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Don't publish anymore on Medium, people!
Yeah, you're a software dev, spend an hour learning Hugo ;) (Take this with a grain of salt, I don't want to tell people what to do, I just stop reading your blogpost when it fades out and asks me to sign in...)
https://scribe.rip/why-do-big-companies-ask-unrealistic-soft...
Edit: just saw that it won't load the entire article, sad.
However, those activities tend to reveal information about their abilities that are useful in an actual game.
Similarly, while you may not be doing those coding problems in day to day development, those coding problems can (ideally) reveal information about your knowledge and abilities in hat does apply to daily coding.
More or less the same reason why psychologists use the Rorschach test [0] Sometimes they are not worried about the specific answer, they're trying to find out your (software engineer) unconscious mind reveals during the process. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rorschach_test
For many decades, Floyd's Cycle Detection algorithm was unknown in academic circles as the most efficient method of cycle detection.
It is not uncommon to encounter this problem in an interview. There's nothing revealing about the unconscious mind and process, other than that the candidate remembered the solution to this problem.
If it was so readily obvious to derive and arrive at a solution, you would have expected the army of PhDs and academics to have done so.
If you'd like an article giving an explanation for this that doesn't require upgrading to a paid Medium subscription, try this one I wrote a few years ago: https://blog.plan99.net/in-defence-of-the-technical-intervie... It is, natch, hosted on Medium, so you will see a banner, but unlike this paywalled article it's dismissable. Just click the X to make it go away and then you can read the whole thing for free. The su…
The issue at hand is that the "unrealistic" algorithm questions aren't fizzbuzz.
Don't publish anymore on Medium, people!
https://archive.md/Xk2F4 I find it hard to trust the opinion of any “techie” who writes on Medium personally. It reeks of “I want to be an influencer!” type personalities.
If you'd like an article giving an explanation for this that doesn't require upgrading to a paid Medium subscription, try this one I wrote a few years ago: https://blog.plan99.net/in-defence-of-the-technical-intervie... It is, natch, hosted on Medium, so you will see a banner, but unlike this paywalled article it's dismissable. Just click the X to make it go away and then you can read the whole thing for free. The su…
Don't publish anymore on Medium, people!
I agree and is not because they are making money out of you (that's fine if you agree) it's mostly because they aren't censorship proof or ideologically neutral.
To criticize it for doing what it was created to do, seems odd.
Sure, there are a lot of software packages out there so any dev can create a new Medium. Who cares? The point was to pull a lot of people to one site to monetize it. They would browse around and find other authors, which is not possible if every dev out there creates their own site.
Just like Twitch isn't it?
Are you saying it is being censored? To what end? What ideology cares about programming. "Those Democrats and their Objects are using the wrong patterns again". "Republicans and their Emacs, holding on to the past".
That's the thing I was struggling with, I can solve many of problems for the avg company – but I don't know how to solve a leetcode problem. I bet there aren't as many companies solving the complex problems on a scale. But if we look from the perspective of the company – maybe it's just an filter to get someone very dedicated and nerdy about programming. Less churn, less questions.
It's not a perfect proxy for how well they'd solve real user facing problems, but so far it has given me a decent indicator of their motivation/passion and apetite for problem solving. There's a dozen other, mostly non-coding questions in the interview, but this one has been the best predicator for me.
(The problem is closer to a more elaborate fizzbuzz with some math parts, than it is to a memorizable b-tree or other leet-code algorithm question)