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Comment by devnull3 | Hacker News Reader

> fucking nightmare for no reason

Absolutely! To add, the amount of nit-picking that happens is staggering. I was downgraded from strong-hire to lean-hire because:

1. I did not use classes in Python. That problem could easily be solved using simple functions. The feedback I got was "candidate does not know idiomatic use of modules & classes"

2. I did not use one of python's standard lib functions and instead I coded it myself (I could not remember it at that instant)

3. I could not spot a scenario in the first 5-7 min of interview. I eventually spotted it and coded it well within the time limit.

Somehow I felt that I am supposed to feel grateful for lean-hire

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> 1. I did not use classes in Python. That problem could easily be solved using simple functions. The feedback I got was "candidate does not know idiomatic use of modules & classes"

Apparently they missed this classic HN discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3717715

> I could not spot a scenario in the first 5-7 min of interview.

This is endemic and part of a much wider malignancy in the tech interviews. Cram two medium-to-high difficulty questions in the span of 45 minutes and require the candidates to solve them both on the spot. In other words, you have at most 20 minutes to work out a complete solution to any given problem.

In practice that means that you need to come up with the correct base solution in the first 2-3 minutes, because there is no time to actually work through the problem.

I call these types of interviews Epiphany Lottery.

They’re IQ tests, it’s that simple.

They are memorization tests at best. At worst they test which candidates have been unemployed most recently so they can cram leetcode study.

> At worst they test which candidates have been unemployed most recently so they can cram leetcode study.

Or which ones are young and single with no responsibilities outside of work. Which is likely a feature, not a bug.

I mean that describes me. But if you don’t have the mental acuity and length of short term memory required to solve these problems…

> correct base solution in the first 2-3 minutes

Not only correct solution but also generate alternatives to showcase what other things you know to get strong-hire.

Example:

This problem was asked in Google: https://leetcode.com/problems/cat-and-mouse/

It is actually based on a paper [1]. Plus it seems it is expected that one needs to know about 'alpha-beta' pruning algos for such problems.

If you solve this using dfs ... its basically gtfo

[1] https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Undirected-Cat-and-Mou...

If they're IQ tests, then why does doing a whole bunch of leetcode questions make me better at it? Isn't IQ supposed to be relatively stable throughout one's lifetime?

I've done hundreds and I have gotten better, but only to a point. At some level it's not pattern recognition anymore, just inspiration. And I'm not smart enough for that.

This one, for instance is expected to be completed in 30 minutes. I spent 2 hours on it yesterday and failed most test cases. I'm a failure.

https://leetcode.com/problems/exam-room/

Do thousands then and get back to me. It's all patterns, this "inspiration", is just patterns, your just not seeing it yet.

Its true on some degree, that you need some intelligence, but I have a few close friends who are FAANG, they are definitely not the best developers I've ever worked with, only difference is they really really cared about getting into FAANG. Getting into FAANG was basically their life ambitions, so they dedicated literally all there spare time to it.

I dedicated a lot of my spare time to it in college (and after) too. What did I get for it? I make just $200k a year at the least impressive FAANG and literally everyone considers me to be a mental defective.

> The feedback I got was "candidate does not know idiomatic use of modules & classes"

Many googlers probably haven't read this blog-post from some time ago [1]: "Python Is Not Java". I mentioned that at my first interview for a Python programmer job ~15 years ago, i got hired (truth be told the interview was for a small-ish startup, not for a behemoth like Google).

[1] https://dirtsimple.org/2004/12/python-is-not-java.html

Did you choose Python or were you asked to use Python by the interviewer?

I chose Python because its faster to code

It's quite a common pattern these days: I often see candidates who choose a language because they think it's better suited for interviews, not because they know it well (we leave the choice of programming language to the candidate).

Sometimes this works well, sometimes it really backfires on them. Coding is one of key rubrics on which we assess software engineering candidates, and if the only signal I have is that they don't know know their chosen language very well, it's hard to justify scoring that rubric highly.

The root comment is saying the interviewee knows the language well enough to consider one solution better than another solution.

And this was misinterpreted by the interviewer as not knowing the language.

An effective interviewer would have asked "Why are you doing it this way?" instead of assuming - wrongly - it was all the candidate knew.

This actually matters. Before you even get to coding skill you want people who can parse reality accurately, and not make incorrect assumptions about what's happening in front of them - either out of narcissism and arrogance, or because of poor communication skills, or because they're following a set process which is bureaucratic and inflexible and operates with a poor signal to noise ratio. (Among other possible reasons.)

I really well versed with Python, Golang & Rust. I will not choose Rust for interviews. For me, Python is much more productive in an interview setting.

But I get what you are saying though.

I didn't mean to imply that this applied to your case. Just a general observation (rather frustrating for someone like me, who wants candidates to do well but not that infrequently sees them being let down by their own choices).

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