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That baffles me as well. I made another comment in this thread [1], but what really dwells on my mind is: do companies that interview like Facebook really believe that my day-to-day as a programmer has so little to do with the work I would do if were to work at their company?

I'm particularly curious as someone who only did a bit of CS in school and became a full time programmer from work I did as a hobbyist.

And if the answer is "yes, your work has nothing to do with the kind of work we do at Facebook, Google, etc." it's not so much that I'm appalled but actually even more curious about the jobs at those companies than I am now.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5623861

Another reason I am not fond of this- it is easily hackable. I know some pretty average people who prepared for months, went through all questions they could find online, ignored their day jobs and cleared the interviews, while some really talented people could not.

Funny that this got brought on the Facebook thread. Though I never applied at FB, I have 'mentored' two people who made it through the process. Mentoring as in, helped them make sense (and see the general pattern) of the solutions which they saw online but could not appreciate/ understand on their own. Though I guess they had lesser trouble regurgitating the solutions in the interviews.

I think that raises another question. You assume that they don't want the process to be hackable, what if they just want someone to see the patterns in those solutions because they believe those patterns arise in the work they will be doing at Facebook?

Though I doubt that, it might be true that being good in algorithmic puzzle-solving (as opposed to real-world algorithmic research/ development) helps employees in their day-to-day work. And I do think they maybe missing some real gems because of it.

But in my opinion, they just need an easily definable and quantifiable process. And they are happy to look the other way when they see covert cheating/ hacking as long as it clears the process. And there is no denying that there is still a decent ability threshold which most covert cheating people too will pass, which I guess suffices the corp needs.

I am a far bigger fan of pair programming after a basic phone screen, but large companies just can't do that.

Its very easy to game the interview at big web companies. I mean even if they ask all these text book academia related questions- Algo/DS ones etc.

I remember once there was a question on Quora about an IIT BTech guy who had offers from all major web companies. Some one asked him how he did it. And his advice was that you had to simply 'practice'. Simply go out on the internet check for good interview forums work on it an hour every day. Even if you are actually a worthless programmer on the ground. You can pretty much ace any interview with simply practice.

This also reminds of my Math classes in pre-university college here in India. I would generally try to solve a problem in more than one way and show it to my lecturer. One day she scolded me badly, that my experiments might end up in me scoring less marks. Her point was the evaluators were used to seeing a certain pattern of answers over years. And if the student had a new innovative answer, they would simply mark it wrong because it didn't their 'one true' answer, even if the solution was more elegant and better than the common pattern. Therefore the only way of scoring high marks was to practice all the common patterns.

Rote learning works at all levels.

I remember some days back I watched a interview of RMS on youtube, and he was asked a question on how you could be a good programmer and what books you had to read. And he gave a straight reply- You had to simply work on some hard real world problems/projects and bring them to closure. That was his advice.

Too bad these days we check people on everything apart from their actual work.

Agree on all points.

Interesting that you brought IIT up. Though I barely cleared IIT JEE and did not attend it for I could not get CS at any of the good schools, I had the feeling that it was becoming more and more hackable with the proliferation of coaching institutes. When I was in a top 5 PhD program which attracts the best of IIT K/B/M guys the quality drop became more evident over the years. There were and are still very bright IITians at my school, but I saw more noise coming in at later years.

And for those who are not aware- there are cram shops in India which 'train' you to clear Google/ Microsoft interviews. And this has been going for at least 6 years, if not more. Now from talking to my friends in India I get the impression that the superficial interview difficulty is higher in India than the Bay Area for similar companies. And that is despite the work quality being much higher in Silicon Valley.

It's all very funny and ironic.

>>there are cram shops in India which 'train' you to clear Google/ Microsoft interviews.

This is so true, that I can't even find ways how to assert it more.

