71–80 of 137 posts
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My gf is in that rotting pool now. Killed the interviews, but hasn't found a right team yet.
One way out of the pool might be to reach out to potential teams herself, if you have any friends of friends within the 'plex who can send out tendrils internally. (Or just contact friendly people who post on HN... >.>)
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Why the hell would you want to work a company that runs you through the gauntlet like this, only to give you the chance that maybe you'll get hired? I mean, this is obviously a really skilled guy who has lots of prospects. Because at this point in your career, you have no degree, no experience, and no income? He's a sophomore in college, not someone with 30 years of industry experience. In my experience, though, I wo…
> The number of people that can start with a blank file and start writing a computer program is probably somewhere around 5% of programmers. What?! There's no way this is true... is there?
Many candidates wrongly assume they failed to get a position because they got a question wrong. Unless the question was trivial (i.e. what is the height of a tree?), most of the time these questions are intended to see how well you can carefully think through, create, clarify, and debug your code. For example, when I was reading your writeup as a former interviewer (lots and lots of college candidates for MSFT -- I w…
I really don't like the idea of solving contrived puzzles, but I'll never make the mistake of keeping my thought process hidden again.
My story: After my technical phone interviews, I got "accepted" as an intern, meaning I was in the Intern Pool of Rot, where I waded and waited for a team to fish me out. I waded and waded for a couple of months, hoping for a kind suitor. The HR woman always told me that she was "optimistic" about my prospects, so I rejected offers from other companies. Then a really cool opportunity came, and I accepted that offer b…
given two full hours and any high-level language (including pseudocode) only 10 percent of professional programmers implemented binary search correctly, according to Jon Bently. Wow! I'm not particularly intelligent and I'm not in the top 10% -- but I could implement an in-place quick-sort in C in 10 minutes that my interviewer could run with only a minor fix (forgot a semi-colon), and I even described the parallel v…
Jeff Atwood references a good example: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/why-cant-programmer...
The sad truth is that many people who program professionally simply cannot so basic programming tasks. If anything, I think top 10% might be overestimating how many can do it - I suspect 10% might have some kind of idea of how binary search would work, but most of them will fail with edge cases etc.
My story: After my technical phone interviews, I got "accepted" as an intern, meaning I was in the Intern Pool of Rot, where I waded and waited for a team to fish me out. I waded and waded for a couple of months, hoping for a kind suitor. The HR woman always told me that she was "optimistic" about my prospects, so I rejected offers from other companies. Then a really cool opportunity came, and I accepted that offer b…
I think you'd have to try pretty hard to consciously design a worse intern recruitment process than this.
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I think you'd have to try pretty hard to consciously design a worse intern recruitment process than this.
Getting them to write code is actually pretty good. As for binary search, I wouldn't necessarily be able to bang it out in two hours in C, but I'd easily be able to bang it out in that time for any language I use regularly. And with sufficient testing I'd take a good stab at converting to C. Though I agree sometimes it can be a coin toss. Once I was asked to write some code that would take dates as inputs and do some…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you'd have to try pretty hard to consciously design a worse intern recruitment process than this.
Getting them to write code is actually pretty good. As for binary search, I wouldn't necessarily be able to bang it out in two hours in C, but I'd easily be able to bang it out in that time for any language I use regularly. And with sufficient testing I'd take a good stab at converting to C. Though I agree sometimes it can be a coin toss. Once I was asked to write some code that would take dates as inputs and do some…
I was once given an interview project where they wanted to see how I did with their current code structure. They gave me this really horrible template of data that could never be used in the real world or for anything other than this project. I decided to restructure the template so I could make a useable application for it. After turning it in they were astonished that I reformatted it to look exactly like their production data and code.
The problem was that they didn't like that I didn't use certain basic function like require_once, autoloading or something else which i forget (this was in php). Instead I used c style programming in php which ends up being faster. They chastised me for not using the builtin php functions because they assumed they must be better and didn't hire me. The company (well whoever the recruiter worked for) sayed in the email that I just wasn't the right fit because I wasn't up to the skill level of the guy giving me the test and they needed someone "that good" because they were way behind on their deadline. I sent them an email back basically saying that they're retarded (in a MUCH nicer way of course) and showed them some benchmark results I made comparing the different ways of doing it (which showed my methods as being much more efficient).
Many candidates wrongly assume they failed to get a position because they got a question wrong. Unless the question was trivial (i.e. what is the height of a tree?), most of the time these questions are intended to see how well you can carefully think through, create, clarify, and debug your code. For example, when I was reading your writeup as a former interviewer (lots and lots of college candidates for MSFT -- I w…
I'm almost certain this is why I failed my phone interview. It wasn't that I implemented an inefficient sort right away, its that I didn't talk about how/why it was and what I could do about it with more time. I really don't like the idea of solving contrived puzzles, but I'll never make the mistake of keeping my thought process hidden again.
I don't claim any responsibility for their success, though! The University of Chicago undergrads are a hard-working bunch. Much more so than when I was an undergrad :-)