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Caltech's CS interview prep course

courses.cms.caltech.edu

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Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#81

Post by majormajor »

amznbyebyebye wrote: post #22

So wait you are smart enough to get into caltech, smart enough to graduate with a degree in CS. And yet the curriculum on its own does not do a good job enough on its own to prepare you for getting a job? Very hard to graduate with a decent GPA in CS at caltech and not be able to thrive as an entry level engineer. If you got B’s in caltech CS I’d make you an offer for 200k+ without blinking or even asking you anythin…

Here we see what the alternative to whiteboard interviews: credentialism. Get into the right school and muddle through and get a guaranteed 200k!

Is there more to you than your high school performance? Push back against this if so!

(Calling the interview Leetcode is misleading IME, since I've rarely been asked something that would be near the upper tiers of that site's difficulty).

Top-tier tech companies face a LOT more competitive pressure than top-tier universities; why should I trust the university selection process more than those corporate hiring ones?

Ask yourself why the rest of the industry isn't happy to simply hire every B student from CalTech/Stanford/MIT/Ivies without an interview?

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#82

Post by aiisjustanif »

barry-cotter wrote: post #67
Apocryphon wrote: post #28

Tech interview discussions always seem to run the same course and hit the same points, so I'll repeat one of mine: What's wrong with the idea of turning the standard Leetcode algorithms interview into a license that only needs to be completed once, or maybe once every 5-8 years, similar to what physicians must undergo? Much more efficient than having to retake it with every single company during an interview cycle.

> What's wrong with the idea of turning the standard Leetcode algorithms interview into a license that only needs to be completed once, or maybe once every 5-8 years, similar to what physicians must undergo? How far from this is the A level in Computer Science[1] which should take at minimum 20 weeks full time study for the target 16-18 age group? Or the EdX MicroMaster’s in Data Structures and Algorithms[2]? If any…

For the non-UK folk you might have to explain A-levels. But your question it’s valid.

> How far from this is the A level in Computer Science[1]? Or the EdX MicroMaster’s in Data Structures and Algorithms[2]?

Pretty far from being standardized and the key point of the previous comment you replied to is re-licensing.

> If any one of the FAANG companies said “Get this qualification and we guarantee you an interview” that would already be massive, never mind skipping one or two steps of the interview process.

Is it? Network engineers are required to keep up certifications for jobs in the US (CCNP or rarely CCDE). So do Security Engineers/Professionals, Auditors, Cloud engineers/architects/consultants. Government employees or contractors require them for assurance. It’s not that massive of a shift imo.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#83

Post by singron »

Apocryphon wrote: post #28

Tech interview discussions always seem to run the same course and hit the same points, so I'll repeat one of mine: What's wrong with the idea of turning the standard Leetcode algorithms interview into a license that only needs to be completed once, or maybe once every 5-8 years, similar to what physicians must undergo? Much more efficient than having to retake it with every single company during an interview cycle.

An equivalent idea is to hire anyone who has worked at any well-known company with similarly rigorous interviews.

But people from those places still perform really poorly in interviews at about the same rate as everyone else. I wish I knew if it was a fluke that they bombed this time or that they passed the original.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#84

Post by mkl95 »

ramraj07 wrote: post #71
mkl95 wrote: post #40

My career path in tech so far has been junior engineer -> mid level -> senior -> tech lead. As I've progressed through that path, I have had literally no opportunities of applying the stuff I've learnt on HackerRank, save for a couple of interviews. At this point I'm convinced that the focus of those interviews was entirely wrong. Once you pass those tests and get hired, you will be dealing with tons of legacy code r…

What’s your suggested alternative? Please remember that while some of us would do well and prefer some live pair programming or debugging sessions, it stresses the hell out of some folks and penalizes them unfairly. Take home tests penalizes people with families and other responsibilities and probably has a racial bias as well in countries where different races have different societal loads. In the end, even if these…

Take home OR coding challenges is a false dichotomy.

> In the end, even if these coding challenges might not reflect the actual work you do, they might still be predictive of success in the job

They are snake oil. You cannot predict success at some job by asking candidates to prove their ability at something that is only tangentially related to the actual job.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#85

Post by Firmwarrior »

NERD_ALERT wrote: post #45
amznbyebyebye wrote: post #22

So wait you are smart enough to get into caltech, smart enough to graduate with a degree in CS. And yet the curriculum on its own does not do a good job enough on its own to prepare you for getting a job? Very hard to graduate with a decent GPA in CS at caltech and not be able to thrive as an entry level engineer. If you got B’s in caltech CS I’d make you an offer for 200k+ without blinking or even asking you anythin…

Computer Science is not Software Engineering. A PhD does not translate to real world engineering skills. If you just go through a bachelors CS curriculum, designed to give a survey of all topics in academic computer science, that wouldn't make you a competent engineer. This is especially true now that through the internet, just about anyone with a laptop can get as good as they want at software engineering without ev…

> If I had the choice between a Caltech grad who had all A's and no experience or a student from some random state school who had interned every summer and contributed to open source, I'd pick the latter.

