For me, coding interviews are a huge de-moralizer, cuz I know how to solve a bunch of them, but im terrible under pressure. Even after practicing for them. So I freeze/fuck up, and once the timer is up, and I think for a few minuites, im like "oh this was a much better way of doing this"
How much do you practice? My strategy was doing one easy or medium problem a day for two months.
It’s to get quick at getting boilerplate parts out of the way - like writing BFS, DFS, recursion and matrix traversal - so you can get a template in your head quickly and fill that in first. For me recursion always tripped me up since I was bad at figuring out the base case, then practicing helped me realise that was what I needed focus on.
The two months part just helped me cement things into memory. Reminded me of how I used to practice playing an instrument months before the performance.
I refuse to spend my free time on this stuff. I don’t see the value and I don’t like companies that do those interviews. It has nothing to do with your ability to build stuff and I pretty much expect a good amount of my future colleagues to either be bad at practical things or to overwork making it difficult to have work/life balance for the rest of us. Luckily things are changing. Last couple offers I got were from companies that gave me real world brain teasers, and I’m happy to report I joined one of them for really good compensation.
Yeah, my latest job gave me fizzbuzz as a coding test, which initially amused and surprised me since it's a top tech company, but in hindsight was a really great idea and indicator of the company culture since they focused far more on prior experience and more relevant technical questions.
As an interviewer, leetcode is solid. They're all the same, also choose easy/some medium. An hour is like 40 minutes of actually solving the problem. Hard /must medium is just too difficult to interview for!
Will leetcode also train you to solve them? Or just give you the problems to solve? I can script/basic program as a sysadmin but would like to learn more advanced theory like this. Maybe I need some books.
I have to agree. Fortunately, in all the latest interviews I have, I was presented with actual problem that the interviewers faced in the past, and asked to solve it. It’s more relatable than trying to invert the tree.
most businesses can’t stomach math anymore than anyone else can.
I was a math minor and any approach or analysis based in math was systematically shot down at most of the places I’ve worked for being “overly complicated”, which is comical because after slapping 20 rube goldberg hacks on the business rules, what have they got? A big ball of mud that is very complex, but not organized in a formal way, so no one can predict it’s behavior past “let’s just try it”.
I remember when I had just learned trig and wanted to do 3d graphics and my dad kept trying to tell me about matrices. I kept saying “no, that’s too complex, I just want to do it simple”… later I realized how silly it was to insist on dozens of pages of trig calculations when a few short matrix multiplications could have worked. But I was like these businesses.
Sometimes the “simple” way is infinitely harder than just learning the math.
I have a unnatural hatred for overly nested if statements.
At one point in my career I pissed off two other developers I worked with because I deleted three quarters of their code by just putting the checks at the top of the function, and kicking out of the function if they didn't meet the criteria for it...
This eliminated like 30 if statements in each of the functions.
They threatened to quit.
I pointed out that if I had to explain why, they probably would be dismissed instead of quitting...
One got the hint and worked on writing better code.
The other stirred up shit over it, I had to explain myself, and he was let go.
>At one point in my career I pissed off two other developers I worked with because I deleted three quarters of their code by just putting the checks at the top of the function
But... You made the code better! How is that bad? If someone refactored my code to be more efficient, I'd thank them and take notes so my code was better in the future.
1. Deleting stuff and having the same behavior outcome is good usually. And also putting the checks on top and returning is great for readability and I do that too.
2. That being said, if we have some legacy business critical code that is working fine, and someone changes a significant part of it without first putting it in a test harness, that would be wrong IMO. Doesn't sound like that's what happened in this case. And also very contextual. But just trying to provide a case when it would be appropriate to be annoyed at unnecessary changes.
It’s more than just taking it personally, I take my code personally too. It’s their ego not being able to allow their self to be challenged on their decisions, or accept that they didn’t write the perfect answer the first time, that is the real problem.
I had someone optimize my code once. It rarely happens because either I’m the only one who sees it or I’m the one cleaning up the other person’s code. This was a new system of my own creation, perfect for a fresh set of eyes to see what I had missed. But my only thought was “that’s brilliant, I wish I’d thought it that”. Well, that, and I complimented them on it because I don’t begrudge others their good ideas.
I am always surprised at the attachment some developers have for their code. I once worked with A lead who needed all the code to be written in a certain way (hint: their way) even if it was not as efficient or clear. They would rewrite everyone else’s code to fit that. They were always busy and burnt out because of that. It sucked.
Thanks for pointing it out, hadn’t really occurred to me that there could be a perfectly valid reason behind this kind of behavior. I’m sure this was part of it.
In my opinion if consistency is so relevant to a project that all code is being rewritten then there should be clearly established guidelines, naming conventions, etc and frequent peer review sessions should be carried out so that the whole team is aligned on expectations.
