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Caltech's CS interview prep course

courses.cms.caltech.edu

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Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#261

Post by throwaway984393 »

catsarebetter wrote: post #255

Wait I'm confused what happened that this link sparked so much discussion about how interviews are broken?

Their "problem solving" section is pure algorithm b.s. Developers rarely ever spend time on algorithms in the professional world, and if they do they aren't going off memory, they're googling "best algorithm for X" and adapting it. There's almost nothing on this page that relates to actual work at a company or the kinds of things employers should care about. It looks like it only exists to try to get you a job at a FAANG with a terrible interview process.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#262

Post by csa »

stillblue wrote: post #247
ketzo wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know you think you’re making a “cynical but rational” kind of argument here, but man, this comment is a huge fucking bummer. You’re acknowledging that you have the both the ability and the knowledge to change (your small part of) a shitty system, and instead you’re pulling up the ladder behind you. That sucks. You should not let yourself feel good about that, even if it’s “economically rational” or whatever. You’re…

What do you suggest instead?

Make the pie bigger.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#263

Post by ketzo »

stillblue wrote: post #247
ketzo wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know you think you’re making a “cynical but rational” kind of argument here, but man, this comment is a huge fucking bummer. You’re acknowledging that you have the both the ability and the knowledge to change (your small part of) a shitty system, and instead you’re pulling up the ladder behind you. That sucks. You should not let yourself feel good about that, even if it’s “economically rational” or whatever. You’re…

What do you suggest instead?

I mean, I don't even have to suggest; I can let the OP suggest instead.

> Having an interview process that is artificially arduous

Make your interviews less artificially arduous.

> way outside the expectations of the job duties

Re-design your interview questions to be more in line with the actual job.

> leetcode monkeys who can barely deploy and manage k8s cluster on AWS

See previous suggestion.

If you want my personal suggestions on interviewing better:

- Interview for problem-solving process, not just for correctness. A candidate's ability to solve an algo problem in 45 minutes is much less important than their ability to calmly, thoroughly, and clearly explain the way that they think.

- Tune interviews to the role at hand. This should be obvious, but for some reason full-stack web devs still have to pretend like dynamic programming is a big part of their daily work.

- More systems interviews. I find that it's much harder to bullshit/memorize here, at least not for very long.

- Interviews based on actually building stuff. "Hey, here's a super simplified version of a feature someone in your role built last month. Can you walk us through how you would build the same thing?"

Interviewing is hard. It's not that fucking hard. When someone is out here complaining about what they see as obvious flaws in their process, and then decide that the best course of action is to "gatekeep as long as others play too," it just reeks of laziness and self-interest.

This does not get better unless individuals decide to start making it better. That's my biggest suggestion, really; don't become a cog in the machine. Every single interview that you, personally, conduct has a small but meaningful impact. It's up to you to have that impact be positive or negative.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#264

Post by user_named »

dionidium wrote: post #119
mkl95 wrote: post #40

My career path in tech so far has been junior engineer -> mid level -> senior -> tech lead. As I've progressed through that path, I have had literally no opportunities of applying the stuff I've learnt on HackerRank, save for a couple of interviews. At this point I'm convinced that the focus of those interviews was entirely wrong. Once you pass those tests and get hired, you will be dealing with tons of legacy code r…

The reason this complaint never changes anything, despite being very popular, is that these interviews serve two purposes that it doesn’t address: 1) they’re an intelligence test; 2) they’re a perseverance/conscientiousness test. Will you take the time and put in the work to pass one of these interviews? That measures perseverance and conscientiousness. Having put in the time, can you recall and adapt what you learne…

No post body was provided.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#265

Post by throwaway984393 »

barry-cotter wrote: post #9
dvt wrote: post #3

If you don't think modern interviewing practices are a problem, this should be proof enough. Not only do we have an entire programming book sub-genre dedicated to this nonsense, but now we're also wasting class time on memorizing sorting algorithms. Fantastic. Of course, we're going to see the inevitable arguments that "40% of the people I interview lie on resumes" or "I interviewed this guy once, and he couldn't eve…

> I've interviewed dozens of people and never had that experience, because I check OSS contributions, professional history, and ask for code samples before I even engage with a candidate in a technical discussion. How are you supposed to hire 50,000 people a year with a process like that? It seems unlikely there are much more than 100,000 people with significant OSS contributions in total. Published material isn’t go…

> How are you supposed to hire 50,000 people a year with a process like that?

