Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Code Interviews

alaiacano.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–98 of 98 posts

Re: Code Interviews

#91

Post by dimmke »

yongjik wrote: post #35
carlosrdrz wrote: post #5

Max Howell's tweet gets pasted on every article talking about code interviews as some kind of exemplification of the problem of whiteboard/algorithmic interviews. What some people might not know is that he reflected on that tweet two years later (3 years ago), in this Quora question: https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin... He even explains how he actually did well in the software engineering i…

The tweet comes up every so often, but it has two problems: (1) Most of Google's engineers didn't even know Homebrew - it just wasn't something Google used on its notebooks. (2) There's no such thing as "inverting a binary tree." At least I haven't heard about it anywhere else. Maybe Google's interview process is broken, but the tweet isn't really explaining much. It's just a nice soundbite.

Reversing a binary tree is a real question that gets asked in interviews: https://leetcode.com/problems/invert-binary-tree/

It’s actually pretty easy if you’re comfortable with recursion and traversing trees. The tree questions Google asks in its interviews are usually much harder- it implies they were giving softball questions to him.

Re: Code Interviews

#92

Post by b20000 »

___luigi wrote: post #88
b20000 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never heard of that. I'm originally from the EU and in the country I'm from, employers cannot control what you do in your spare time, and do not automatically own what you do outside your day job. In the US that's much more complicated.

Ask your employer, most people don't know about it.

i’m self employed

Re: Code Interviews

#93

Post by b20000 »

blovescoffee wrote: post #83
b20000 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why spend 3 months full time studying when you can spend one month full time writing code for a product you can talk about in the interview?

Many companies will reject you unless you an also pass the coding interview and that will generally require studying.

good luck to them

Re: Code Interviews

#94

Post by b20000 »

bfung wrote: post #81
b20000 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that sounds like a takehome and should be paid for.

It’s possible to structure the question to fit 30-45min. It’ll be pretty clear what level and experience a person has in doing api’s. If the json response is already laid out, parsing json can be an independent task from the network call. The point of the interview is to see if the person can reasonably code it, it doesn’t have to be production grade.

DOING api’s, what does that mean?

leetcode interviews do not test if a person can reasonably code. they expect people to give a specific optimal solution to a specific question which you can only provide if you have solved the question before, in the way it is expected, within max 2-3 minutes. the process is broken.

the moment you ask a candidate to build something you could use in your codebase you should pay them.

Re: Code Interviews

#95

Post by b20000 »

DasIch wrote: post #86
b20000 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why is this voted down?

He’s obviously wrong. Most people have various interests and obligations. The number of people who after a day of work in software engineering go on to continue to do that in their free time instead of pursuing other interests is vanishingly small. Additionally you have people who also just can’t do this, even if they wanted to, due to other obligations. Obviously there are people who have a very narrow set of intere…

After my day in software engineering I cannot grind leetcode. Why is it OK to demand people grind leetcode and pass ridiculous circus interviews, but it's not OK to demand they show a personal project they worked on? Both our equally time consuming to pull off.

Re: Code Interviews

#96

Post by gcheong »

gallamine wrote: post #8
carlosrdrz wrote: post #5

Max Howell's tweet gets pasted on every article talking about code interviews as some kind of exemplification of the problem of whiteboard/algorithmic interviews. What some people might not know is that he reflected on that tweet two years later (3 years ago), in this Quora question: https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin... He even explains how he actually did well in the software engineering i…

“He actually did well” - how would he know that? He also wasn’t hired.

Perhaps he felt he knew it to the extent that the problems posed weren't completely foreign to him and he felt his solutions were reasonable which was possibly corroborated through either subtle bodily cues of the interviewers or direct verbal confirmation.

Re: Code Interviews

#97

Post by engmgrmgr »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #89
engmgrmgr wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, need to call BS for all the impressionable young readers. The job of ‘programmer’ takes on many shapes and sizes. Businesses evolve and are different from one another. You may be very successful in some clusters of business, but how representative is this, let alone your unique experience, to the rest of the industry? If you’ve never worked with anyone with “real” software training, why would I hire you into a…

You…um…do realize that I wasn’t giving advice to “impressionable young readers,” right? I was merely recounting my own personal experience, and, a bit more cautiously, opinions. I say “cautiously,” because I know that opinion is a different thing from fact, and I need to be careful to avoid presenting my opinions in a manner that frames them as “facts.” In another thread, I needed to do a mea culpa , where I did just…

You are taking a very active role in discourse in a public medium. This isn’t your personal blog, so you’re intentionally broadcasting your experiences to anyone and everyone.

Re: Code Interviews

#98

Post by ___luigi »

b20000 wrote: post #92
___luigi wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask your employer, most people don't know about it.

i’m self employed

> I never heard of that ...employers cannot control what you do in your spare time.

If you are self employed, you might not get the same contract. In our contracts, what has been discussed in the thread was clearly stated by our employer (I asked my colleagues about their older contracts as well).

Post reply on HN