Hacker News Reader

Comment by doktrin | Hacker News Reader

> Everything is in a flat structure, except when it comes to salary and responsibilities.

This part got a laugh out of me.

Otherwise, the analogy feels really stretched and at times feels straight up incorrect. For instance, I've never sat through a technical interview administered by non-technical staff. I've likewise never been quizzed on the history of computation.

I agree that the programming interview in the US can be overly algo-and-whiteboard happy, but I think this critique is unfair and possibly even outdated (my most recent round of interviews involved more live coding, and less whiteboarding, than when I last interviewed 4 years ago)

View on HN

I had a technical phone screen done by an HR several times, or at least it felt like it was a completely clueless person. Once I could tell exactly why, when after he asked me what is complexity of binary search and I replied "O(log)" he asked what base? (for non-technical people reading: logarithms of every real base produce exactly the same O() result being different only by a constant factor).

It's been a while since I took a math class, but it seems like the logarithmic base is key to understanding what kind of problem you have and the type of solution needed. Comp Sci naturally uses 2, biology and finance tend towards e, etc.

Base 2 problems tend to require clever recursion and dynamic programming to solve, while the natural logarithm often requires calculus.

But then again, I'm not a mathematician - just what I took away from a broad undergrad.

Sure, if you are actually evaluating logarithm the base is very important. However, as I said, an entity designated as "O(log)" is exactly the same for every base so selecting a specific base here makes zero sense. Likewise, O(n^c) is as same as O() of any polynomial of power c, if somebody is writing O(3n^2 + 5n + 366) instead of O(n^2) - you know they don't quite understand what are they doing.

I've definitely had phone screens where the interviewer was non-technical and asked technical questions they didn't understand, and were just looking for form answers they could tick off. Even from Big 5 companies. But in-person technical interviews were always with currently practicing engineers.

Yeah I wasn't taking phone screens into account. I'd edit my comment to clarify that I was thinking of in-person interviews, but the timeout has elapsed.

I think I disregarded HR screens because the questions (IME, at least) are often so trivial the experience of the interviewer doesn't really matter. There have been a few times when I've disagreed with a screeners pre-defined answer, but none of those cases resulted in a rejection or a halt to the interview process.

> > Everything is in a flat structure, except when it comes to salary and responsibilities. > This part got a laugh out of me.

I had to smile when one interviewer described his company to me as very process oriented, but without the overhead.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com