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In my experience, for a pure engineering role, nobody seems to care. I had credits at large companies, posted talks online (interviewers rarely looked at them), but if I forgot how to write binary search in 10 minutes in an interview it didn’t matter. This actually made me realize being just an IC wasn’t actually my goal though. Once I started interviewing for management and sales, all of those things _really_ matter…
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Binary search? I would never hire anyone who couldn’t implement it from scratch. There’s no complex idea or trick to remember, it’s the most basic algorithmic around.
I feel like I'm pretty good at these things, but I'd 100% have an off-by-one error in my first attempt at binary search. I can get it right quickly if I'm able to test the code, or very slowly if I have to work through several test cases by hand on the whiteboard. There's a lot of room in between "couldn't implement it" and "can do it in 5 seconds" and "wrote a buggy version of it".
A common counter argument is that a bad interviewer wouldn't accept an answer that has minor bugs in it like that. But I don't buy that counter argument, because a bad interviewer could misjudge candidates regardless of the interview format.
[1] https://reprog.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/are-you-one-of-the-1...
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I am older then that and still don't fond that question extraordinary hard?
the point isn't about whether the question is hard. It is about understanding that other people are different and especially when the people stumble for whatever reason. The manifested "holier than thou" and lack of humility probabilistically suggest relative youth and inexperience.
Yes, people can randomly fail in interview due to stress or whatever. But that can happen on any question. This particular question really should weed out all that many otherwise good people.
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Thank you for your insight! Hm so perhaps statistics and probability are actually more valuable for companies like that?
Do not think only in terms of technical skills. Large companies operate via easily scaled algorithms for everything including promotions and hiring. The simplicity of these algorithms often means that they can be circumvented. You want to get hired at Google. What do you do ? Spend 3 years doing side projects or spend 3 months befriending and impressing some engineers so you get a referral. There maybe god level engi…
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Does this mean that the whiteboard coding interviews are flawed, or that guys like us, who has made a ton of more or less great projects are flawed? Why would a company rather have a guy that can solve binary search in five seconds, than one that has showed continuous progress with several finished projects over the years? Do they think accomplished guys somehow are a liability? Or is it that they want a blank sheet…
Binary search? I would never hire anyone who couldn’t implement it from scratch. There’s no complex idea or trick to remember, it’s the most basic algorithmic around.
I quote from the thread: "binary search was first published in 1946 but the first published binary search without bugs was in 1962"
In my experience, for a pure engineering role, nobody seems to care. I had credits at large companies, posted talks online (interviewers rarely looked at them), but if I forgot how to write binary search in 10 minutes in an interview it didn’t matter. This actually made me realize being just an IC wasn’t actually my goal though. Once I started interviewing for management and sales, all of those things _really_ matter…
In my experience, for a pure engineering role, nobody seems to care. I had credits at large companies, posted talks online (interviewers rarely looked at them), but if I forgot how to write binary search in 10 minutes in an interview it didn’t matter. This actually made me realize being just an IC wasn’t actually my goal though. Once I started interviewing for management and sales, all of those things _really_ matter…
> In my experience, for a pure engineering role, nobody seems to care. I am interviewing a lot of people. I look very suspicious at these kinds of moves to try to impress me. I don't necessarily ignore, but I try to figure out if this is some kind of shallow engagement. It impresses me if you can stick to something meaningful and do it regularly for years but you can just as well hurt your chances if you propose 5 si…
The curse of knowledge is also a thing: An expert might have a harder time explaining things to a novice. A novice can more easily explains things to a fellow novice.
And if someone gets something wrong on the internet, sooner or later someone else will point it out. #XKCD386
You'll miss out on a whole range of engineers that have a life outside of work (which also brings some balance and maturity to the job), and therefore have no time (or inclination) to groom a public presence on the internet. Raising a family, going cycling, volunteering, reading books - these are all more valuable insights into a candidate for me, more so than your retweets.
> The vast majority of candidates have little to no evidence of creativity in public at all. The same is true for many of the best engineers I have worked with.
> As a hiring manager, this means you have to learn how to source candidates and interview effectively: you don’t want to miss out on a great engineer just because they spent all of their energy making great products for prior employers rather than blogging, speaking and coding in public.
In my experience, for a pure engineering role, nobody seems to care. I had credits at large companies, posted talks online (interviewers rarely looked at them), but if I forgot how to write binary search in 10 minutes in an interview it didn’t matter. This actually made me realize being just an IC wasn’t actually my goal though. Once I started interviewing for management and sales, all of those things _really_ matter…
Problem is, not much else looks appealing. Most realistic pivots look more miserable and end up just being adjacent roles that remove all the parts of what I like about software development while becoming mostly what I don’t, likely with a much lower salary cap. I thought about doing something radical and going back to school, but I don’t have the time or money. Though this thread makes me want to look again.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does this mean that the whiteboard coding interviews are flawed, or that guys like us, who has made a ton of more or less great projects are flawed? Why would a company rather have a guy that can solve binary search in five seconds, than one that has showed continuous progress with several finished projects over the years? Do they think accomplished guys somehow are a liability? Or is it that they want a blank sheet…
Binary search? I would never hire anyone who couldn’t implement it from scratch. There’s no complex idea or trick to remember, it’s the most basic algorithmic around.