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Software engineering interview questions

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Re: Software engineering interview questions

#91

Post by general_failure »

Kurtz79 wrote: post #50
sfbushstreet wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how companies like google, facebook, and linkedin interview candidates. It's not effective, but it's the common practice

It's not very effective, but I don't think it's that bad. In the end as a developer your job is to solve problems, and getting hired is simply another problem (solving which has self-evident benefits, so you shouldn't lack motivation). It's not like the hiring process for technical jobs is shrouded in mystery: there are tons of resources on the internet about it. You know what kind of questions will be asked, you kno…

Solving world peace and curing cancer are also problems. I don't think engineers are best suited to solve them.

Re: Software engineering interview questions

#92

Post by general_failure »

MaxScheiber wrote: post #88
altpaddle wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok but the question is why are some of these questions even considered the 'base' level of knowledge for interviews? At least on the front end side we still ask about these algorithms even though binary search trees and Djikstra's have almost no application in our work. The reason for these questions being considered 'fundamental' seems totally contrived, and that's that everyone studied them in their CS program, not…

Graph traversal is quite relevant to DOM manipulation. More generally, these sorts of "classical" problems come up more than one would assume at first glance. I believe that understanding the theoretical backing is very important for making correct software design choices, at least at the positions I have held. Moreover, this base knowledge is a proxy for general awareness of complexity analysis and architectural tra…

If you wrote code that requires graph traversal in DOM, you are doing it wrong.

Re: Software engineering interview questions

#93

Post by general_failure »

These days I dont even bother with such interviews. I talk directly with people in power and skip all this bullshit. All positions like VP, director, manager roles have way more real influence compared to an engineer. None of thrse positions require you to answer these questiins and yet give more pay and influenve on the final product. Unlike an engineer who has to work from the bottom to drive change. Unless you are a colleve noob i would really ask you to reconsider your job position if these are the questiins you are answering. Talking of 90% of the software companies here. I do know real engineers do tremendous stuff.

Re: Software engineering interview questions

#94

Post by mathattack »

pmiller2 wrote: post #49
mathattack wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even a week or month is short. I've been in situations where it's tough to make a hiring decision based on 10 weeks of (paid) interaction, even when saying "No" means having only 4-5 interviews to decide on a "Yes" for someone else. This is why hiring people who we professionally interact with (referrals) is so important. And it's a handicap for people with weak networks or internal-only jobs.

How is it that a company could not be able to make a decision after 2+ months of a person actually working for them? If it's not a clear "no," we know that person hasn't managed to destroy the company and can at least get along well enough socially. If it's not a "yes" after that much time, that seems like a management failure. After all, 2 months should be more than enough time to produce enough code to tell whether…

It comes from "This person is good, but not great, and we only have one spot, so should we hold out for great?"

Re: Software engineering interview questions

#95

Post by vvoyer »

barrkel wrote: post #62
vvoyer wrote: post #60

I am not able to answer any of these easily and still get a lot of job done and job offers every day/two days. Interviewing for a frontend Facebook job is all about doing an Array.map/reduce no more. What matters is what you can do. Few engineers really need to learn and master "Binary Tree Level Order Traversal" every day after coffee.

I like to give slightly more difficult versions of these questions as take-home problems, rather than interview problems. Give them out after phone screen, but before in-person interview. And yes, something involving a binary tree order traversal would be the kind of thing that I'd be interested in. Because I want to work with programmers who can code, who at the very least know what recursion is and are able to empl…

Thanks for your reply. I understand that the programmers you are looking for are not typical programmers.

What I wanted to point out is that I was frequently impressed in my career by people capable of solving these problems easily and thought of myself a bad or less doable programmer.

While in reality there are a lot of different programmers out there and they will fit differently given the job they need to do.

Sometimes it will be a requirement to know all theses problems well, sometimes even if you know them well you will lack the needed experience to do the actual job.

I am a JavaScript (now you understand right? :D) developer working on frontend/backend websites and I can tell you most of the people I have worked with do not care about me knowing easily how to deal with a "binary tree order traversal"

Re: Software engineering interview questions

#96

Post by barrkel »

aercolino wrote: post #87
barrkel wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like to give slightly more difficult versions of these questions as take-home problems, rather than interview problems. Give them out after phone screen, but before in-person interview. And yes, something involving a binary tree order traversal would be the kind of thing that I'd be interested in. Because I want to work with programmers who can code, who at the very least know what recursion is and are able to empl…

For me it would be much more valuable if the programmer knew that a tree wouldn't be needed at all if expressions were represented in reverse Polish notation. However, in the last 30 years, I needed to process expressions at work and by myself exactly zero times.

Humans have to read these expressions and understand them for auditing purposes. RPN might be suitable to CS and mathematics geeks, but not everyone in banking has that background.

Re: Software engineering interview questions

#97

Post by collyw »

general_failure wrote: post #91
Kurtz79 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not very effective, but I don't think it's that bad. In the end as a developer your job is to solve problems, and getting hired is simply another problem (solving which has self-evident benefits, so you shouldn't lack motivation). It's not like the hiring process for technical jobs is shrouded in mystery: there are tons of resources on the internet about it. You know what kind of questions will be asked, you kno…

Solving world peace and curing cancer are also problems. I don't think engineers are best suited to solve them.

We leave world peace to politicians. I think engineers would probably do q better job.

Re: Software engineering interview questions

#98

Post by tn13 »

sheepmullet wrote: post #52
tn13 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many more better methods but eventually if a method is better it also means it is expensive. Hiring a paid intern would involve lot of legal crap + lot of time wasted on a person. Also number of interns we can have is super limited and we will need some sort of interview to select interns in first place. Asking tough questions in interview is not particularly bad because tough questions generally work welll…

"This strategy has worked well for Google, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon I dont see why it cant work for everyone else." The downside to the methods Google etc use is they have a huge number of false negatives. They reject tons of great engineers. This works out well when you constantly have thousands of great engineers applying to work for your company. It does not work well at all if you are a normal company.

Yes. This is true. That is why try recruiting in countries like India.
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