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Comment by capocannoniere | Hacker News Reader

> What this means is that top-tier students are achieving the same results as those in no-name schools

This is an misleading conclusion that ignores a HUGE selection bias. I doubt top MIT CS students, for example, would feel the need to practice coding interviews on interviewing.io

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We have a bunch of MIT students. The sad truth is that everyone is scared of technical interviews.

I went to MIT and knew a good number of people who were confident in technical interviews. The problems in interviews were much easier than what I got in class, or even CTY CS classes in middle school.

While there's definitely good people at non-elite universities, selection bias is at play here too.

For example, in the senior year case, you're just looking at people who were concerned enough about interviews to go to interviewing.io during their senior year. Most people I knew at MIT had a full time offer they were happy with from their Junior year internship by their senior year.

You can actually see the impact of this in your graphs too, notice that the % of people with a 1 or a 2 in elite schools increases for senior year vs junior year. People who have been doing well in technical interviews and have good return offers won't spend as much time preparing.

>CTY CS classes in middle school.

The hell? What sort of problems are you getting?

Were you doing edit distance and word break and shortest palindrome in middle school?

Was a long time ago so I don't remember them all, but some examples I do remember:

* Print pascal's triangle up to the n-th level, with proper spacing (so that it looks like a triangle).

* Make the game Go for 2 players. I got a sub problem of this during my Google interview (determine whether a piece is captured).

When interviewing in tech jobs I had : - build an asynchronous communication queue from scratch (which implies building semaphores) - optimize the drawing of a sphere on a screen

the rest was more regular (I didn't apply to super elite jobs, and both the companies with these two hard tests failed, so it's no indication neither about them, neither about me)

> - build an asynchronous communication queue from scratch (which implies building semaphores)

How long were these interviews? Seems like something I could do in a few days not a 2-hour interview!

It lasted two hours. Now the way it worked was that I was doing on my own but I had to constantly explain to a "peer" my line of reasoning. So I was not alone in front of a white paper :-) This was an extremely interesting wy to interview. I felt I had the opportunity to demonstrate my skills on a difficult problem (which I didn't solve). I didn't remember the details of Dijkstra's algorithm but I had the opportunity to show that I can approach a complex problem in a logical and efficient way (well, that day, that kind of problem; don't ask me to work on helicoidal tomography :-))

That says (nearly) nothing about the representativeness/randomness of the sample you got.

And, please, when showing graphs for comparison purposes: make the Y axis scale identical, or the results are quite visually misleading.

I would not have noticed that one chart in each set of 4 has a different scale, so things that are the same height aren't actually the same number. It certainly looks nice and tidy but it is indeed misleading.

>I doubt top MIT CS students, for example, would feel the need to practice coding interviews on interviewing.io

If anything, those students would be the ones working the hardest to study for their tech interviews.

But not necessarily on interviewing.io.

I am not from MIT, but instead a top university in China. I was accepted into Google last year, and I never even heard of interviewing.io before.

So? Ignoring that this is a single datapoint, it could be that interviewing.io is relatively unheard of across the board (which would say nothing about the relative frequency of top-tier vs. not-top-tier students using it), or less heard of outside the US.

You are right about it. And the logical conclusion is that we can conclude nearly nothing from their data.

You bring up an interesting point about selection bias. Did you consider the other angle that top-tier students at no-name schools overrepresent the data from those schools? As in, low-teir students, regardless of school, are unlikely to practice.

> I doubt top MIT CS students, for example, would feel the need to practice coding interviews on interviewing.io

What brings you to this conclusion?

I also want an answer to this. Being a top CS student at a top CS school does not mean that you are naturally good at technical interviews.

I'm not saying technical interviews are good or bad. I just think it's a different skill from what a student generally learns.

Thanks for making this point.

Indeed. Being an MIT dad, I know a few course 6 undergrads. Bright kids get social axiety, too. And can brain-freeze at inappropriate times. And may be better in a quiet, thoughtful problem-solving mode than the kind of TV quiz show that modern interviewing has become.

I just don't get the modern interview process. Why are we looking for lint in human form? I'd rather see someone sketch some psuedo-code for an interesting problem with several acceptable solutions.

I think I learn more by asking a fuzzy, underspecified problem question and seeing what clarifying questions I get back. I want to know if the person can wring a spec out of a customer - coding it up with all the semicolons in the right place is the easy part.

In antoher comment on this discussion :

>> Most people I knew at MIT had a full time offer they were happy with from their Junior year internship by their senior year.

This leads me to think that top-universities student are already "chosen/watched" by companies before the recruitment phase so both companies and student are much more confident they can work together.

So basically, top companies just recruit people the best way : by looking at students while they are still student. Which is fine, except the top universities are, I guess, the most expensive ones. But if that is true too, then that's another bias : companies have rich employees, so they hire people with the same set of personal values...

> Being a top CS student at a top CS school does not mean that you are naturally good at technical interviews.

Not necessarily, of course, but it'd be pretty surprising if it didn't trend in that direction.

Admittedly, this is a bit of an exaggerated conclusion. It is definitely possible that some subset of top CS MIT students would get anxious about coding interviews and would go to interviewing.io to hone their skills.

However, the following types of top students are significantly less likely to practice on interviewing.io, for example:

- Seniors who have already done internships at top companies (Google, FB, Stripe, etc)

- People who excelled at programming contests and generally enjoy algorithmic challenges: IOI, TopCoder, Project Euler, etc.

- People who have built awesome open-source projects that got significant recognition. For example, Feross Aboukhadijeh was a Stanford student who built Youtube Instant and immediately received an internship offer from Youtube founder Chad Hurley [1]. I doubt people like him would need to practice on interviewing.io

- In general, students who are regarded as top n% of MIT/Stanford/CMU CS are inundated with recruiting pitches (I speak from experience as a CS graduate from one of these universities. Most of us constantly received an overwhelming number of e-mails from recruiters, many of them offering to get us to get fast-tracked in the interview process).

Granted, not every top CS student at MIT/Stanford/CMU has done competitive programming or built really cool stuff that's widely recognized. But a significant percentage of the top n% of students do have this kind of background (admittedly, this is somewhat of a circular definition of "top" student). That's what I mean by selection bias.

[1] https://feross.org/youtube-instant-media-frenzy/

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