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Comment by kodah | Hacker News Reader

As someone who didn't go to school, I struggle with doing algorithms and implementing data structures in front of someone. Outside of timeboxed interviews I negotiate them fairly well, but I'm almost always seeing something for the first time. Then again, for as long as I've been in software it's always been tailored for academics. This seems to be just fine and even championed as a good thing.

My reaction is to plan my exit from the industry whenever this job comes to an end. I'll end up going back to school in my thirties, despite being qualified, because of self-imposed constraints by this industry that have little if anything to do with the tasks I'll be given or planning day to day.

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I think this can’t really be the reason for your going back to school. A few weeks of drilling of common data structures and algorithms would put you at parity with college grads. Could it be you just don’t like the industry and project that onto some kind of academic bias or something? Nothing wrong with not liking software development it is often awful.

It is, I plan on going back to school to be an EE when that times comes.

> A few weeks of drilling of common data structures and algorithms would put you at parity with college grads.

I don't know where one gets this kind of idea. I also stated fairly clearly that I have no trouble negotiating algorithms and data structures, the problem is when they're timeboxed and involve an interviewers participation.

I think my main objection is to even doing these kinds of interviews. When, in the world, would one need to write out binary search and would have only 30 minutes to do so? Knowing the properties of different algorithms and data structures is important, imo, but implementing them in a timeboxed manner with abstract problems seems like an odd activity to demonstrate qualification.

> Could it be you just don’t like the industry and project that onto some kind of academic bias or something?

Academic Bias may play less of a role than my perception makes it out to be, but I'd at least say it's significant in this industry. The way I think it gets in is subtle, catering questions and problems that one might find in an academic setting is one. My company also heavily hires interns, which again facilitates an academic bias in hiring, but there is no program for people who don't come from a prestigious university. The lingo used usually points to an academic background as well; I've learned "top talent" usually refers to prestigious companies (that primarily hire from academia) or prestigious universities.

So maybe you'll read this and appreciate it I hope.

I started getting back into electronics in the last 5 years, and have been really enjoying it. I think EE is maybe one of the hardest engineering fields, but can also be the most rewarding I think when you do something cool.

It's also wide ranging from RF to Electrical Grid to VLSI.

So good luck. I wish you well.

an important thing to note, everything in the typical interview programming assessment is covered in one DS/algo class students usually take their sophomore year.

If interviewing is your only worry, just get a single undergrad textbook on DS/algo. Interviews do not by any stretch cover the full academic breadth of a cs degree.

As someone who's also self taught and currently going through the drilling process... its pretty tough to actually pull in and retain on an encyclopedic level all the information one needs, especially on concepts used less frequently in any sort of day to day - especially when in a timeboxed environment with an interviewer watching and evaluating my every move. Think also on the amount of people who are years out of college who struggle with these problems, given that they haven't actually used them in many years.

An example of an extremely common question: “Write a function to check if a binary tree is a binary search tree.”

Yes you can memorize an answer here, and the implementation of a binary tree - I think most people just do that. Knowing the inns and outs of a binary tree is probably useful if you're writing a database, or a compression format. If they're hiring someone with the capability to write a database, or compression format, this question makes plenty of sense. It also makes sense if your criteria for hiring is "did they study and understand an algorithms course?". It doesn't make much sense if they're looking for someone who can do the actual job, in my opinion.

> It doesn't make much sense if they're looking for someone who can do the actual job, in my opinion.

FAANG (& similar) have more applicants who can do the job than they have positions, so instead of checking for that and calling it a day, they filter for some combination of IQ and how bad you want it—willing to do a ton of otherwise-low-value prep work & practice, and to go through the painful interview process itself, likely several times at different companies, even for successful candidates.

The reputation of their interviews also means they likely don't get a ton of candidates who can't do the job. So they could likely just start randomly selecting from their candidate pool and do damn near as well as they do with all the interview effort—except as soon as that become known, they wouldn't be able to do that anymore. Plus they'd lose the hazing factor, which likely helps build company in-group identity. Having a lot of your employees feel like they only have their job because the finally got "lucky" in an interview may also help with retention, especially when everyone else who pays as much interviews in similar ways.

In a sense, being a huge, unpleasant waste of time is the whole point of their interview processes.

This is the first time I've seen the reasoning behind the interview process they use explained in a way that makes sense. Thanks.

> Yes you can memorize an answer here, and the implementation of a binary tree - I think most people just do that.

If you are talking about a self-balancing binary search tree, then, yeah, most people will have to memorize the implementation, as it would take much more than an hour to implement correctly. But if you are talking about plan binary trees, most good engineers will be able to write a simple enough implementation for the interview in a couple of minutes. And it won't be from memory, it will come from _understanding_ of how the binary tree is structured. The beauty here is that there is no need to memorize the implementation, as it is much easier to remember the definition of a tree and then write an implementation based on that.

