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Comment by deanCommie | Hacker News Reader

Nope, that's not how tech interview coding problems work at all.

They're not brain teasers, they are real life problems that can worked through iteratively, with some hints and guidance from the interviewer.

Source: Am one of those types of tech interviewers at one of those types of tech companies

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> They're not brain teasers, they are real life problems that can worked through iteratively, with some hints and guidance from the interviewer.

I spilled my tea from laughing. Yeah, just the other day I was asked a real life problem of finding out in which order I would burst some balloons for maximum monetary gain.

And you answered Ripple, Eth, Bitcoin?

For those downvoting this, replace "balloons" with "bubbles" in the parent comment to understand this great joke.

Except that is not how it ends up. Candidates who get/take hints are largely de-ranked over those who "solved 3 questions flawlessly without any inputs within an hour" as are those candidates who bring in an approach that the interviewers did not have in their mind.

Source: Am one of those types of tech interviewers at one of those types of tech companies and also part of the HC having reviewed thousands of interview feedback!

If you're doing only technical questions, you're doing it wrong.

Spend half the time on behavioural questions, and half on tech, and suddenly you'll find it easier to justify hiring a well rounded engineer who needed a couple of hints over an unblinking automaton who can solve questions flawlessly yet would struggle with any real-life ambiguity.

You are spot on. Most of these tech rounds are a mix of coding, behavioral and design rounds (even the lunch interview matters). But when judging on coding ability, I'd be cautious of rejecting candidates with real world experience but may not be able to afford a good month of dedicated leetcode practise.

Isn’t there a massive advantage if you have seen the question before though? I mean you just pretend like you haven’t and hit it out of the park.

This isn’t theoretical, I have done this before in a real interview and it did work.

Your lack of ethics would likely reveal itself in other ways during the hiring process.

What does ethics have to do with answering interview questions? If he knows the answer from seeing the question before, that means he's a perfect candidate for the job. Are you seriously suggesting he should sabotage himself and ask for a question he doesn't know? That's beyond absurd. Frankly, it's stupid bordering on insane. What it isn't is unethical. Should the interviewee also ask for different questions on his final course exams because he knows the answers to the ones on the test from studying? What insanity!

Lol

Sorry, but unless I'm working on an actual database, I'm unlikely to need to solve btree (index/sort/resort/invert) type problems. I do have a decent understanding in principle, but generally am using a database layer that someone else wrote for these types of things.

The problem is you are going to use the hints and guidance as an excuse to cover up your biases.

Guy who looks like a close friend? Yeah I had to give him a hint, but that’s ok. Guy who’s ugly and speaks with a stutter? I had to give that guy a hint, can’t belive he couldn’t figure it out on his own.

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