591–600 of 693 posts
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Honestly, does it matter?
Yes?
It's kind of like that date that you both absolutely loved over a long weekend, but the other person refuses to respond to. You can't really be mad, except think bitterly, "...really?"
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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…
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Of course they're unrelated. The interviewer asking this doesn't expect you to write these algorithms all day, they want to know that you have the basic mental dexterity to figure things like this out. They are, ideally, abstracted problems of the complexity that you'd be expected to be able to solve on your own. There are some positions where you don't have to care if people can really problem-solve; as long as they…
> they want to know that you have the basic mental dexterity to figure things like this out If you have the "mental dexterity" to coming up with your own solution which is identical to Dijkstra's pathfinding algorithms in terms of complexity within an hour interview, you are a god among mortals. And that's what they expect - a solution to a problem that is equal to the best minds of our field. I say this from experie…
I've never had a web-app that failed due to performance. I can't recall any that ever have, except Facebooks' attempt to use HTML on mobile.
UI performance has little to do with algorithms, and only occasionally requires opening the profiler to hit 60fps with some tweaks to bone-headed nested loops. Or maybe reconsider your use of Angular!
Front-end apps fail because long-lived mutable state is a powerful engine of complexity, and algorithms do not solve complexity. I am constantly telling my team (CS back-enders prepare yourself!) to ignore performance concerns. O-whatever has zero-impact on delivering simple, extensible, bug-free web apps that please its users.
But admittedly, crafting good software isn't as objectively clear as implementing a mathematical function that makes your server code perform. The proliferation of front-end frameworks and compile-to-js languages indicates that writing FE software that works remains a far greater challenge than writing FE software that hums.
To that point, maintaining a popular github repo for a library or app that demonstrates your ability to write, maintain, and extend FE software is still the best sign that you know what you're doing, and that you like what you're doing. Conversely, knowing a lot of algorithms as a FE candidate tells me nothing about whether your first PR will be your last.
On a happy note, Netflix didn't ask me a single question regarding algorithms! Their interview's focus on OOP made sense, even if it didn't fit with my own focus on ClojureScript and FP.
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So, are you suggesting that folks take one day off per week? That seems a little ridiculous. The number of employers who haven't even looked at my resume, even after a month long process, is insane. Is it really that hard to read a resume beforehand? Why waste everybody's time?! So please, take your time, skim their resumes and maybe do a bit of github code reviews before inviting someone to sit down. Hell, do it whi…
I read the resumes, and if the code description is interesting, I'll pull up the github repo. I read a lot of them because I do a lot of interviews, and the resumes that get passed to me for interviews all look fantastic and incredibly similar. Because good programmers have remarkably similar resumes as bad programmers -- one was made by sweat & blood, the other with bullshit. It's just text on a page, there's no way…
I kind of get the impression you're bitter or projecting something, but I can't quite put my finger on it. Not trying to be snarky, just saying.
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…
How do you know his skills aren't useful to the market? That seems like a terrible thing to say.
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…
After reading author's post I've a feeling that its not the programming skills that the author has issues with, but instead the attitude, stress durability, expectations to the world around him. True, hiring can be broken, it often is, but as with everything, the persistence usually allows us to find the proper company with proper hiring process. He's getting frustrated pretty quickly, complains when is asked to perf…
Persistence is a pain in the arse if you have to spend 1.5 hours every Hackerrank challenge (plus you are likely to want a warm up of at least half an hour). Say you have to do ten of those. Why can't employers ask you to bring in some previous work and discuss it? Surely that is a lot more relevant than algorithmic stuff that you likely haven't used for years.
I got an offer and accepted it.
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…
It's just really hard to decipher one's ability when everyone puts technical experience on their resume because they took an online class or read a book on some thing once.