I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days • Hacker News Board

Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days

#571

Post by jedberg » Sat, Jan 19, 2019, 7:37 AM UTC

Xeronate wrote: post #379

jedberg wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but you used libraries to do it, right? You didn't actually need to know how BFS works, did you? 10 million lines of code fits in RAM pretty easily. You could use the worst algorithm in the world and still complete that whole task with just a few seconds of compute time. I think that's the point. You don't really need to know about BFS in most cases, because in most cases you can solve the problem with any old…

I can tell you really don't know what you're talking about because you can't just "use libraries to do it". You can use a library to parse a given input, but you need to traverse the tree in a specific way. Here, I'll give you an example of the first step of the problem with proprietary info stripped out. https://gist.github.com/tohsa/2d906942f8712abdfc7df72128479c... You plain and simple need to know BFS to do these…

Ok I see where the problem is. I read through your code and didn't think "BFS", I just thought "knows how to nest for and while loops". I suppose you could consider this "knowing BFS", but I would consider this table stakes. I would never ask about something like this in an interview.

I thought you were talking about actually using BFS on a data structure, in which case I'd use a library to do it so I don't have to reimplement all the loops and because there are modern libraries that would take care of the parallelization (like this one[0])

[0] https://github.com/arjun-menon/Distributed-Graph-Algorithms/...

Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days

#572

Post by smallnamespace » Sat, Jan 19, 2019, 7:40 AM UTC

nicoburns wrote: post #508

cornellwright wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but that's my point. So long as the interviewer is telling you what they'd actually like you to do, you should be able to just derive the algorithm you need to do it. At some point the algorithms become difficult enough (particularly if you add lots of constraints like efficiency) that it's pretty unreasonable to expect that in an interview though, and at that point it's a bad question. Rather than memorizing a…

My first reaction when inplementing anything more than a very simple algorithm is to google the best way to do it. Of course, I could probably come up with a way to do it by myself. I could probably even come up with an efficient way if I spent an afternoon/day on it. But why do that when I can google it, and get 3 blog posts and 2 stack overflow answers detailing the different options and the trade offs between them…

> But why do that when I can google it, and get 3 blog posts and 2 stack overflow answers detailing the different options and the trade offs between them, most likely even with an implementation I can base mine off of?

A lot of resources out there are wrong, inaccurate, or not reasonable for your particular context, and it requires a reasonable amount of algorithmic intelligence to be able to sniff out what's appropriate.

If I had a dollar for every high-upvoted SO post that misstates a problem or doesn't offer proper caveats... but I can make that judgment because I've already thought about a related problem in the past.

It's like asking why one should learn how to write properly when Grammarly and spell checkers exist, or why mental arithmetic is useful when we have calculators—at some point those your tools will be inappropriate or unavailable. Search tools are force multipliers, not replacements for personal knowledge and intuition.

Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days

#573

Post by kevan » Sat, Jan 19, 2019, 7:42 AM UTC

jahaja wrote: post #195

It's interesting that software interviews have degenerated into literal auditions. Just as with auditions, you need to train specifically for them. Is there really a reason why software jobs can't hire in a blue-collar fashion where there's a background/experience + sanity check and a subsequent trial period? Even looking beyond that, is there any similar profession where interviews like these take place? I'm startin…

> is there any similar profession where interviews like these take place?

Based on some conversations with friends it sounds like Big 4 consulting is similar. The behavioral questions are the same, and instead of coding they have "case questions".

>No consulting interview would be complete without case interview questions that test a candidate's ability to think strategically about problems...make it a conversation, and explain every step of your thinking/process along the way. Again: showing that you can arrive at a solution after thoughtful questioning and analysis is far more important in these questions than being able to throw out a brilliant new strategy on the fly, so focus on the process, and allow it to lead you to a solution.

[1] http://www.vault.com/blog/interviewing/26-interview-question...

Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days

#574

Post by calf » Sat, Jan 19, 2019, 7:43 AM UTC

acpetrov wrote: post #321

rossdavidh wrote: post #291

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…

You're better suited for research which is about working long term on open problems.

Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days

#575

Post by paulgrant999 » Sat, Jan 19, 2019, 7:48 AM UTC

turtlecloud wrote: post #494

acpetrov wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree with you. The puzzle solver ABSOLUTELY hate it if you somehow say that the question is flawed. Ie if you think outside the box and render their hypothetical situation flawed. It’s as if they didn’t spend enough time to realize that they are missing the forest for the trees.

lol. I rolled something that was patentworthy by a researcher at one of the FANG-sized corps (from scratch). Corrected a theoretical flaw that rendered the algorithm request impossible mathematically. Detected and solved a much larger semantic problem (which fixed permanently the problem they were trying to solve). And the "coder" was only concerned about "why I chose to log" -- "so I can break the job down, pause and resume - since you didn't include ms timestamps I had to come up with a way to partition the log into parallelizable, resumable chunks".

