Comment by thelastknowngod | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thelastknowngod | Hacker News Reader

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thelastknowngod

> I have a leetcode account but I can not force myself to solve puzzles in my free time after solving them all day long at work. And dare I say puzzles at work are more interesting, because they solve real people's problems.

The problems at work are also real, actual problems.

I have trouble with the coding section of the interviews but I do know how to write code. If the coding section of the interview was like "build me a ci pipeline for this app" or "find all the workloads in this cluster which need X attribute" or "design a terraform module to do Y" then I would pass with flying colors.

In the average SRE role, it has been my experience that there are very few situations where I would need to build out a perfect O(1) algorithm. Nothing I write is going to be so heavily used that this level of performance is something to be concerned with. These are the only code problems I really see when interviewing though.

> build out a perfect O(1) algorithm

In my experience, the algorithm-heavy interviews happen at large companies that use it as an extended IQ test to filter out people who don't perform well on mathy problems, psychologically or problem-solving wise. The argument is that with their influx of applicants, they can afford false negatives (a good programmer failing an algorithm quiz) more than false positives (a bad programmer passing a personality test).

I've had live-coding interviews where I consistently felt so dumb with flashbacks to my worst oral exams at uni.

And I've had live-coding interviews where I aced it so much it felt like improvising teaching material.

> The argument is that with their influx of applicants, they can afford false negatives (a good programmer failing an algorithm quiz) more than false positives (a bad programmer passing a personality test).

I don't understand this line of thinking, especially at the Big Tech companies. You're hired on a probationary basis, usually six months. If the candidate seems reasonable then hire them. It's sink or swim time.

> You're hired on a probationary basis, usually six months.

Where is that the case? I have never heard of such a practice, and I don't remember that being routinely done at either Microsoft or Google.

This is always the case in Denmark.

Well, that's certainly different from what I am used to! I suppose people in Denmark must not relocate for work very often? Hard to imagine uprooting one's household on a six-month gamble.

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