It's still O(N) even if you don't need to copy the input, because you nonetheless visited every character in the string.
Oh, I skimmed over the O(1) part.
That baffled me for a moment, then I realized you were talking about the general case of a uniform random input where a carry for the 1s digit has probability 0.1, a carry for the 10s digit 0.01, etc., and all 9s is the pathological worst case, right? That's what I get for coming into the discussion sideways.
Leetcode is simply testing whether you studied Computer Science, took Data Structures & Algorithms course, and read the CLR book on algos and practices it. Nothing else. This is really freshman level cs work. very simple. people who cannot leetcode - a simple data structures & algorithms inteview - cannot understand runtime nuances of what they write. This is how you end up with N+1 algorithms and exponential runtime…
Using the word "wageslave" to describe 300k TC office workers is out of touch at best and downright offensive at worst.
ah, yes. The American Dream of living in a 50 year old shitbox fixer that costs $2M in the suburbs of Cupertino. If you can make that much remote out in Nebraska then sure, fine. There are people doing a lot worse. But when doing much better looks like that, what even is the point?
Seems everyday on Blind there's a few posts from mid 30s folks reporting ~$3M NW and wondering if it's enough to retire on.
Take home and “please time box it to maybe an hour maximum, you’re probably doing a load of interviews and tech tests at the moment, so you don’t need to finish: I just want to see your approach”. In-person time I used to like to ask a question I got from here: “Tell me about your favourite coding work or side project”. We’d then dig into choices, trade offs, obstacles and how they got around them. My favourite answe…
"Please timebox to an hour" is a bit dodgy though. If one candidate really does that, but the rest give it an extra 2 or 3 hours, that 1 hour candidate will probably be at a disadvantage.
I often ask for them to version control and send me a zip of the git repo, so I can look at commit histories. Yes, they can fake that, sure, but I can normally tell a lot about a dev from that, and actually if I see 4-5 commits over an hour perhaps with some wrong turns, that pushes the candidate up in my estimation than somebody with 1-2 commits that don't tell a story, but does show a complete solution - which is most likely what would happen if you edited history a bit.
Thank you for mentioning this. I always find myself going further back and forth with employers who allow a take-home exercise but ask that it be time-boxed nonetheless; it's difficult to try to unpack how they're trying to communicate what kind of time pressure a role experiences, and that if I took longer than their expected time box, does that look bad just because I needed some more time to understand the problem…
I don't think most employers are out there looking at the timestamps on your commits to see if you really completed it within the timebox or not -- I certainly wouldn't. I don't think that candidates who spend less time or turn in incomplete take homes are necessarily at a disadvantage. Sooo much can be discerned from a take home even if it's not finished. I can evaluate a candidate's familiarity with modern syntax,…
Thanks for sharing your take. I wish I came across interviewers like yourself in the last 18 months of job searching.
“Cracking the coding interview” was first published in 2008. One guesses that those techniques arose between 1999 (when google started) and then, but I’m sure it was in place in 2005.
Even earlier than I thought. It be interesting to know when the practice started, by what company and all the history behind it. But it does seem like it's been around a long time at this point.
As described in that book, definitely Google. I wouldn’t be surprised if the canonical coding interview as we know it today started at Google, but there is also the infamous technique used by Joel Spolesky, FitBizz or something like that.
This is incorrect. If my income and expenses both increase by 10x, my savings increase by 10x. After just a few years of saving, I have the option of moving somewhere cheaper and living like a king. It's not like your savings and investments are adjusted for the cost of living when you move. In the extreme case, you can earn as much as possible and accumulate enough to live on indefinitely in a cheap country. This is…
if your income 10x and you are on the wage - then that means you are either will have to work 10x more hours - or work 10x more intensively/efficiently, which leads to its own burnout and issues. main point being is that if your income doubles, your savings rate will double, but your work related stress will double, and arguably your health (mental and physical) will deteriorate at 2x faster rate
Do you really think your extreme examples are the average experience outside of Nebraska?
Well these are more affordable places in sf, not everyone is techie millionaire, you know. and Nebraska has nice places too, especially if you have a family. Try to raise a family with 5 kids in sf, and compare to Omaha. I would pick Omaha 10 out of 10 times, if I was not a millionaire
>Try to raise a family with 5 kids
What am I, a farmer? I would pick not doing that 10 out of 10 times regardless of how much money I had.
Quiet and peaceful, cleaner air, you can play loud music and stomp around without upsetting neighbors, and for many people most of their time is spent on a computer anyway.
The quality of my life is not defined by stomping around or playing loud music. It’s having access to and making use of amenities. What the hell good is money to me if I have no goods and services to spend it on? Maybe most of your time is spent on a computer.
The quality of my life is not defined by how close I am to fast food diners or other frivolous goods and services.