class. People would skip recitation sometimes because they werent learning new material like in the lectures or doing their problem sets which took enough time already. If these were made more mandatory somehow, they'd be like interviews.

Re: How to Pass a Programming Interview

#208

Post by BoysenberryPi »

ktRolster wrote: post #152
BoysenberryPi wrote: post #115

I've interviewed for a lot of YC companies and companies that frequently post in the "who's hiring" thread and the programming interviews they give are absolutely horrendous. I've had programming test where companies look at my resume and go "so you are very experienced in Ruby? Great, solve these algorithms in C++ for us. I've actually had someone give me a ACM-ICPC world finals question. I don't have a problem with…

I've actually had someone give me a ACM-ICPC world finals question. What company, do you mind if I ask?

Would rather not disparage the company. They do good work they just have terrible interview practices.

Re: How to Pass a Programming Interview

#209

Post by [deleted] »

ktRolster wrote: post #152
BoysenberryPi wrote: post #115

I've interviewed for a lot of YC companies and companies that frequently post in the "who's hiring" thread and the programming interviews they give are absolutely horrendous. I've had programming test where companies look at my resume and go "so you are very experienced in Ruby? Great, solve these algorithms in C++ for us. I've actually had someone give me a ACM-ICPC world finals question. I don't have a problem with…

I've actually had someone give me a ACM-ICPC world finals question. What company, do you mind if I ask?

[deleted]

Re: How to Pass a Programming Interview

#210

Post by ken47 »

quanticle wrote: post #57
ammon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, I see where you are coming from (I actually love academic CS). But the VAST majority of the programming work out there does not require any Big-O analysis. It just does not. It's used as a tool in interviews to (essentially) look for rigor. The problem is that this harms people who are rigorous as hell in low-level details of JS and V8 (something I'd posit is actually more useful to many more companies), but neve…

But the VAST majority of the programming work out there does not require any Big-O analysis. Your point is simultaneously valid and irrelevant. The vast majority of programming doesn't involve any Big-O analysis. But if you can't do Big-O analysis, there are problems where you will be stuck. Your code will be running slowly and you won't know why, and all the micro-optimizations in the world can't make a O(n^2) algor…

But if you can't do Big-O analysis, there are problems where you will be stuck. Your code will be running slowly and you won't know why, and all the micro-optimizations in the world can't make a O(n^2) algorithm run faster than an O(n) algorithm on even a moderately large data set.

That's actually incorrect. Not knowing Big O does not prove that you do not know how to optimize an algorithm.

However, it does mean that you don't speak the common language of computer science, that would allow you to easily communicate the effect of your optimizations to other programmers.

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