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How to Pass a Programming Interview

blog.triplebyte.com

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Re: How to Pass a Programming Interview

#81

Post by darrenkopp »

bshlgrs wrote: post #3

Another tip which I give: Interviewers vary widely in how much they care about whether your syntax is accurate, whether you handle invalid inputs, and whether you write unit tests. It's really useful to ask the interviewer whether they want you to worry about those things. If you handle invalid inputs for an interviewer who doesn't care about that, they're going to be a little annoyed by you going more slowly than ne…

Great point. I tend to be the person that realizes that interviews are stressful and I'm not gonna hold it against you if you miss sanitizing your input or similar issues, but I will call you out on it with a question like "well, what if you get X" and at least verify that you know that's an issue and let you then add the code in to accommodate for that.

Re: How to Pass a Programming Interview

#82

Post by alistairSH »

jkarneges wrote: post #25
alistairSH wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any reason an interviewer should care about syntax, etc? When I interview, I ask for psuedocode - I don't really care what language the interviewee uses, I do care that they can get their point across.

This happened to a friend. He confirmed that pseudocode would be acceptable, but then as he was writing it out the interviewer got on him about not terminating lines with semicolons (I suppose the pseudocode looked C-ish). So yeah I'd say make this clear.

Ack. I'm not sure how I'd react to that.

I interviewed quite a bit last year (on the hiring side). I was really surprised by the variation in pseudocode written by the candidates. Most wrote something JavaScript-like, a few stuck to mostly proper Java or C. But then one dumped a giant web of crazy on the board (but still made his point) and one wrote something that looked suspiciously like COBOL - still not sure if he was trolling me.

Re: How to Pass a Programming Interview

#83

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

pklausler wrote: post #78

I hated this article. A good technical interview reveals an aptitude for programming or a lack of same, and can distinguish a true aptitude from an ability to fake it. I've been interviewing programmers for a very long time and I'm pretty good at avoiding "false positive" results with a few straightforward questions. If you have aptitude and talent, brush up on your algorithms and try to have fun with the interview.…

Care to mention these questions? Most companies are suffering HARD from false positives. I'm sure a lot of people would love to know what's working for you.

Thanks!

Re: How to Pass a Programming Interview

#84

Post by quanticle »

nice_byte wrote: post #68
eranation wrote: post #33

If you have an unbounded abundance of good candidates, it is a different story then when you are a new startup fighting for talent. At highly targeted companies such as Google, Facebook et al, I'm sure that if they have a dryspell of good candidates in a given month (can't think of a reason why), then they revert to things like: "We don't care if you don't get the 'trick' immediately, we'll give you hints" and "we ju…

findDupe isn't O(1), it's O(n) since it has to look at all the elements in the list.

It's O(1) space complexity but O(n) time complexity.

Re: How to Pass a Programming Interview

#85

Post by steven777400 »

dkopi wrote: post #74
bshlgrs wrote: post #3

Another tip which I give: Interviewers vary widely in how much they care about whether your syntax is accurate, whether you handle invalid inputs, and whether you write unit tests. It's really useful to ask the interviewer whether they want you to worry about those things. If you handle invalid inputs for an interviewer who doesn't care about that, they're going to be a little annoyed by you going more slowly than ne…

You can always preempt the whiteboard issue by bringing a laptop along. "Hey, I'm a lot more comfortable writing code on a keyboard and with an IDE. Lets program this together in a text editor instead of a whiteboard".

As a candidate, I feel that it is fair to stand up for this as well. If the interviewer wants psuedocode, I'm happy to whiteboard it. But I've been whiteboarding before and had the interviewer say, "that code wouldn't compile, you're missing a bracket." So I said, "If you want code that compiles, bring in a laptop and I'd be happy to put it in to Visual Studio [it was a .NET position] and have it be syntactically correct; but if I'm whiteboarding, it's going to be psuedocode."

Re: How to Pass a Programming Interview

#86

Post by hire_charts »

osagatisop wrote: post #49

I really wish that at some point during my CS education I would have realized how typical programming interviews worked and just how impossible they are for me. None of my internships had this sort of stuff and after a long string of failures interviewing after graduating, I can openly admit that being able to solve algorithm stuff just isn't in my blood. It doesn't matter how many books I read or questions I practic…

One thing that helped me was to actually implement things that made use of the "algorithm stuff." Not just practicing in front of a whiteboard, but real executable code!

In particular, anything involving a Tree was never very intuitive until I tried implementing a script to search for files by name. Suddenly both the recursive and the iterative approaches made sense. I understood the trade-offs because they applied directly to my work. That opened the door for more complex algorithms, like a Huffman Coder (which I wrote in C, as part of a CS class).

The other thing that helps me in interviews is to just talk through everything I am thinking. It feels like I'm stating the obvious over and over, but a good interviewer will be able to follow your thought patterns and help you along when you get stuck. Also it just helps to hear yourself say things outloud sometimes. If you just stand there silently decoding a problem in your head, the interviewer can't help you and has no idea how you'd approach a real problem on the job.

Re: How to Pass a Programming Interview

#87

Post by ammon »

osagatisop wrote: post #49

I really wish that at some point during my CS education I would have realized how typical programming interviews worked and just how impossible they are for me. None of my internships had this sort of stuff and after a long string of failures interviewing after graduating, I can openly admit that being able to solve algorithm stuff just isn't in my blood. It doesn't matter how many books I read or questions I practic…

I am sorry that CS education has not worked out for you so far. I want to emphasize the "so far" part of that. I hope that that's hyperbole at the end of your post. If not, I have to encourage you to reach out to friends and family, and maybe take a break from interviews. You can get in touch with me (email in my profile).

There is a huge amount of randomness in interviews. I usually say this as a bad thing, but in your situation now, it can actually be a good thing. Interviewers look for a WIDE variety of traits. Most ask algorithmic questions. But if you do enough interviews, you will find a company that values the skills that you have (I am assuming here that you can program productively). Smaller companies particularly have more variance in what they are looking for. I encourage you to just treat this as a numbers game, and get applications out to as many small and medium companies as you can.

This sucks. But it can and does get better. After you have a few years of experience under your belt, companies will look at you in a very different light.

EDIT:

Also want to add that we made Triplebyte to help people like you. We'd love to have you apply.

Re: How to Pass a Programming Interview

#88

Post by leeny »

ammon wrote: post #2

A large number of bad things influence interview decisions (credentials, targeted practice, how well you know the specific algorithms that come up again and again in interviews). I hope that more programmers getting better at interviewing skills will help move companies toward measuring actual programming skill.

Obviously I'm biased because I'm building a company around it (interviewing.io), but I don't think biases around credentialing are going to go away until interviewing is anonymous.

The other stuff is harder to crack. I'd really like to see interviews that are more tightly anchored to real work/layer complexity by building on themselves, etc etc.

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