Sure, and yes I can do that, but you are also judged in comparison to people who just graduated and used them in theory classes all the time, or who are demons on hackerrank etc.

> I think this can’t really be the reason for your going back to school.

What precisely makes you're more expert at the OP's experience then the OP?

As a fellow college dropout who had the same insecurities and actually went back to college in his thirties (part-time) to study exactly this... all that knowledge still doesn't prepare you for time-boxed stressful leet code interviews.

The people you are competing with study leet code for 3 months and get really good at solving coding puzzles within 45 minutes. Study the basic data structures (nothing fancy needed beyond binary trees) and solve leet code an hour a day for 3 months. That's all you need to do.

> The people you are competing with study leet code for 3 months

You can keep competing with the B and C players if you want but don't give that advice to others.

What would you recommend A players should do?

A players have a deep understanding of the topics so that very little or no memorization of solutions and techniques is necessary. (Practice, in this case, is a form of memorization.)

That's a shame. Most software development jobs don't actually require a degree and getting a degree is no guarantee that you'll be able to solve the whiteboard questions.

There are many employers (such as mine,) which do not use these theoretical questions, and instead focus questions on prior project work. That said, many of the high-prestige employers (and their former employees) do use the tests you're talking about, largely because they see themselves as exclusive. If you're aiming for one of those prestige employers, you should be aware that they're also exclusive about which schools they recruit from.

Or you can ignore employers who interview like that and keep searching until you find one that doesn’t. A lot of people do this for the same reason you outlined.

I gave up on software interviews. Everyone wants to follow what FB and Google do to 'find the best people'. In my experience, 'keep searching until you find one' is bad advice.

Can't tell you how many companies I interviewed with that simply take their entire process from others. We interview like X, we group teams/squads like Y, we do our agile process like Z. I don't want to work for your wannabe something else organization, get a clue.

> In my experience, 'keep searching until you find one' is bad advice.

This advice worked for me and several of my long term colleagues across decades of career experience. We’re all introverts so this is a big deal for us.

I suspect you are giving up too easily.

> across decades of career experience

Modern whiteboard interviews are not decades old. I never had any issue until the last 5 years or so. Tech interviews are testing for presentation skills and brainstorming skills, and placing a lot of weight on those alone. If that is what the job is like then I don't want it.

If your idea of best practices is copying (as best you can) someone else then I'm not a good fit for your company. In my view, its your loss and not mine - you missed an opportunity because you are not creative enough to see any other workable process.

I passed the last crap whiteboard interview I went to, even the question that no one else had gotten right previously (so they say). Didn't get the job, over-qualified - they wanted someone cheaper really. It is not about giving up too soon, its about doing something I dislike, and that has nothing to do with the day-to-day work, over-and-over.

A degree to learn data structures and algorithms would be a massive waste. I think I had 2 classes that focused on them

But didn't you have classes where some subset popped up again and again?

That's why I still encourage people to pursue a Bachelors degree over bootcamp if they have minimal programming experience prior to going to school. If I'd taken only the "intro to ds" and only "intro to algos" courses to get my degree I would've been poorly equipped to start my first job, since that was the first time I'd seen those concepts.

I think the idea of the algorithm interview is to see if you were awake in class while getting the degree and whether you can think on your feet. For other classes it's more difficult to come up with questions that aim for the same.

What algorithms courses are we even talking about? I dropped out after sophomore year but I still took data structures and algorithms, and a lot of the stuff I see people mention getting quizzed on at Google (I saw convex hulls in another thread on here) is 400-level, elective courses in these topics. The last object we studied in DS&A was graphs and graph algorithms, which I can handle just fine.

The ones you take before dropping out and starting a job, obviously.

Can’t tell if you’re being facetious or not but my point was that not even every CS major would have taken this course (and learned about these structures) by the time they had finished, so it doesn’t quite seem reasonable to expect it as core knowledge for CS graduates, unless you want to select for graduating from a particular school.

Art school graduate here, and my only advice is to broaden your sights and keep trying (if you want to). I've interviewed with FAANG too many times to count and every time it's crashed and burned on the comp-sci quizzes. Fuck em, keep looking. You'll eventually find a team that doesn't demand solving riddles that aren't applicable to your day-to-day CRUD. Take these jobs and you'll quite possibly learn the skillsets, or meet enough people, to get into the Big Co's without the riddles. It worked for me.

I feel like I have PTSD from Google and Amazon interviews early in my career.

My enter CS degree had one course on data structures and it didn't make me expert at white boarding ... Doing 40 mock interviews helped me

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