As a fresher, I attended a off campus interview here in Bangalore(Those who don't know- these are generally mass hiring drives, where hundreds/thousands get hired) where I happened to talk to a guy between written test sessions who even had taken very elaborate 'class notes' on clearing these interviews. He had gone through something like a 3 months coaching class just to attend these interviews. There are standard coaching materials, which are updated pretty frequently. Pretty much anything that they can ask you in these interviews will be covered. They have made you hard practice it so much it will be cake walk to you make it through.

>>And this has been going for at least 6 years

I can assure this has been going on for a very long time now.

>>It's all very funny and ironic.

Its all about the volumes. A recruiter told me, if a resumes falls down during a mass hiring drive they don't even bother to pick it up. We live in an era where recruiters search monster.com based on some keywords and pick up candidates based on that. So we are now down to SEO optimization for resumes. And then coaching classes to game the interviews.

As a side note, in all major IT services companies in India you have to take 'certification exams' for pay hikes and promotions. I've seen people drop everything they do and practice clearing these for months. The worst part is you have to 'memorize' the whole material. Later I would see those people go on to get promotions and hikes, while the actual who go the work done fail(due to lack of time to practice) in the certification exams.

>> where I happened to talk to a guy between written test sessions who even had taken very elaborate 'class notes' on clearing these interviews.

Pretty sure there would be coaching classes to get into coaching classes with higher hit rates of finally clearing the interviews. It's that broken.

Whenever people talk about the madness of India's youth, I can't help not quoting Soumen:

"It's hard to overstress the liability of a nation of a billion people out of which 700 million are functionally illiterate and the rest have no wish to follow instructions, even when they are asking for a favor."

http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/soumen/APKGKAH/illiterate/Applicat...

>> As a side note, in all major IT services companies in India you have to take 'certification exams' for pay hikes and promotions.

Hope you are fortunate enough to be not working for such places anymore.

Broken? It sounds exactly how optimization systems work :-)

Care to put the quora link to see what the guy said and not a possibly altered version?

Have a to create a new login to search. Forgot the old one. Don't have enough patience to go all over it again.

From the post: "Good coding problems are fractal in nature. They can be extended arbitrarily to gauge the depth of your knowledge. For example, you might be asked to solve a problem any way you want. Then you'll be asked to solve it again in constant space or sub-linear time."

You could prepare for months but if you don't understand the core CS concepts then it's difficult to hack these kinds of interview problems. Having a solution is one thing, but coming up with 3 different solutions to the same problem based on various constraints (preprocessing, space/time constraints) requires understanding.

If they "hacked" this, then thru likely understand the concepts well enough such that its sufficient for the job.

Also, interviewers should ask if they interviewee has seen the coding problem before and come prepared with a backup. Interviewers are also looking to see if the interviewee derives the answer too easily. Usually scraping the surface reveals whether the person really knows what they're talking about or not.

I don't disagree with anything you say. As I mentioned earlier that all people who hack such interviews do have basic understanding/skills requisite for the corp, quite enough to play the gymnastics of the interviews.

A good interviewer does try to gauge whether the answer was known to the interviewee. But I have seen that happen far more at hot startups than big companies- primarily because of their more stringent process which leaves less wiggle room for guess work and is more tuned towards concretely judged parameters.

I just don't like the facade of 'hiring the smartest people' in the world, when their mechanism largely filters just well-trained average people.

And I most certainly don't want to sound condescending, so I apologize before-hand. But I probably used a different definition of average than what you or most people here may have in mind. I know quite a few ACM ICPC world finalists, am a region finalist myself, and have conducted/ published CS research with reasonable impact. So I was simply using my PhD program peers as good, and people with lesser (proven) skills as average. My fault, but I hope you can see what I was trying to say.

Well trained average people are good enough to do great things. That is a feature, not a bug.

I see your point and do feel the same way. The problem (industry-wide) is that the process only allows for a glimpse of a candidate. Even if you're interviewing all day, you're probably only talking to each interviewer for 1 hr (or less) and evaluating many different aspects of them (technical, personality, motivation, etc). And this is supposed to speak for your whole career.