It's insane that this is even an expectation. It's like trying to hire 50,000 cabinet makers. There aren't that many! So instead we just require people memorize and sketch the steps for putting together a cabinet and then hire them. Even if they haven't sharpened a block plane in their life. You can then hire enough "cabinet makers", but I wouldn't buy a cabinet from 'em.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#266

Post by urthor »

pc86 wrote: post #249
urthor wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"One common misconception I keep seeing is the idea that the interview result revolves around solving the question." Candidates know this. The issue is: Interviewers who do their job, and build a broad based picture of a developer's skills and give fair ratings, are rare. The perception is 75% interviewers don't even bother. They're tired, they're unmotivated. Their annual bonus doesn't reflect "conducts fair and bal…

I had an interview a few weeks ago that ended in an offer and was basically a verbatim Spiral Matrix problem from LeetCode (they had changed the starting direction of the spiral but that's it). Didn't run it once because we ran out of time, and when I pasted it into LC after the interview, noticed several errors to the point where it's honestly probably better we didn't run it. The interviewer was super engaged the w…

The "Merge intervals" question, or variations in particular are such a good interview question.

Off by one errors. Test the developers on the off by one errors.

Whatever your skillset it's truly the fairest tool in the book I think.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#267

Post by urthor »

lhorie wrote: post #257
urthor wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"One common misconception I keep seeing is the idea that the interview result revolves around solving the question." Candidates know this. The issue is: Interviewers who do their job, and build a broad based picture of a developer's skills and give fair ratings, are rare. The perception is 75% interviewers don't even bother. They're tired, they're unmotivated. Their annual bonus doesn't reflect "conducts fair and bal…

Yeah, this is admittedly a problem. I don't have a great solution other than relentless education, which is... hard. Especially at scale. From a cultural side, some companies have a competency pillar that is supposed to embody the idea of being a "good person". In mine, we call it "Citizenship", it's tied to performance appraisal and interviewing is one way to develop that competency. As for code cleanliness, I've pa…

I guess the question is, what's the proportion either side?

Is it 25% will do it properly, 75% don't? Am I too cynical about tech interviews, or too optimistic?

I'd also add, for a couple of companies, Google's approach springs to mind.

I think for places where, you know, they do search algorithms, knowing how to print the spanning tree of a graph is probably an important thing to know.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#268

Post by stillblue »

ketzo wrote: post #263
stillblue wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you suggest instead?

I mean, I don't even have to suggest; I can let the OP suggest instead. > Having an interview process that is artificially arduous Make your interviews less artificially arduous. > way outside the expectations of the job duties Re-design your interview questions to be more in line with the actual job. > leetcode monkeys who can barely deploy and manage k8s cluster on AWS See previous suggestion. If you want my person…

> Tune interviews to the role at hand. This should be obvious, but for some reason full-stack web devs still have to pretend like dynamic programming is a big part of their daily work.

This personally hurt :)

Completely agree with you on everything you've written.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#269

Post by erosenbe0 »

dionidium wrote: post #119
mkl95 wrote: post #40

My career path in tech so far has been junior engineer -> mid level -> senior -> tech lead. As I've progressed through that path, I have had literally no opportunities of applying the stuff I've learnt on HackerRank, save for a couple of interviews. At this point I'm convinced that the focus of those interviews was entirely wrong. Once you pass those tests and get hired, you will be dealing with tons of legacy code r…

The reason this complaint never changes anything, despite being very popular, is that these interviews serve two purposes that it doesn’t address: 1) they’re an intelligence test; 2) they’re a perseverance/conscientiousness test. Will you take the time and put in the work to pass one of these interviews? That measures perseverance and conscientiousness. Having put in the time, can you recall and adapt what you learne…

If you aren't interviewing with the team or hiring manager with the opening and just getting assessed by random SWE in a giant company that seems like it is subject to a lot of variance.

Why don't they just conduct a proctored test? Doesn't make any sense.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#270

Post by hn_throwaway_21 »

ozzythecat wrote: post #122

Interviewing is broken. When I was at Amazon, it became impossible to hire candidates, and generally the engineers we brought on board were non-US citizens. Typically they're Indians without U.S. residency status, often times U.S. college grads or often even transfers from Amazon's Indian offices. Not only did we pay below other FAANGs, but with these hires, we'd pay them at the low end of our own scale. What are the…

Amazon is an exception in the industry as they routinely hire from tier-2 & tier-3 engineering universities. On the contrary, Product Managers come from tier-1 MBAs. My hypothesis is that given Amazon's strong emphasis on engineering processes, they are able to train and uplevel these devs to tier-1 level talent over time.
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