I really wish someone had explained this to me while I was in college.. I had ONE professor who'd actually worked in the real world who explained it, but all the other professors were lifetime academics who just parroted the same idiotic stuff about how important it is to get good grades.

Getting my first engineering job after I graduated was a nightmare.. I ended up having to go with a crappy internship that barely paid enough for me to live in a bedroom in a shared house, with a terrible boss who constantly threatened me and stressed me out. And that's with a 3.8 GPA.. When I told prospective employers that, they were like "What is that? Out of 4? 5? Is that good?"

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#86

Post by shahbaby »

Apocryphon wrote: post #28

Tech interview discussions always seem to run the same course and hit the same points, so I'll repeat one of mine: What's wrong with the idea of turning the standard Leetcode algorithms interview into a license that only needs to be completed once, or maybe once every 5-8 years, similar to what physicians must undergo? Much more efficient than having to retake it with every single company during an interview cycle.

Reminder, our field isn't regulated.

Anyone can go online and learn enough to be useful at a high paying entry level job.

At some point there has to be a filter and that's what these interviews are for.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#87

Post by pthread_t »

Swizec wrote: post #24
dvt wrote: post #3

If you don't think modern interviewing practices are a problem, this should be proof enough. Not only do we have an entire programming book sub-genre dedicated to this nonsense, but now we're also wasting class time on memorizing sorting algorithms. Fantastic. Of course, we're going to see the inevitable arguments that "40% of the people I interview lie on resumes" or "I interviewed this guy once, and he couldn't eve…

The problem with looking at OSS and publications is that this penalizes a lot of people with real lives outside of work. Especially problematic if you’re into equitable hiring processes aiming to hire people who aren’t in their 20’s anymore. Looking at past work penalizes people who primarily have experience in large systems where their work is NDA’d, impossible to understand without a loooot of background, or simply…

> The “do smol thing together so we can talk about it” interview penalizes people with performance anxiety.

Does this apply to the Leetcode style interviews?

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#89

Post by majormajor »

synthos wrote: post #80
ramraj07 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s your suggested alternative? Please remember that while some of us would do well and prefer some live pair programming or debugging sessions, it stresses the hell out of some folks and penalizes them unfairly. Take home tests penalizes people with families and other responsibilities and probably has a racial bias as well in countries where different races have different societal loads. In the end, even if these…

grinding leetcode is just as bad, if not worse, than a take-home test

Perhaps not everyone has to grind it so much. (I would wager they're the same people who do regularly find themselves thinking about computational and space complexity, and about using different datastructures and algorithms for problems, vs the ones who never see reason to!)

A take home test requires spending free time for everyone. A whiteboard interview requires variable amounts of free time. I would wager that, on average, the people inside companies using these processes require less time to "grind leetcode" than the people outside those companies do.

You gotta be able to convince the folks on the inside, not the ones on the outside. To them, it being hard to "grind" might even seem like a good thing! "It's hard to cram for this compared to other sorts of tests!"

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#90

Post by literallyWTF »

paradygm wrote: post #49
dvt wrote: post #3

If you don't think modern interviewing practices are a problem, this should be proof enough. Not only do we have an entire programming book sub-genre dedicated to this nonsense, but now we're also wasting class time on memorizing sorting algorithms. Fantastic. Of course, we're going to see the inevitable arguments that "40% of the people I interview lie on resumes" or "I interviewed this guy once, and he couldn't eve…

> I've told at least 5 or 6 companies that wanted to white-board me to suck it. It's honestly insulting that I'm forced to white-board when I have two books with my name on them (published by Apress), contributions to Golang (small commits, but they still got me in the AUTHORS file), and OSS projects with hundreds of stars on GitHub That is all commendable but none of that tells me if I can work with you. When I inte…

This is the dumbest excuse for white boarding/l33t code that isn’t even applied in real life.

You can be the most pleasant person who’s articulating their thoughts in simple and easy to understand ways and if you don’t solve the bullshit problem in o(-1) time you’ll get rejected.

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