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Stanford CS9: Problem-Solving for the CS Technical Interview

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Re: Stanford CS9: Problem-Solving for the CS Technical Interview

#251

Post by setr »

barry-cotter wrote: post #238
Bukhmanizer wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think most people have a problem with the class itself. It's more that the technical interview has gotten away from a practical method of showing what you know, and is now becoming a skill to maximize itself, whether or not it actually demonstrates if you can do the job. To take an absurd example, imagine if for some reason Law firms started requiring an Irish Stepdancing component to their hiring process. I'…

I’m Irish. WTF is Irish step dancing or Irish stepdancing? On the correlation of irrelevant things to performance in a demanding job you know law school is at best as related to the practice of law as Bar review courses right?

Dancing with your steps; apparently famous since '94

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_stepdance

Re: Stanford CS9: Problem-Solving for the CS Technical Interview

#252

Post by mamon »

Jare wrote: post #223
mamon wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FizzBuzz test is actually pretty great interview question, but most interviewers miss one crucial ingredient: time pressure. Original idea was that any competent programmer should be able to solve it in under 1 minute (only limiting factor being your own writing/typing speed). It is a good indicator of familiarity with the basic programming constructs (loops, conditionals, print statements). It's like writing down th…

I will highlight the most glaring problem I find in your take. > FizzBuzz test is actually pretty great interview question [...] you should be able to do that without thinking If you are going to code for me, I'm not interested in what you can do in 1 minute, I'm interested in what you can do in 1 year. I want you to spend more than 1 minute just thinking about any problem that is remotely worth solving. And that's t…

If you are not able to write FizBizz without thinking that means that you've probably written no more than a handful of for loops and if statements in your whole programming "career". That's a very bad indicator for someone who applies for a programming job.

Re: Stanford CS9: Problem-Solving for the CS Technical Interview

#253

Post by walshemj »

alexvoda wrote: post #213
walshemj wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't want some one on my team who had know idea of what the company did. I normally for public companies read the annual report and accounts.

This only works depending on the scale of the company. If the company is huge and involved in many things there is less engagement from each employee with the overall mission of the company. This is even more pronounced when employees can't even see the fruit of their work in society. Like when the developer workforce of a company is spread across many countries but the clients are focused only in one company. I thin…

I was talking about for the purposes of the job interview, I though that was obvious. Also you want to look a bit at the companies financials to get a feel for any equity based comp and also if the company looks like its in trouble - eg Carillion in the UK

Re: Stanford CS9: Problem-Solving for the CS Technical Interview

#254

Post by walshemj »

pjmlp wrote: post #201
walshemj wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And which countries invented the computer pray? ok I know about Zuze but he was effectively ignored. In terms of PE / CENG status its more who you know that what you know :-)

Well, computing has lots to thank to UK, Germany, Finland, France, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark. Sorry if I forgot anything, fellow Europeans.

You didn't get that I was hinting that countries that don't have strict rules about who can call themselves engineers invented the core tech behind computers ditto Ethernet which was US and UK.

Re: Stanford CS9: Problem-Solving for the CS Technical Interview

#255

Post by dietr1ch »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #249
dietr1ch wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's rather silly to "prepare" for an interview, but IMHO what they expect at Google/Facebook/Amazon/Microsoft is not something you should really need to prepare for if you took the time to really understand the algorithms and general techniques you study as a CS undergrad. Rehearsing at a relaxed pace over a single weekend should be more than enough, particularly to get used to discuss your ideas and using a…

Either I’m a bad student or you have an inherent ability that I don’t have. I’ve interviewed at all of those companies and you need a lot more than a weekend to succeed - even my friends with offers took more time to study than that!

Note that it doesn't just take passing grades and a single weekend.

Gaining deep understanding is the trick, and it comes from constantly being exposed to CS-like problems. This doesn't need to become something intensive like studying before exams, in fact having a deadline might be really bad for it as you won't think about each thing enough time and the pressure makes you less prone to wonder about the problems.

It just needs to get you passively thinking about a problem, mostly abusing on your "background brain-threads" and taking the time to make yourself deeper questions around the problem and the data-structures used, like which problems are similar? which are the properties of the problem that enabled some approach? what's key for the DS to be useful on that problem? are there lower/upper bounds to the solution? why something doesn't work?. Some quick research later on the problem might show you a better way, and then the right question to ask is what did you missed to come up with that, did you ignored some property of the problem that the "right" approach exploited? was it just something you didn't knew about?