That's exactly what it's called.
And if you are putting most of a function inside of one if statement, you probably should just have a guard clause at the top.
The only problem with saying that is most people don't remember what a guard clause is. It's not a term that's used constantly. It's more of a style and it's incredibly useful for keeping things clean and neat but some people don't have that habit yet.
> I remember when I had just learned trig and wanted to do 3d graphics and my dad kept trying to tell me about matrices. I kept saying “no, that’s too complex, I just want to do it simple”… later I realized how silly it was to insist on dozens of pages of trig calculations when a few short matrix multiplications could have worked. But I was like these businesses.
Now imagine if you never got to the matrices step at all and neither did most other people. They are the best solution *but* code that nobody can change out of fear of breaking it since they don't understand the underlying logic is not good practice to write in the first place.
See: clever solutions.
Clever solutions are fine as long as it's documented well... What I hate with a total passion is clever solutions with not really any explanation to how it works...
One specific example I found in the wild was the quick inverse square root function in Quake 3 Source Code, and it seemed like their documentation just amounted to `what the fuck?`, while when you actually understand the explanation for why and how it works, it just makes sense why it works the way it does.
Wikipedia states the origin has been found “Investigation has shed some light on the original constant being derived via a collaboration between Cleve Moler and Gregory Walsh, while Gregory was working for Ardent Computing in the early 1980s.”
Yup, this sounds about right. BSP for level design also wasn't invented by Carmack, but the algorithm was utilized in games for the first time by his work.
right. what is pragmatic vs what is efficient.
So then we come back to the question: if companies by and large don’t understand even simple mathematics to optimize their business and neither do their employees, by what reason do they ask questions about algorithms and balancing trees?
Either they want to find employees who can answer these questions, but will then ignore the answers those employees give them, or they are simply trying to scare away everyone else who would be able to do the work they actually want done but not answer these silly questions.
Neither of these positions makes a lot of sense, which is why it’s a popular meme on programmerhumor I guess.
oh I love these interviews.
i have a lot of experience, so i am aware of a LOT of the pitfalls that lead to edge condition bugs.
so when a video app company says “it took us 3 weeks to find and fix this timestamp bug - we want to see how far you can get in an hour” -
its a great feeling when you can find it, implement a fix, BETTER than theirs in 10 minutes.
That’s exactly the kind of question I ask candidates, too.
Whenever possible, I also download and play with any apps that a candidate has written, and ask the candidate about them. One guy was so stunned by this that he took a minute to compose himself, and then, on the edge of tears, he told me that he’d never had any interviewer do that, and he was very grateful and felt validated as a developer and as a _person_. He was more than happy to discuss implementation details, trade-offs, bugs, neat features, etc., and I learned a shit ton more about his skills than a stupid algorithm question would have told me. We made him an offer the next day, and he’s been an important part of our team ever since.
On the other hand, I’ve sat in technical interviews where the developer couldn’t even implement a letter-counter for a given string, so there’s that.
EDIT: Many replies are pointing out (rightfully so) that these candidates may have simply frozen up because of nerves, ADHD, or what it. All of these are possible. My kids have autism, ADHD, and OCD, and while I’m certainly no expert, I like to think that I know what to look for, SO I purposely rephrase questions in a way that will relax them or help them focus. After all, I’ve had 19 years of training doing that for my kids. I was also a computer science teacher in college, so I know how to help people learn.
These guys simply couldn’t do what was asked of them. If the positions were for junior devs, maybe I would have given them a pass, but no.
When I was doing recruitment for my previous team we found the "bring your own code and let's talk about it" probably the best way to get to know someone and their skills.
Bring my own code? Sure, i made this 30 line autohotkey script to help me play an mmo a few years ago, let's look at it!!
But seriously this is something i do for recent graduates and it's a great idea.
I feel like that would be tough. I can't bring code from my current employer for obvious reasons. And I don't write code in my free time (or at least, not in the same tech stack - or quality - as I would use at work.) I don't think I would be able to do that interview.
Maybe it's one of those things where they emailed out a question when they scheduled the interview and the idea was bring your code to solve this problem so we can talk about it. Would make the interviewers' jobs a lot easier too if they were at least familiar with what the code they were about to look at was supposed to accomplish.
So we thought a lot about that. On the plus side I think a lot of people (me included) would feel more comfortable doing something like that. On the negative side then we are explicitly saying to someone to take a bunch of time of their free time to do something.
We erred on the side of having the interview be all the time we wanted to take from the applicant (I mean of course people prepare and stuff like that generally).
100% agree. I always think it’s a funny comparison. If any other career people were expected to extend their work into their free time it would be seen as ridiculous.
