What sort of person do these exercises? Is it fresh college graduates?
What sort of person do these exercises? Is it fresh college graduates?
I also at the same time, interviewed with the fastest growing startup in the area, who had way better comp, slightly better benefits, etc. They asked me to do a take home homework assignment that would've taken like 20 hours, so they could see how I work.
I ghosted the second contact, and after another round of interviews, accepted with the first company, and I'm by far happier with my work and the respect given to my input at this job than any previous one I've had. I'm certain that wouldn't have been the case at the latter company.
I truly believe that once you are beyond the junior level, interviews really are a two way street, and you should jump with the utmost caution unless you already dislike where you are.
Knowing more about an entire system and architecting it requires a lot of variety of experience and it's just a more fun interview for everyone involved.
When I interview people, I also hope I'm assigned to conduct our architecture one because it really makes you learn a lot about an engineer.
They feel very much like the sort of thing you use in an environment where you've got way more qualified candidates than you have open positions, so you're optimising for screening people out. Certainly not a place I've ever been in over here, where the norm is to be desperately looking for even one qualified candidate.
I'm 11 years into the profession. Solving leetcode is somewhat different from the problems I solve at work, so I struggled at first and had to practice, and practice a lot. I have yet to find out how useful this is outside of job interviews, but my brain started to forget some topics from CS after doing so much web stuff and it was a good way to remember these and practice problem solving.
Also what constitutes an awesome GitHub? Because unless you run a project with > 100 stars it’s little more than academic and doesn’t matter.
At my current company I'll probably pay less than half as what you'd make at a "nice" company though, so maybe you won't interview with me anyway.
Thankfully, where I live, most companies don't really ask for hard-core algorithm questions - if they did, I would never get a job, as I really suck at these.
I was able to answer the question. Many did not, but the process was more about how you handled yourself through the process, how you communicated with the interviewer as you walked through the problem, than it was about reaching the actual solution. I know several people, bright people, that were hired there even though they never solved the puzzle.
After I got the proper solution, I asked the person that administered the quiz "Is this an indication of what kind of code gets written here?" He just started laughing and saying "no, no no". Because I would not take a job at any company that actually wrote code like that.
That interviewer ended up being my first manager, and we had a good work relationship. It was a great few years of my career.
I don't at all believe I magically got 10x better at coding though... just 10x better at recognizing and remembering patterns.
I think the best type of interview for everyone is the "walk me through X" type. You can almost always spot BS in those and if you can't... should you even be interviewing? I would 100% rather have someone that knows how to glue pieces together vs someone that is good at leetcode... don't get me wrong, I'm amazed at how awesome people are at it and I've met people who excel at both... but I feel its just too weighted in interviews.
It started with big tech companies, but I’ve also seen smaller or less prestigious companies doing that, too. There’s a whole small industry around the big tech interview preparation.
And it’s not only for fresh grads - a year ago I interviewed with some SV companies for senior positions (including EM) and I had to go through Leetcode interview as well