Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Data Structures for Coding Interviews

interviewcake.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–238 of 238 posts

Re: Data Structures for Coding Interviews

#231

Post by LightskinKanye »

CodeMage wrote: post #193
nxsynonym wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh I agree completely. I just take issue with the fact that it somehow is a "youth problem", as is being pointed out by the parent comment. It's a business problem, not a lazy millennial/education problem. Stop hiring shitty coders and you'll stop getting shitty interviewees. Less shitty interviewees means less need for these types of "beat the coding interview" services/blogs. Honestly a lot of times the comments in…

I'm not defending such comments, but there's more to them than just gatekeeping. Speaking from my own point of view, the "I was a geek and it wasn't cool" sentiment comes from feeling betrayed by having your lifestyle become an industry that too often focuses on profit more than on quality; the "I know CS from the ground up" comes from frustration with all the people who dismiss learning from the ground up without un…

I know some of your type at work. The worst part is I make more than them 1 year out of school...

Re: Data Structures for Coding Interviews

#232

Post by RafiZ »

gameguy43 wrote: post #26
curiousDog wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice site but your questions are pretty run of the mill these days. Would be nice to see some new, original questions :-). Also an option to schedule some mock interviews would be great!

Thanks! Have a few new questions in the pipeline :) For mock interviews, definitely check out: - http://interviewing.io/ - http://www.byte-by-byte.com/practice-coding-interviews/ - https://www.pramp.com/ - https://www.funnel.la/ - http://interviewkickstart.com/ (email 'em to ask about mock interviews over Skype)

Pramp provides you the ability to schedule same-day mock interviews.

Re: Data Structures for Coding Interviews

#233

Post by btschaegg »

ethbro wrote: post #205
FlyingSnake wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My bad, I misinterpreted your comment. I second the artisanal mindset that you have elaborated, and it will be better for everyone if we adopt the craftmans mindset (Which Cal Newport also talks about). I personally feel that we should model Software Engineering like the Apprenticeship model in Germany. It would be interesting to see how it fares.

I had someone reply to one of my comment that they 'didn't know about the Vietnam War because they weren't born then'. ... I feel like our discipline suffers from a lot of the same problems. IBM mainframe experience doesn't translate into knowing the intricacies of React, but it does provide wisdom on systems and usability problems people coding in React are going to run into too. Glorify the new, but be informed by…

Not that I'm disagreeing with you there, but I've also seen the opposite. I've had conversations with people who know their mainframe environment inside out but have no idea how a modern computer really works.

I'm under the impression that it often comes down to a combination of Dunning Kruger and a certain unwillingness to inform oneself about "new" things (i.e. things one doesn't know about yet) - and those seem to exist in both camps. So, just maintaining Aristotle's mindset and keeping an open mind seems like a good starting point to me in that regard.

Re: Data Structures for Coding Interviews

#234

Post by logfromblammo »

ng12 wrote: post #217
logfromblammo wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only reasonable, real-world solution to the linked list question is "How many bids do you need for me to collect for licensing the third-party code library? Three? It's usually at least three. I'll look at Infragistics, JetBrains, and anything I can find that's open source, and get back to you by COB. Are there any specific features that the linked list has to have? Any deal breakers? Do we need official support,…

I'm going to start asking linked-list questions just to weed out people who take it as a grave insult to their ego.

I guess I'll amend my previous statement. I need to discern between "Not Invented Here", "Cargo Cult", and "Power-Abusing Management". You won't be able to tell by asking me. I know linked lists forward and backward--though the backward part really only concerns doubly-linked lists. I won't stop judging you for asking the question, but I will answer it. It will then provoke automatic follow-up questions about how much you rely on first-party and third-party code libraries, and about which kinds of open source licenses your company finds acceptable for use with their products.

Interviewing is a two-way street. If you ask questions more relevant to academics than real-world employment, I will try to figure out whether the pay your company offers is worth dealing with the apparent dysfunction in it. I can deal with almost anything if you pay me enough.

Your presumption is that the ability to answer linked list questions in an interview gracefully is positively correlated with future job performance.

The burden of proof is on the person making the assertion. The only way I can see evidence for it is if people ask those questions in the interview and make note of the response, but do not use it for the hiring decision. Then, in the future, after the worth of the employee is measurable, correlate it with the answers to the experimental questions.

As far as I am aware, no company asks experimental interview questions that do not impact the hiring decision, in large numbers and for years at a time, just to gauge the merit of those questions before adopting them into the interview process. It is far more common for someone to decide on a theoretical basis that a question has real discriminating power without any real evidence, or to stop asking a particular type of question and then maybe compare employee populations a few years later.

Re: Data Structures for Coding Interviews

#235

Post by canes123456 »

daliwali wrote: post #229
canes123456 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly is this projection? Your original comment was stereotyping real developers based on their appearance. They were not "legit developers" in your eyes because of how they looked. I am looking at the home page photos and it is not like they all look like models. They are younger and better looking than average but they would not look out of place on any dev team. This nonsense about what a developer looks lik…

It was clearly not my intention to judge programming competency by appearance. But it is also undeniable that the industry does select for young, good looking people.

It selects for young men. Looks do not help you much IMO. Being a woman hurts you.

Re: Data Structures for Coding Interviews

#238

Post by cholantesh »

daliwali wrote: post #87

I got an impression who their target audience is, based on the examples used, drinking kombucha and listening to Spotify. All the young, beautiful people who wouldn't have ever taken a computer science course if it weren't such a lucrative industry to be in right now. Maybe with this guide they can pass an interview at a big company where they just twiddle with bits all day. I won't be holding my breath until they ca…

"Back in my day, no one cared about surviving in the overwhelmingly capitalist world economy."
Post reply on HN