I do think there are false negatives through this process but that's the trade off, I believe, for efficiency. Considering how time consuming interviews are (for the interviewer), there has to be some ways of reducing the wheat from the chaff.

After all, many use a university degree (from a prestigious university) as an initial filter. However, I'm sure there are many talented people who don't have degrees. But when looking at the probabilities, your chances of finding a great candidate are significantly higher if you filtered on that degree.

Why couldn't talented people also game the interview?

Why would they bother to? Is there a shortage of opportunities for talented people to apply their effort instead of cramming an interview?

I made another comment on this thread [1]. I wish instead of having to prep for interviews like this, I could just present a portfolio of clean code I made myself (non-proprietary of course) or my github. Unfortunately most of the grads they're hiring have no serious code to show for themselves.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5623922

(Author of the post) Consider this: In any job you're going to do "normal" stuff the majority of the time. The other times, you have to pull out A-level work. It's not 24x7, but when the time comes you have to be able to do it, eg writing a parser for an obscure query language that will get executed $X billion times per day, so it better be small, correct, and fast.

We ask people to prep because we want to know if you can do that level of work.

Thanks. That kind of answer is what I'm most curious about. What exactly is the A-level work that is not "normal stuff" that you want your candidates to be prepared for.

It reads like a category error to me. My experience is that the coming times that require A-level work from memory are emergencies and the "$X billion times a day query parser" ones are not, allowing more iteration and collaboration.

You may be right, but all I know is my own experience. The query parser example is real; I had to do something like that recently in order to more deeply analyze some performance bugs.

The process you describe in the essay is portrayed as one of policy and iterated improvement at Facebook, oriented around "How We Do It," with your GP example meant as support for that process as relates to "prep mode" approaches to interviewing at FB. It sounds like you're backing away from that, though.

Was your query parser work done under the pressure and constraints of an interview environment? Would you have been able to write that parser in the same form at a white board during your actual interview?

Well, that sounds just weird. Either you expect the people being interviewed as part of their prep to learn and remember forever everything they ever may need at Facebook and that could possibly be asked in the interview, or your argument doesn't make sense. If I hadn't any contact with parsers/compilers for a while I will need to look stuff up. When you have no frame of reference in my process when getting the information necessary to solve the problem - how can that possibly be a good indicator of me being able to solve an unforeseen problem? If there is a known solution and I already have the exact algorithm, the hard part is over and it's only about writing code. Which is exactly what people seem to complain here: The skill to reproduce a known algorithm is at best the lowest possible bar.

I agree that most of the work that needs to be done in this industry could be done by a well-trained monkey. And there are plenty of well-trained monkeys doing said work. But you really want more competent people doing it because you never know when you'll randomly encounter something that needs more ability than just cutting and pasting within a known template.

As an example of why, consider this famous Brian Kernighan quote, Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it? I've certainly been in the situation where the website is crashing, nobody knows why, but we need it fixed immediately. And solving the problem under pressure like that is twice as hard as debugging it normally.

When things go pear shaped, you really want someone available to debug it who is both competent, and familiar with the code in question. This is easy if the person who wrote the code is competent. But if the person who wrote the code is not amazingly competent, you may be stuck with your choice of competent people who don't know the code, and incompetent people who do know the code. Neither of whom is in a good position to fix the problem.

This is hopefully not a situation that comes up very often. It is not something most of us get a lot of practice for. And we put a lot of effort into avoiding a pants on fire situation. But ideally you want all of your programmers to be able to think at this level. (Even if they mostly demonstrate it by avoiding problems in the first place.)

> really bothers me about these postings is the advice that you should 'prep'

Advice to prep bothers you? Wow! I thought it went without saying that any endeavor of import benefits from prep.

If you don't care enough to skip a couple of episodes of Mad Men and warm up your brain before you come in, you aren't interested in working here.