Hacker News Reader

Comment by santaclaus | Hacker News Reader

How uniform are tech interview questions, in others' experience? I've had questions all over the place, often entirely unrelated to the position at hand. A while back, interviewing for a gig at Microsoft on a server related position, I was asked questions about triangle rasterization algorithms and z-buffers, by an entirely unrelated group. What is the point of these off the wall questions, and how or should one even prepare for these sorts of things?

View on HN

It's always been pretty random for me. I've been asked puzzle questions, to come up with my own idea and implement in their codebase, had interviewers who couldn't answer questions about their own puzzles, and been given automated code tests with invalid test cases.

Tech companies conduct interviews like 5-year-olds play soccer - everyone chasing the same prize with the same myopic strategy. And it's not that it can't be done better, but that everyone is afraid to take any _risk_ in order to improve it (if we don't chase the ball, someone else will get it and we won't!). No matter how broken the current system gets, we muddle through somehow and chalk it up to necessity (how else would you find good engineers?). Then we try to forget the whole thing even happened until we end up looking for a job again.

As a junior CS student - I haven't heard about these before... Kind of scared - Should I know about these kind of advanced things before I get out of school? I'm not attending a particularly 'rigorous' university for CS

I wouldn't worry about it too much. You're expected to have some holes in your knowledge, especially as a fresh graduate. Be prepared to talk generally about different data structures, and it's good to know the big-O time complexity of the common operations/algorithms.

But the bottom line is that developers are in such high demand that you'll get a job somewhere. After you work there a couple of years, your experience will be worth more than your degree. (Though the degree is still valuable, if you learned the theory/concepts well)

I've already worked 2 years as a intern for a tech company (full stack programming, webmaster duties, etc), so I feel like I'm in a good place. I just want to get a good tech job in the Northwest US and as far as I understand it is competitive

Edit: Thanks for the response - I'm enjoying learning about data structures and advanced things with data structs

I wish that it were more like you've described here, but unfortunately, my experience is that the interviews will be very challenging, that you will need to know data structures very well, and that it really won't be enough to talk generally about these things. It might not even be enough to talk generally in a way that shows you understand how to use a data structure to solve a problem and sketch out a bit of code. It depends on the company, but to get an offer, you may need to write more or less accurate code at a whiteboard that solves a problem efficiently. Some minor syntax errors aren't a big deal, but overall, the code will need to be pretty tight and be close to working. Again, this is in my experience (I have interviewed at amazon and google, as well as smaller startups that seem to do the same thing).

I'd highly recommend "cracking the coding interview", and make sure you can handle even the moderate to difficult problems in about an hour at a whiteboard. Before you go to that, though, go back to your data structures and algorithms book and make sure you can do basic list, stack, queue, binary tree, hash, and binary operations. In other words, you should be able to build and print a linked list or binary search tree without much thought - if you can't do this, there's no way you'll be able to solve unanticipated whiteboard problems that use linked lists, trees, or other core data structures in a more elaborate way.

Your experience will be worth more than your degree, eventually, but you probably will still need to pass the technical interview/exams when you change jobs, even at more senior technical levels.

I'm not saying this is good, just saying this is how it is.

My experience in the midwest is much different. I know of a number of folks who were hired as developers with no coding/whiteboarding required.

That said, I would expect an interview at Google or Amazon to be tougher. Given their name recognition, they can afford to be choosy. The vast majority of companies cannot.

It seems rather ridiculous to ask graphics-programming questions of someone interviewing for a server side position. I don't think any kind of preparation would help you with that kind of questions.

I asked the recruiter I had been working with about it, and her response was along the lines of: 'We only hire engineers who are capable of tackling any problem faced by the company.' ...

So in other words they want that mystical 10x engineer

There is one kind of preparation: having graphics programming as a hobby, or failing that, an interest in everything under the sun and nonstop studying.

If you read an algorithms book, like Sedgwick's, you should be mostly set. Usually they're trying to figure out who actually understands how pointers, memory, and complexity work. (A lot of devs don't know basics at all, like binary search or even how to do am in place reversal of an array or something).

I wouldn't expect a very genre specific question (like graphics) unless they provided enough info that you could figure it out from first principles.

And sometimes they just wanna make sure you can think it through, even if you don't find the most optimal solution. A lot of devs simply give up with an "I don't know", without indicating that they have any ideas on how they'd figure it out.

Fairly random, though they generally break it into sections. Typically something to do with a high level overview of something, then digging into some finer details of it, then off to whiteboard some very unrelated code (fizz buzz, fibonacci terms, etc). Sometimes (not as often as I'd like) want to talk about my background and prior projects.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com