I've been asked to solve such tough questions during some interviews. Getting asked to solve really complicated text search problems using suffix trees in a 45 minute phone screen for a junior Android dev position at a small startup lol
Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry
561–570 of 693 posts
Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry
#562Earlier quoted context omitted.
Almost anyone in any company can go to HR and say, "This person is great, we should interview them for position X" and they will go to the top of the pile. If you reach out to someone you know at a company, if they like you, and you are good, usually you can get an interview there. Contacts are also good at helping you find unposted jobs. You have to "Reach out" first. Contacts can also recommend you to a hiring mana…
> Almost anyone in any company can go to HR and say, "This person is great, we should interview them for position X" and they will go to the top of the pile. If you reach out to someone you know at a company, if they like you, and you are good, usually you can get an interview there. I see you have never worked in the defense industry before.
Should I consider that a blessing? :-)
Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry
#563Earlier quoted context omitted.
The hardest workers with the most successful can-do attitudes will simply reject your company if you ask them to do bullshit like algorithm trivia or HackerRank tests. Such trivia is the opposite of useful hard work; preparation for it truly wastes time that could be better spent on other things; a can-do attitude would imply rejecting or ignoring requests to do such things. As a result, the people who actually do ta…
or they already learned it because they worked hard during school and they work hard to keep themselves current. I think the concerns people have about the efficacy of this interview style is valid, but extending it to the point where you start to make claims about how people who can pass them aren't as good is ridiculous.
there's nothing 'current' about BFS. It hasn't changed. You'll never write one to meet a real, work-related need. It's just a memory test that puts recent grads at an advantage.
Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry
#564Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been programming for ~8 years as well and have implemented BFS multiple times, especially in occasions where I have to travel nested data structures and want to print them in a specific order. BFS and DFS are the bread and butter of tree/graph problems and every software engineer is expected to encounter them at least once in their life. What if you want to debug a complex data structure or just a tree and want…
I guess I should rephrase. I've been programming for ~8 years and I've never been presented with a problem that insisted I know what BFS was explicitly. It is intuitive, which even further pushes the question "Why do I need to know this to be an effective programmer"?
Because it's not intuitive to some people. Some people just don't 'get' it. The assumption is that such people are probably also not good software developers.
Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry
#565Hiring 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…
In this case, I think an argument can be made that hiring worked for the firms involved.
Because of or in spite of?
Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry
#566Earlier quoted context omitted.
or they already learned it because they worked hard during school and they work hard to keep themselves current. I think the concerns people have about the efficacy of this interview style is valid, but extending it to the point where you start to make claims about how people who can pass them aren't as good is ridiculous.
there's nothing 'current' about BFS. It hasn't changed. You'll never write one to meet a real, work-related need. It's just a memory test that puts recent grads at an advantage.
Not BFS exactly, but I did a breadth first traversal of a graph a couple weeks ago.
Could I have dug up a library to do what I needed, sure I guess. Easier to take 20 minutes and just write the tool.
Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry
#567Earlier quoted context omitted.
there's nothing 'current' about BFS. It hasn't changed. You'll never write one to meet a real, work-related need. It's just a memory test that puts recent grads at an advantage.
Not BFS exactly, but I did a breadth first traversal of a graph a couple weeks ago. Could I have dug up a library to do what I needed, sure I guess. Easier to take 20 minutes and just write the tool.
> Easier to take 20 minutes and just write the tool.
What? That would be a huge red flag in my book. Where are your unit tests? I'm not trusting your 20 minute off the cuff reproduction of classic algorithms in any business critical piece of the code, not ever.
This would get you booted from a lot of places, or at least given a stern talking to for doing something that seems slick, cool, and time-saving in the short term (yay, let's roll our own!) when really it's immature and time-wasting in the long run.
Never (!) homebrew that shit unless you have to (like, you're in an embedded environment or your use case requires some bleeding edge research algorithm).
It's like seeing someone write their own argument-parsing code. Holy shit, what a bad idea. Never (!) do that.
Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry
#568Earlier quoted context omitted.
or they already learned it because they worked hard during school and they work hard to keep themselves current. I think the concerns people have about the efficacy of this interview style is valid, but extending it to the point where you start to make claims about how people who can pass them aren't as good is ridiculous.
No, overfitting is a real thing. Overfitted learning algorithms are generally worse at generalizing their ability to broader examples and new situations. The types of candidates who spend the time necessary to memorize algorithm trivia for the sake of passing these exams are exactly like overfitted learning algorithms. What they happen to know is unlikely to generalize well. Of course you could get lucky and hire som…
> Overfitted learning algorithms are generally worse at generalizing their ability to broader examples and new situations.
Source? or just trying to justify your own shortcomings?
Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry
#569I don't want to pick on any individual response, but the amount of close-minded - and arrogant - replies on this thread is pretty sad. The OP has many valid points. I've interviewed hundreds of candidates - some well, some not so well - and been interviewed many times. I've had four offers in my last five interviews, so I'm not bitter about the process, but I do think most interview processes are far more amateurish than the people they're trying to weed out.
Interviewing should be about finding a fit between a worker and work that needs to be done. The best predictor of that is past success doing similar work. It's not about imitating Google's process, and except in increasingly rare situations, it has very little to do with academic computer science.
And there is never a need to treat anyone rudely. So don't.
Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry
#570Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, overfitting is a real thing. Overfitted learning algorithms are generally worse at generalizing their ability to broader examples and new situations. The types of candidates who spend the time necessary to memorize algorithm trivia for the sake of passing these exams are exactly like overfitted learning algorithms. What they happen to know is unlikely to generalize well. Of course you could get lucky and hire som…
> Overfitted learning algorithms are generally worse at generalizing their ability to broader examples and new situations. Source? or just trying to justify your own shortcomings?
Here, let me Google that for you.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overfitting >
> Overfitting generally occurs when a model is excessively complex, such as having too many parameters relative to the number of observations. A model that has been overfit will generally have poor predictive performance, as it can exaggerate minor fluctuations in the data.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalization_error#Relation_... >
> The concepts of generalization error and overfitting are closely related. Overfitting occurs when the learned function f_S becomes sensitive to the noise in the sample. As a result, the function will perform well on the training set but not perform well on other data from the joint probability distribution of x and y. Thus, the more overfitting occurs, the larger the generalization error.
Shall I fetch a ruler?