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Comment by bostik | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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