Faster Coding Interview Prep Using Interactive Visualizations
educative.io
educative.io
I tend to look for developers now that have a better sense of modeling and api design. One interview that works really well is modeling a chat app and going through all the edge cases. Also a fan of Rob's Pairing Interview that is executed by pivotal. Build an array or perhaps a set from scratch and pair on building it where the interviewer is a driver and the interviewee as the navigator.
With a large amount of experience, we as interviews, should be asking much more about past projects and issues people have run into. I find it much more valuable to understand what real world problems people have faced, and how they solved them. Sometimes you even get to a point where someone actually has a good story about using the wrong algorithm, and so you still get to talk about algorithms.
This tends to also tell you a lot about the candidate’s abilities to work in the environment you are thinking of placing them into. Algorithms questions should be a fallback only when you can’t discover this while running through questions about their experiences.
Good questions are going to be more than, build a linked list in JavaScript or a bubble sort. Those are pure algorithmic questions, but you still need to walk the walk not just talk the talk.
Doctors need a license, and even so, you still hear about people who are found out to be frauds years later.
If software development didn’t have technical interviews the field would be full of people who wouldn’t know anything about programming, but who would call themselves developers anyway.
That is what fizz buzz or basic algorithms are for. Because really,smooth talking incapable collegus do more harm then normal incapable ones.
For example, I recently had someone run through a distributed system's set of questions related to kafka and some AWS services. It became obvious through this questioning that what he had built was not capable of guaranteed message delivery, i.e. the system was lossy.
The rest of the interview was about this system and how he would rebuild it to make sure there were no messages lost between all the handoffs of the system. We got into many very detailed areas about persistence, atomicity, idempotentcy, etc.
It should not be a shoot the breeze conversation about buzz words, it should be a very detailed process of getting down to the most complicated piece of software someone has worked with. It becomes very clear, very quickly, if they are bullshitting you, and then you don't hire them.
Unfortunately I don't have a good solution to this problem.
I'm wondering how interviews in other professions look like. For example when you're a director of a hospital and want to hire a surgeon. I guess you don't ask him to come one day to make a little surgery for free.
Actually, there is. And it's quite simple, really:
"Thanks very much for your time, but I've gone through many, many rounds of questions like these, and have come to the conclusion that, while interesting and to some extent topically relevant, ultimately the ability to regurgitate answers to them on the spot has extremely low relevance to the work that one actually does as an engineer. And BTW I noticed your statement of the problem was not only very muddled, but English-wise, barely readable. And actually, as presented, the problem isn't actually tractable, math-wise. And like, you brought me in here to solve the knapsack problem on a quadrillion integers in 2K of space or whatever and yet, you couldn't even think to stock the whiteboard with fresh markers? Or clean it first, for heaven's sake? Really, what's up with that? And gee, isn't the vibe in here, like, really really starting to suck now, given that at one of the interviewers is starting to fumble with his phone already, indicating that he would clearly very greatly prefer to be somewhere else, doing just about anything else - like you know, actually productive - than what you've forced the poor sap to do for you right now?
"But we don't need to dwell on that. The point is that we have different perspectives on these things, which is of course perfectly fine. So if you don't mind, howabout we part ways and do something else with the rest of our respective afternoons?"
You have to do them.
Beyond tending to basic needs (shelter, clothing, food, etc) you don't "have to" do anything.
You may not get to work for those companies (and it is a great many, unfortunately) that have bought into the whiteboarding cult. And that may seem to kind of suck. But it's not like you "have to" work for those companies (as much as they would dearly, dearly like for you to implicitly and unquestioningly believe exactly that).
The truth of the matter is that, at the end of the day, some companies can afford to tell you no, even if you are talented, because they will get other people who want to do what you don't "have to" do. And it works quite well for them, as you can see.
You can look at it that way, if you want to.
My way of looking at is: "Are these people dealing with me in a way that makes me feel respected and valued, both as a potential colleague as a human being? And above all, trusted? Maybe in a 'trust-but-verify' sense, but fundamentally - trusted? If not, then who they are, what they're doing, how successful they are or how many people are supposedly all ga-ga to work for them -- none of that can begin to matter."
In the same vein: why are algorithms preferred over discussing data structures? Knowing a lot of data structures, when to use them and how to combine them is probably much more broadly applicable than knowing a lot of algorithms.
I've never seen a project that went off the rails because the people on it failed to understand algorithms or the proper time to use a deque but almost every project I'm handed to work on has a data normalization issue.
Alas the Google cargo culting will probably continue...
https://i.imgur.com/kE2ElEv.png
Switch it to auto and it will look a lot cleaner.
Otherwise cool site
If one can "crack" these interviews by spending a couple of hours on some interactive tool... then shouldn't that be an indication to those conducting these kinds of interviews that, fundamentally speaking, they might not be all that useful in the first place?
And not only that - but perhaps counterproductive? In that they explicitly reward not the thoughtful, disciplined engineers you want to hire -- but the drudges and go-getters who think, "Gots to get me into a top company - just tell me what I gotta do to pass the test!"
Shouldn't it now?
Doing well on CS puzzles is and probably still be required for a long time to come. More of a hazing ritual. What I think should be allowed is for the interviewee to pose the same kind of ridiculous question to the interviewer, if the interviewer fails, the candidate takes their job.
If I ever really needed another job, I guess I'd have to suck it up and refresh myself on that stuff. That's a shame.
I never got the point of it, but I see it as a ritual...
I routinely code tree traversals at my work, so my judgement may be clouded here, so I am genuinely curious here to know if most people here think that it is unreasonable to expect someone to code a BST from scratch.
In my opinion, BSTs are one of the easier things in programming, with a complexity that is maybe only a little above a for-loop. Most often, in real world, the more complex stuff happens in the business logic, or API contracts, or that sort of thing outside tree traversals.
I'm merely a junior level developer working on database engines. Most of my day-to-day involves maintenance of decades old code where the 'hard problems' have long been solved. I imagine my codebase ancestors might have needed thorough knowledge of trees at some point :)
Btw, engineers love algorithm & data structures questions because they're easy to judge and learn. Not because they're good at judging candidates.
Do you really think that we're going to just look for correctly memorized answers to rote shibboleth questions and then tell the hiring committee "sure, $CANDIDATE would be a great programmer!" ??
It has nothing to do with Rust, of course.