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They were extremely upset about the flawed spec. They couldn't understand either the patentworthy algo; or most of the programs actual key details.

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Also, they lied about being a coder.

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Now what, a I supposed to do with that. You asked, for a professional. You got one. Not my problem if you only hire hacks.

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Even worse on the devops side.

Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days

#576

Post by paulgrant999 » Sat, Jan 19, 2019, 7:49 AM UTC

jsmeaton wrote: post #352

acpetrov wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Honestly, it sounds like you may be geared more towards software architecture rather than software development. If you like the sound of the bigger picture more than the details, it might be something you could look into.

my understanding is with the migration to thousands of "pizza" developer teams doing self-service, that "no one person understand the entire codebase" i.e. software architecting is dead.

Am I in error to hold this belief?

Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days

#577

Post by nitrogen » Sat, Jan 19, 2019, 7:55 AM UTC

calf wrote: post #574

acpetrov wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're better suited for research which is about working long term on open problems.

I think the opposite would be true; research might benefit from puzzle solving, and software engineering is precisely the discipline of building up and reasoning about layers of abstraction and components of a system.

Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days

#578

Post by mullingitover » Sat, Jan 19, 2019, 7:58 AM UTC

Pharmakon wrote: post #303

erik_seaberg wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Howell's own words from https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin... : > I wrote a simple package manager. Anyone could write one. And in fact mine is pretty bad. It doesn't do dependency management properly. It doesn’t handle edge case behavior well. It isn’t well tested.

From later in his same post... But ultimately, should Google have hired me? Yes, absolutely yes. I am often a dick, I am often difficult, I often don’t know computer science, but. BUT. I make really good things, maybe they aren't perfect, but people really like them. Surely, surely Google could have used that.

> I am often difficult, I often don’t know computer science, but. BUT. I make really good things

Having worked with people who are dicks but make really good things...I wouldn't want him on my team either. There are plenty of people who make really good things and aren't dicks.

Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days

#579

Post by existencebox » Sat, Jan 19, 2019, 8:03 AM UTC

sanedigital wrote: post #566

existencebox wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I say the following having worked at multiple "big-5" including G. Do you not feel any of the twist in your stomach that I feel when reading your post? That we're discarding any vestige of track record and accomplishment (that I pragmatically see as having correlated better than any other variable with effective coworkers in the past) for a readily gamable trivia question that I take some perverse pride in not having…

> That we're discarding any vestige of track record and accomplishment... It's not your job as one of the five interviewers at Google to evaluate anything except the candidate's performance in your interview . The Hiring Committee (HC) then takes the feedback received from all the interviewers and combines it with the interviewee's résumé, any recommendations they've received, etc. Source: gave over 100 interviews at…

Realize though, the unfortunate result of the way this is implemented results in an interview process that ends up being perceived as quite coarse and unfeeling, and seems to filter on often capricious tests of algorithmic knowledge; Some highlights in my personal experience, writing an RB tree, and "write a regex to capture the comments in code;" simply put I never felt that my experience was even slightly under consideration. I realize the typical response from a Googler (including my friends there now) is that these things specific instances are disallowed/not recommended, and I trust they're not lying with those statements, but for whatever reason _those did happen some years back_, and I continue to hear similar attestations both here and at work.

Feel free to write off all of my frustration as a selfish fear that I won't be able to pass these gates in N years with the heavy focus on algorithms-under-pressure; it's certainly hit and miss now, and I'm open that I've been both accepted and rejected at all the places I've worked to call out how much of a crapshoot this process seems to be.

I fully acknowledge that an org of G's size has needed to make certain tradeoffs/processes, but that has tradeoffs for candidates, which can be hair-pulling when we do/have done isomorphic work at a high level.

(I should probably disclaimer that MSFTie, I have nothing particularly against G in this and all opinions are my own, but highly algorithmic interviews are a topic I've always been selfishly unsettled about)

Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days

#580

Post by feverzsj » Sat, Jan 19, 2019, 8:10 AM UTC

the problem of interview in large companies is no one want to take responsibility of recruiting the wrong guy. So they just use some "standard" process to screen and test the candidates. If they still pick the wrong guy, no one will be blamed, since other big companies use the same process.

And that is the main reason big companies like google, facebook can't make good products. Instead, they pay billions to buy successful products made by those who were rejected in their interview.