491–500 of 740 posts
the vector would be almost exactly equal to - , except in the path boards, there's no opportunity for "if you know more, show it."Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the correct explanation; false positives are so much more expensive than the opportunity cost of a false negative.
People always say this, but is it true? It’s easy to fire someone. It’s really hard to find someone who can ship (something you won’t get from a whiteboarding challenge).
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I honestly don't mean this in a snide way. Can you give a few concrete examples of how a deep understanding of BFS that can't be googled and read in 10 minutes at the time you need it can help you ship profitable software products faster than your competitors?
I was recently asked to identify pages in our 10 million line application that use a certain piece of business logic. It involved parsing the page and their nested subcontrols into a tree with by doing a modified BFS on the linked files, doing a modifed BFS on the tree to identify the related code behinds, parsing the C# from the codebehinds into a tree, and traversing the C# tree (again with a modified BFS) to find…
would go even further and say that you could easily have installed something like https://oracle.github.io/opengrok/ in three commands for your organization and extract a lot more value while resolving the issue.
When I was a new college grad, I felt trapped by the fact that everywhere I looked they wanted several years of experience, and I had none yet. How can I get experience if it's required to get the job? Now that I am 51, I feel annoyed that all of these stories of interviews involve asking questions about algorithms that rarely come up in real coding, and if they do you should NOT be rolling your own code, you should…
I just graduated, so I'm not dealing with constant internship interviews anymore, but at the time I absolutely hated it. My frustration isn't exactly like yours (my time is probably a lot less valuable). I feel that the questions are all geared at puzzle solvers. If you're a puzzle solver, you love answers. You love digging into the details. You love finding out the basic components of a system. I think these are the…
When I was a new college grad, I felt trapped by the fact that everywhere I looked they wanted several years of experience, and I had none yet. How can I get experience if it's required to get the job? Now that I am 51, I feel annoyed that all of these stories of interviews involve asking questions about algorithms that rarely come up in real coding, and if they do you should NOT be rolling your own code, you should…
I just graduated, so I'm not dealing with constant internship interviews anymore, but at the time I absolutely hated it. My frustration isn't exactly like yours (my time is probably a lot less valuable). I feel that the questions are all geared at puzzle solvers. If you're a puzzle solver, you love answers. You love digging into the details. You love finding out the basic components of a system. I think these are the…
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I interview at Google and I never look at resumes - to avoid bias. I don't want to be biased by whether you went to Yale or UT Austin. My question is always a standard algo/DS question anyway.
That is a good way to eliminate bias, but in the end, is that a good way to make sure each position is staffed by the best candidate possible? I always pondered about that when I was at Google. We had mostly smart people, but I argue not all of them were the perfect fit for the position/skills needed. Sure some bias are best eliminated such as what school they went to, but if work experience in general should not be…
He says they have to fire guys in his team frequently because they ace the interview process by practicing it ad nauseum but are terrible software engineers.
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I cannot help but think that these big tech companies (FAANG, et. al) are missing out on diversifying and increasing their engineering expertise by passing over developers like you. I often think what would Google/Facebook would be like if they hired in some experienced engineers that may not be able to whiteboard a BFS tree or can tell you Djikstra's algorithm, but have proven business track records of getting proje…
It's because they are basically just testing IQ. It's not actually programming knowledge they care about. If a person has a CS/EE degree and has been professionally programming for a few years they probably have enough domain knowledge regardless. Then the rest of the interview is testing soft skills.
It is instead the opposite. These companies are testing the quality of "who has practiced the most for these types of questions".
It has nothing to do with intelligence. It is instead almost directly correlated with how much time you have spent practicing interview questions.
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>The technical interviewing scheme is not great, but I haven't seen another system that works. I would argue that pair programming or take home projects do a far better job than the standard Whiteboard Algo interviews. In fact I don't think it's even close but SV engineers have been captured by this Whiteboard Interview Stockholm Syndrome/Hazing and continue to perpetuate the insane idea that there is no better way.
Many people on HN also complain about "I don't have time for pair programming, take home". They don't like interviews. People just expect to be paid top dollar on their word.
I don't think it's the case that people don't like interviews. I think you're making a strawman. I'm not going to go and say that you're part of the cycle of SV engineer being hazed, reproducing it and exhibiting a sunken cost fallacy/bias towards the way you've done it, but it's possible. I don't think this is the ideal way to interview.
What's more, I've been seeing actual improvement on the state of the art in this area. Platforms like Karat et al (not sure if Karat is the best in this area but I did have a good experience with a company that used them and interviewed me well) are actually incentivized to minimize false positives and negatives rather than just one. You might be surprised at how much better a good technical interviewer can be than an average strong engineer.
Can you guess which group is better at technical interviewing and I've found more capable of handling the responsibility of screening talent in the past?
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This is just ridiculous. BFS is such a useful building block. If you're stubborn enough to not spend 10 mins on this the best of luck.
The creator of ruby on rails wouldn't pass a whiteboard interview. Ruby on Rails had more of an impact at Twitter, Github, Airbnb than BFS is my guess DHH's tweet https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1085987159406927872
Such a situation would show me that he either does not care about getting the job, or is so arogent that he automatically expected that people who throw job offers at him.
That shows that this person has horrible personality problems and that I would not want to work with him, no matter how much he has accomplished in his life.