Going for those kind of questions will make you better at analyzing problems and come up with some strategy to solve them, and when you have that clear getting it written shouldn't take much effort.

Re: Stanford CS9: Problem-Solving for the CS Technical Interview

#256

Post by 35bge57dtjku »

walshemj wrote: post #197
35bge57dtjku wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> surely not a hard question, you would think! Not so much hard, more that it sounds like a complete waste of time and could be signaling to people that this is one more non-technical/HR interview they have to get through before getting to talk to people they'd be working with and who can fill them in on details specific to their prospective job or team. Whatever you're trying to figure out with that question, there'…

I wouldn't want some one on my team who had know idea of what the company did. I normally for public companies read the annual report and accounts.

> Whatever you're trying to figure out with that question, there's gotta be a better way to probe that, that doesn't make it look like you're wasting the available time.

Re: Stanford CS9: Problem-Solving for the CS Technical Interview

#257

Post by thaumasiotes »

sjg007 wrote: post #220
thaumasiotes wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The SATs are specifically designed to meet these goals, among others: - Preparation not required. - Preparation not beneficial . And it shouldn't be surprising that they achieve that well. Consider these scatterplots comparing students who took the SAT without preparation to students who prepped: https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2012/02/test-preparation-and-s... . As further described at the same link, research quite co…

You can definitely prep for the SAT and it makes a big difference.

Is there a reason you believe that?

Re: Stanford CS9: Problem-Solving for the CS Technical Interview

#258

Post by Eridrus »

adjkant wrote: post #70

My school does co-op's and has a 1 credit co-op prep course. We do have practice interviewing there. We also do resume workshops, general best practices for the industry you're in, etc. You can do both the content and the prep, as I am sure is the case with Stanford CS. While it's unique to have a course specifically named for this and am sad to see it as well, I don't think this is as big as people are making it out…

Hey it could be worse, people could be getting a degree because they need it for signaling purposes and/or to satisfy an arbitrary immigration bureaucracy and don't actually need any of the things they're being taught. Oh, wait :)

Re: Stanford CS9: Problem-Solving for the CS Technical Interview

#259

Post by pedrosorio »

sidlls wrote: post #247
pedrosorio wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Are candidates expected to derive solutions to coding or engineering problems themselves from first principles as their day to day?" Does performance on these tasks correlate with performance on the job? Is it easy to measure this performance in interviews reliably? Then it's going to be used by companies.

The answer to both your questions is "no", and companies use them in spite of that.

Any studies that support the answer "no" for both questions?

Technical interview performance has ~0 correlation with performance on the job? I find it hard to believe. Is the mean performance on the job of a software engineer that fails to pass Google interviews as good as one that does? Why do most companies want to hire Google software engineers if that is the case?

As for my second question, it should have been "is it easi-er to measure this performance reliably than other skills that may be relevant"? It sounds like this would be hard to answer. But this kind of interview seems to be best suited for repeatable evaluation (although, of course, you do have the problem that people will prepare and bias the results, but I don't see how you can avoid that if you want a repeatable way to measure performance).

Finally, "and companies use them in spite of that". Any guesses why?

Re: Stanford CS9: Problem-Solving for the CS Technical Interview

#260

Post by Balgair »

bearforcenine wrote: post #46
davesque wrote: post #38

The on-the-spot technical interview is the biggest waste of time in the history of humanity. Everyone underperforms in technical interviews. I've conducted a number of them and I've never learned a single thing other than the fact that people make surprising mistakes when under pressure in contrived situations. Here's something that I think works much better: come up with a novel challenge that requires a couple hour…

How do you prevent cheating? Someone can very easily have a friend complete the challenge and walk them through it in a lot of detail. They could prep well enough that you hire someone who is massively under-qualified. Then if your company is large enough, your novel challenge gets leaked and everyone knows it ahead of time. Solutions start being sold or distributed. Then your interview is meaningless. I'm all for a…

I mean, as long as that person is getting their 'friend' to do the work while on the job, who cares?

Like, things get out on time and shipped, right? I may misunderstand the intent of the comment though.

But if they are sub-contracting out their work AND the work is done correctly, on time, etc. then it's all gravy. Yeah, you should probably hire that 'friend' instead, but if the interim works, it works (speaking very generally here)

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