Comment by tracer4201 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tracer4201 | Hacker News Reader

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As someone who has interviewed and been rejected several times, I don't think cheating is why someone with good grades would do poorly at a coding interview.

Some people are good test takers on paper. Ask me to whiteboard some code, and I genuinely get stuck on trivial problems because whiteboarding coding questions is not what I am great at.

I've worked at Amazon and now I am at Google - after alot if stress, anxiety, and prep, I was able to get through and get hired. Microsoft outright rejected me.

One other thing - CS degrees don't teach people to code. They reach computer science. It just so happens that labs and assignments may require coding, but spending half a day or a day to do a project and getting an A has very little relationship with being forced to quickly hash out code in a 45 min interview.

IMO, at both companies I have been at, the majority of new hires are fresh grads. The barrier to entry whose been out of school is extremely high... but I digress.

> whiteboarding coding questions

Ah, you haven't figured out the trick. When somebody asks you to whiteboard something, write down all the nouns they said, draw boxes around each noun, and draw lines randomly between the boxes. Keep talking and pointing at the boxes and the lines, and then draw circles around some of the boxes (but keep talking - this is important). Point emphatically at some of the boxes, underline some of the words, and redraw some of the lines - bonus points if you can use different colored markers. As long as you keep talking, the interviewer will get bored, assume you drew something smart, and offer you a six figure salary.

You jest, but this is exactly the feeling I got when I was reading up on how to do better at system design questions: https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer

Wow, that's an amazing resource - thank you!

>As someone who has interviewed and been rejected several times, I don't think cheating is why someone with good grades would do poorly at a coding interview.

As someone who has interviewed and been a TA at a top school, I would not be so quick to dismiss - especially for a broader definition of cheating.

In the school I went to (and I've anecdotally heard this is common for many top schools): Most professors don't change their homework sets and often don't change their exams either. The place was loaded with students who would get the assignments from older students and just memorize. As a TA, I remember one student who consistently only got the answers correct for questions that came from previous semesters, and got all the more original questions wrong - even trivial ones.

He was an extreme case, but the sentiment was strong in the student population, and is just as another commenter out there described: People who got to top schools tend to optimize for GPA, and not for learning. Most of my fellow students would refuse to learn anything beyond what was needed to get an A.

I get what you're saying: Live coding is not for everyone. But I also get what the GP is saying.

Sometimes you just have to admit that if you're a 4.0 student at a top school you might have bigger opportunities than learning extra material for enrichment. You might not, but you also might. Imo

I agree. I did decently in my algorithms class - got an A, but I feel like my intuition is still lacking even though I have the pre-requisite knowledge. The class also wasn't inordinately tough like it would be at UWash/UT/UM/HYPSM, so its possible my fundamentals aren't as good as I would have hoped.

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