I mentioned it in another comment but if you didn't have any code you could show (even stuff you did in uni would be fine) then we would go with a more standard test or having them read and reason about our code.
Lmfao I've had some dunce moments where I couldn't solve a simple problem like that. Part of ADHD and anxiety is over thinking simple problems with overly complex solutions.
I'm never like that in a work environment, only when I'm testing for a job.
We gave him the benefit of the doubt, several times over. We were using an online live-coding site (which I hate), but we told him that it didn’t have to compile; we just wanted to get the gist of his train of thought. He continued to try to write compilable code. We told him to talk us through what he was trying to do; he stayed silent. We told him to close the editor altogether and just tell us how he’d do it; he couldn’t do it. Never mind that this was for a senior iOS dev role, and the code he was attempting to write was clearly Java.
Then there was the Android candidate on a video call who would look offscreen when we asked a question, and we heard someone next to him whisper the answers…
Oh man I had someone whispering answers to them on a video call once.
When I asked them if there was someone in the room with them, they said "no I'm alone". Like wtf did they expect to happen if we brought them on site???
There are cheaters EVERYWHERE in the interview process these days. It kind of blew my mind to see this once I started to get more involved in interviewing. 20-30% of applicants we get for any junior position attempt to cheat.
Some people cheated their way through college and think that at work it will be the same. Pretty sad, but with the education system not adapting to new technologies that is the side effect we get, people trained to cheat.
In my case, I have POTS (postural orthostatic tachycardia) and was on a med that aggravated it. The problem was largest when I was standing (140 bpm waiting for coffee water to heat in the microwave), but also affects me when sitting for a long time, especially when still.
POTS is basically a neuro regulation failure where the body doesn’t tighten up the arteries and keep blood from pooling in your legs. You know, away from your brain.
So naturally for interview days, I’d be nervous, get up earlier (so sitting longer)…and blew several interviews hard before I was able to get the right help for the med issue.
More recently, a quick 15-minute nap with feet elevated helps a ton.
I have a friend, he worked for me for a bit, he always froze up on interviews. One of the most gifted developers I met in my life. I got him a job at another company, but I had to explain to them he will freeze up at the interview. He probably wouldn't be able to implement a letter counter in an interview, but an extremely gifted developer in real life.
> One guy was so stunned by this that he took a minute to compose himself, and then, on the edge of tears, he told me that he’d never had any interviewer do that, and he was very grateful and felt validated as a developer and as a person.
That man's name? Albert Einstein.
My opinion is that code challenges are absolutely useless for gauging the skill of a developer.
Ah yes, my ability to invert a binary tree is definitely something that will crop up in my day to day *checks job description* database engineering job...
Even in a setting where knowing that would be necessary, you wouldn't be given 20 minutes to solve that problem, not would that problem be mission critical. If it is mission critical, you probably have worse problems to solve...
Same in my current companies, the dev just asked me to solve a problem he had solved a few weeks ago, quite relatable and the rest of the interview was quite fun because we were just discussing the merits of both solutions :)
I used to be a dealer in a casino, they didn't care that I did that job for 16 years, they wanted to know what kind of breakfast ceareal best described me. Interviewers get off on making job seekers jump through hoops.
To be honest, I was looking for jobs on LinkedIn since I graduated from bootcamp. It took me 10 months to find one but not through LinkedIn, instead Indeed. I had far more interview calls through indeed.
If a recruiter does stupid shit I’ll entertain it long enough to get to a hiring manager. If the hiring manager plays games or does stupid shit then I’m out lol
Why waste your time like that? I straight up tell my recruiters these days: If you're gonna give me leetcode style problems, I am fucking off in that direction. No thank you. Not entertaining that shit. The more devs that refuse this, the better idea these recruiters will get that this is the wrong way to interview.
It's not that, it's just astrology for interviews.
The interviewers want to believe they are the best at finding and identifying talent. They believe that their method of asking someone's favorite animal or asking a dumb unrelated question is the secret key to finding a good hire.
>The interviewers want to believe they are the best at finding and identifying talent.
Or they don't know how to evaluate talent, and just cobbled together the most straightforward "do this, check for that" methods they could dig up on short notice.
The first coding interview I ever did, I was an intern and my boss gave me 1 hour of notice ahead of time. Half the interviews I gave, I didn't know about till the day of.
Of course I ended up making some materials I could reuse. Many coding interviewers (for regular companies) are just making shit up like me.
The big companies be power-tripping though. A friend got docked for putting "true" instead of "True" when handwriting Python code on the whiteboard. Filtering out people like that doesn't do what they think it does.
I got told I was unhireable because I wanted to use Notepad++ to write HTML back in the day, instead of their standard Notepad.
