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Comment by spaceman_2020 | Hacker News Reader

spaceman_2020

It seems to me that the selection process favors Indian and Chinese engineers who are used to cramming for rigorous entrance exams to top universities.

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I think it just heavily favors new grads, who just spent a year+ studying algorithms. Those with full time jobs have to spend precious hours of free time remembering how to do these.

Well, this just sucks about these jobs interviews. I learned quite a bit during my last job and I'd be happy to show some of these to the interviewer, but instead I'm forced to answer questions that I know have nothing to do with what I'll be dealing with. It's always the same story, it's just exhausting.

Yeah, it's kinda ridiculous actually. It's like they don't even believe you were employed when they interview you.

so indian and chinese new grads ?

> I think it just heavily favors new grads, who just spent a year+ studying algorithms.

Year+ is a fair assessment. A proper Computer Science course(4 years!) is mostly about algorithms. Most of leetcode hard would qualify as warmup exercises for my class.

That was a while ago. Right now? My brain is chock full of architectural stuff, k8s, several programming languages, multiple cloud provider idiosyncrasies, etc etc. Can I do leetcode? Yeah sure. Can I do it during an interview? I've tried recently, bombed spectacularly.

I'll probably have to invest the time prepping properly because there's little choice these days. Like you said, it's using up our precious free time. I'd rather be, I don't know, writing some stuff in Rust so I can add that language to my toolbox.

I'm practicing leetcode right now and I'm also working on a side project in Rust. I confirm it's much more fun writing some stuff in Rust.

Please continue to give your honest feedback to employers. I don't do leetcode and I won't proceed with an employer that expects me to interview like that.

This isn't what new grads actually do. They're in the same boat you're in, algo classes have a lot of theory but LC is a different beast entirely

Having the theory fresh in mind is a big help though I think.

And also Eastern European or ex-USSR countries where highschool STEM curriculum is more difficult than in the west and participation in STEM competitions and olympiads is encouraged for kids.

We had to solve binary and hex division and multiplication on paper for exams and study Dijkstra's algoritm and binary tree traversal in highschool CS. Ugly stuff for a bunch of 16 year olds who just wanted to make Flash games. Really made me hate CS.

This was poked fun at in ex-YU: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmrJQaj8sIo&t=240s (sorry, no translation; tl;dr: CS without computers)

Eastern European here. From the mentioned I had binary division, but that was it.

I was solving leetcode-adjacent problems for the entire last year of high school in preparation for the final exam though.

> We had to solve binary and hex division and multiplication on paper for exams

This is not ... hard. It's the same logic as decimal multiplication/division on paper.

> study Dijkstra's algoritm and binary tree traversal in highschool CS

That's more like it!

>This is not ... hard. It's the same logic as decimal multiplication/division on paper.

Do you really think tests where you gotta solve several divisions and multiplications on paper in hex and binary with no aids under time pressure is approachable for every 11 year old who just starts to learn about CS?

It's good to learn and know how such operations are done, but those tests were the bane of my 11 year old childhood.

I wouldn't call 11 years old as "high school".

Nah, it's the whites who the hiring market favors.

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