251–260 of 372 posts
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> That said, I'm always surprised how many candidates cannot even point to one problem they worked on they found interesting or one solution that they're proud of. It could be that this technique favors people good at telling stories. Personally, I'm a horrible storyteller. If you were to ask me what I did over the weekend, I'll offer some facts like "oh, went swimming in a river and Bob lost his hat, but we found it…
> If I didn't know that you'd be asking for solutions I'm proud of, I might draw a blank at that moment. Granted it's an interview setting and these are the questions one needs to prepare for. The key word there is "prepare". These are standard interview questions that you just have to have a prepared, rehearsed answer for that you can rattle off without thinking. There are tons of these types of "behavioral" questio…
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I've been coding for about 25 years. The last time I had to write any code related to binary trees was in school, 15-16 years ago. Given enough time and debugging I'm sure I could do it. I'm not going to be successful on a whiteboard though. If I actually had to do it I'd look it up instead of wasting my time figuring it out. Unless you're interviewing for a position where they'll have to implement binary trees you s…
Additionally: Nine times out of ten, you shouldn't be implementing the binary tree in the first place. There are already tons of tested, robust libraries out there that will do it a lot better than you can, handling all conceivable edge cases, available in a variety of license flavors. Many languages' standard libraries include support for binary trees. You want candidates who can work through the buy-vs-build tradeo…
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Well, for a random employee of a random company there is no motivation to not haze people on the whiteboard, it's mostly a power play for them and oversupply of candidates permits it. They really don't care how good of an engineer they hire and how much value he can bring to the team or to the company.
I don't think that's true, actually. I've been both interviewer and interviewee, almost all my friends do interviews, and in every case I've seen, the interviewer is earnestly trying to make her best determination of whether you can succeed at the company. Most interviewers - both ones I know as friends and ones that have interviewed me - get very, very happy when they find a candidate that they know will meet the hi…
Especially in the context of Google's public commitment to increase diversity among their engineers, it strikes me that revamping their interviewing process to eschew whiteboarding ought to at least be considered - it would be amazing PR for Google if they swallowed their pride and innovated in this area. And it would have a real effect outside Google, since so many companies' interview processes mimic Google's.
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> > That said, I'm always surprised how many candidates cannot even point to one problem they worked on they found interesting or one solution that they're proud of. > It could be that this technique favors people good at telling stories. Or people who think they're impressive. I know I would've been able to point out many problems and solutions I found interesting and were impressed with when I was 15. Today, not so…
I'm not a "look at me!" kind of person, but here's what has really helped me with these kinds of interviews. Keep a daily journal of what you work on. Nothing fancy, just stop by once a day religiously and add a few notes on what you did, what meetings you attended, who you spoke with, etc... Save your evaluations and especially any award packages you or your team might get submitted for. At least where I work both a…
Meh, if you can't even handle a tiny whiteboard situation how are you going to handle any deadline pressure? It's not about knowing the right answer off the top of your head, it's more about how you work and approach the problem. Sure some bad companies expect you to be able to write something very specific on the spot, but thous are pretty rare imo.
It's not about "pressure", it's about the fact I'm an introvert and do poorly at composing while speaking. My brain requires time to focus inward to formulate complex thoughts, and interrupting any time I pause narrating doesn't give me that time to think.
I've literally never had it be an issue in my career, because deadlines happen on the order of days to months and in real life conversations it's acceptable to pause talking for 5 minutes. (Heck, in real life, it would be rude to talk the way you do during an interview, because it wouldn't give the other person a chance to share their thoughts about the problem.)
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> That said, I'm always surprised how many candidates cannot even point to one problem they worked on they found interesting or one solution that they're proud of. It could be that this technique favors people good at telling stories. Personally, I'm a horrible storyteller. If you were to ask me what I did over the weekend, I'll offer some facts like "oh, went swimming in a river and Bob lost his hat, but we found it…
Good point. When I notice that people are struggling with finding something, I usually just pick one thing from the resume and try to go more in depth about that.
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> I do use the whiteboard for trivial CS questions limited to 5-10 minutes. Think fizzbuzz and string reversal. Why do people keep saying string reversal is easy? Text is one of the hardest things out there. Unless you expect your programmers to support ASCII only? Why not reverse a list or an array? That does sound like something that is doable in 5-10 minutes.
Thank you. A great response to "reverse a string" is "What's the encoding?" If it's anything but ASCII, you're in for a long white boarding session. If the interviewer doesn't know what you're talking about, back away slowly......
Meh, if you can't even handle a tiny whiteboard situation how are you going to handle any deadline pressure? It's not about knowing the right answer off the top of your head, it's more about how you work and approach the problem. Sure some bad companies expect you to be able to write something very specific on the spot, but thous are pretty rare imo.
In what way do you think whiteboards are like deadlines? I honestly don't understand this line of thinking. It's not about "pressure", it's about the fact I'm an introvert and do poorly at composing while speaking. My brain requires time to focus inward to formulate complex thoughts, and interrupting any time I pause narrating doesn't give me that time to think. I've literally never had it be an issue in my career, b…
So basically what you are saying is that you are some kind of snowflake that requires it's own room to concentrate and be productive and you can't even think while doodling on a whiteboard.
In my books that counts against you, that doesn't mean you are straight out, but it definitely makes you a liability to some degree.
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Thank you. A great response to "reverse a string" is "What's the encoding?" If it's anything but ASCII, you're in for a long white boarding session. If the interviewer doesn't know what you're talking about, back away slowly......
what makes other encodings hard ? The two things that come to my mind are byte length and comparison function. If the encoding had a fixed-length byte length, then it should be just swapping n-bytes at a time instead of 1-byte. What else is difficult about non-ascii encodings ?