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Comment by tinderliker | Hacker News Reader

I am a SWE at Google, and yes, most Googlers are pretty good at solving whiteboard problems. It's not like we are born with those solutions in our heads, but we enjoy solving those questions especially with other people. It's a lot of fun to "explore" answers to these questions, and that's what I think interviews are all about.

I know HN hates whiteboard problems, but just like anything, you get good with it if you're having fun solving them.

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We don't hate whiteboard problems because they aren't fun. They're obviously fun for some people.

We hate them for interviews because they're a terrible signal for hiring, they're often poorly administered, they're humiliating, they discriminate against introverts, and they've become frustratingly common.

They unfairly mess with people's livelihoods. It is a really big, life-altering issue for some people.

And yet, nobody has a significantly better tool.

Yet, with such a terrible signalling tool for engineers billion dollar companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Uber with complex technical challenges were able to manage. /s

I also want to see how you guys solve these problems. People on youtube videos already know the answer. They just told you how to solve it. But I can't see how they approach to get the answer. I think that part is the most interesting and valuable part for non-talent like me.

Here's one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKu_SEDAykw&t=11s

>They just told you how to solve it. But I can't see how they approach to get the answer. I think that part is the most interesting and valuable part for non-talent like me.

I ran into this too when I was preparing for a loop, especially for more complicated DP and recursion problems.

I found a website called gorecursion [0] on Reddit and he is very good at describing these solutions from the naive case to the optimized case very well. This helped me quite a bit, but I still didn't get the offer.

[0]: http://www.gorecursion.com/

In my experience, you can't learn that skill by watching others. It is a practice, like playing chess, or writing Math proofs. So IMHO the only way is to train. Start with simple problems, and continue from there. Bang your head against problems for a few hours before looking up the solution. Over time, you will get better.

Disclaimer: I'm myself not very good at algorithmic puzzles. For a job application I took a vacation to train solving coding tasks, and was getting better every day. I got that job, but guess that for a Google application I'd rather have to train for 3 months.

How do I force myself to find them fun?

Maybe start with the easy, one gets the sense of accomplishment when solving a problem, building on from there.

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