501–510 of 693 posts
Why don't more people do, "We're not 100% sure if you're the right fit, but we'd like to find out. We'll pay you to work with us for [2/4] weeks."
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How the question is posed really matters. What if the question had been "hey, you have a starting node in a linked structure, and you want to visit / collect / search all of the nodes that it can reach, without duplicates", you'd probably come up with DFS or BFS on the spot because the problem is not that hard and those are really the only two ways to attack it, and having found one of the two you'd probably also rea…
All that is true, but I went through some interviews last year at Google, and honestly, you really can't afford to be thinking about things like this. Nobody is going to ask you to just implement DFS, but you may get a problem that essentially reduces to DFS, if you can see it. In my experience, you really will be expected to solve this problem at a whiteboard in 45 minutes. Syntax and so forth won't be an issue, but…
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My point is that they are not entirely different; both are academic, simple, basic applications of the kind of graph theory freshmen learn. Described in terms of a heap, Djikstra is barely more complicated than BFS.
BFS is far from academic though, it's a very common tree/graph traversal algorithm when you want to traverse in-order, like propagation of events in a UI, or printing contents of a nested data structure for debugging purposes, or searching for the top-most element in a tree that meets your criteria so you can insert a new child subtree (very common operation in nested GUI). Hell, it's not even such an alien concept f…
Not sure if it's accurate, but it seems like these inane coding challenges are more common on the coasts. The only time I've experienced any of them was at an interview with Amazon (for an Email Deliverability Manager role, of all things...). I've been tested on code, but it's never been these inane tidbits everyone went through getting their CompSci degree. Anecdotal, I know.
What cities and kinds of firms did you work at?
The last 3-4 years have been at larger corporations. Major retailer and a division of SAP. Haven't always been at larger corps, but after doing the startup thing for a couple of years, the stability is relaxing.
I also had job offers from some companies that would be maybe "mature startups"? Not sure of a good term, but around 5-7 years old, profitable, ~50 employees, etc. One of them had zero programming exercises of any type. Just tech discussions. None had the questions discussed in this article.
Hiring isn't broken, dude. You just don't interview well, and you seem antagonistic even to the idea that your cachet and skills, insofar as they exist, aren't useful to the market. That's a problem -- for you. Interviews exist because employers need a way to quantify and qualify your ability. Typical computer science problems are a (flawed, but concrete) way of doing that. No reasonable interviewer expects you to re…
What do you think about OP's comments that the algorithm questions were unrelated to the front-end positions?
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I interviewed for Google. I didn't get the job, but they were 100% awesome people. Even followed up after asking if I had an complaints, or questions, or anything like that.
I would love to get to experience something like that, but I don't have the educational merits to even be considered by industry heavy hitters like that.
There are three attributes you need to select for to identify performing employees in intellectual fields.
- General mental ability (Are they generally smart)
- Work sample test. NOT HAZING! As close as possible to the actual work they'd be doing.
- Integrity (The first two won't matter if the candidate is a sociopath).
Hell one of these companies should hire me to do data driven recruiting.
What frustrates me about this is not even these questions, specifically, but which companies seem to use them. If Google wants to ask crazy algorithm questions, that's at least sort-of reasonable. There's at least a hypothetical chance your work will involve that knowledge. But I've interviewed at companies who's entire tech stack is a simple CRUD web app, or a simple RESTful mobile app, who's so-called "big data" is…
Hiring isn't broken, dude. You just don't interview well, and you seem antagonistic even to the idea that your cachet and skills, insofar as they exist, aren't useful to the market. That's a problem -- for you. Interviews exist because employers need a way to quantify and qualify your ability. Typical computer science problems are a (flawed, but concrete) way of doing that. No reasonable interviewer expects you to re…
Hiring IS broken, unfortunately everyone isn't realizing it simultaneously, so half of us end up speaking about it to the other half who are already employed and feel the need to justify their employment. Since these discussions never happen out of CS / IT circles they very rarely propogate upwards to changing company practices unless the CTO/CEO happens to read HN. You're just further contributing to the rigged scen…
My recent hires are all just people I met at events. I'm told by people outside the company that they're all very happy workers.
We do not do technical interviews. We talk casually about past work and what people want to achieve. After hiring we usually find out they have a different skillset and then we find the right tasks to match experience vs. career path.
Knowing this works for my team I would never want to go back to full-time employment at a place with HR ever again. HR has become an insular group of "specialists" who do not deliver value to organizations, and often ruin them IMO.