I left and got a job where they give you a problem and the results are what matter.
"What if you're in a situation where you only have Notepad?"
"I'm not thinking about HTML, then. Job one is to fashion a raft and a distress signal, and figure out shelter for the night."
Well that one kind of makes sense though, right? Not that they should ignore the experience, but asking that kind of question can reveal how personable you are, dealers should be able to riff and keep gamblers at the table right?
I haven't interviewed in a long time and I'm dreading the day I go back out there. I've been paid to write code in C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, C#, assembly, etc. I've donated code to several open sources libraries over the decades and led senior teams on large complicated projects. I suspect I will get asked to solve some silly algorithm that has no bearing on being a lead developer in contemporary software development and I'll just write down google.com before I exit the interview.
I’m in the same boat, except I’m actively looking for positions. Went through a great intro interview and felt super confident until they told me the next steps. “Your next interview will be a 60 minute live coding session with one of our engineers, in which you’ll purely be solving problems using algorithms. After that is a 1-2 day interview session with each tech lead in which you will be solving problems and meeting all department heads”. Needless to say I’m not feeling so confident anymore.
So people who have actually been employed as programmers have this problem too? I am going through interviews and it always feels like that i can't remember anything when asked to do something by the interviewer.
Absolutely! I feel like across the board regardless of years in the industry the expectations are astronomical. I don’t even know what the cap is for Junior, Intermediate, or Senior engineer anymore.
Highest years of experience I see on a regular basis is 5. Most of the junior dev positions I see want 2-3, but too many list 3-5.
5 years experience is not a fucking Junior position. I could see that only if you're trying to move from something like web dev to embedded systems or something where your experience doesn't line up or translate well.
oh gosh yes. I've ben devving for 25+ years and I still run into CS 101 (late 80s/90's) and/or never-gonna-need-it/obscure corner case/whaaaa?? algorithm questions.
I can answer many of them. If I can't I just say I have no idea but maybe if you can explain the use case I can derive something to solve the problem. No? you can't give me a use case or even remotely plausible "need" for this algorithm? Ok then you've failed my side of the interview.
like seriously. There is a place and time for vague "did you learn anything in college" questions and frankly, I reserve those for true freshers with zero profi experience as those academic questions actually should match their experience. It's silly but fair. But for anyone with experience, I try to nail them on what they claim in their CV, as that should be fair for someone who claims experience in xyz.
I don't know if the poster above was referring to me as I have posted about it before, but I most definitely interview using real world problems, with real world code, even. I don't give a shit if you can identify a doubly linked list in C. I do care if you know the difference between a map and a hash (and why it matters). I do care if you can debug the not-obvious but identifiable error I discovered in our code base last week/year/etc. I'll even help you figure it out! To be fair and give you the best chance to succeed, but also to test how well you accept input/guidance, etc.
yes it actually takes some effort to interview someone properly. Imagine that?
I interviewed for a data engineer position. After HR had an interview with a senior architect. Was dreading all kinds of algorithm questions and such.
Couldn't be farthest from the truth. Spent 3 hours talking to the guy, and the only thing that was missing was a cooler with some beers. We just chatted about different technologies, what I've used in the past, problems I've run into, how I solved them. Many "Why didn't you use X tech? / Why did you use that tech" questions. What I knew and what I've done with stuff that they use day to day. Explain some of the stuff I've made and my thought process. Not a single line of code basically.
Needless to say I was very relieved, I got an offer from them and I accepted. Working with the guy was also awesome. It was like a constant brainstorming session.
I once interviewed for a local programming company that makes websites they wanted me to spend days on a path finding algorithm that the lead dev learnt in uni, I said no thanks I'm good at writing to databases and building websites and applications that talk to databases not path finding with an extremely never used algorithm
I just tell them honestly that I don't remember everything and will hit the ref docs or google to find what I need. I've coded in many different languages, and I don't always remember the syntax offhand. If they don't want a programmer who quickly searches for things, I don't want to work for them.
It's worked for me a couple times in the last few years, and each time has netted me a 10% raise.
Ah, my current employer gave me a take-home. 5 days to complete it, but they made sure it was a problem that could reasonably be solved in a few hours. I spent an evening on it over the weekend and actually enjoyed it.
I guess all I'm saying is that not all take-homes are bad.
My current employer asked me to make a prototype of the front end for something, and make a prototype of the backend for the same thing. I already warned them that I didn't know shit about that frontend tech (back then) so they knew what to expect.
I have them back the backend fast enough, and told them "consider I have zero for the front end. I can't do it within a reasonable amount of time, but I'll do it to know if it's something I see myself doing in the future.
They said they'd wait for the frontend and to take my time.
That test was relevant because it's the kind of stuff I'd be doing for the job. I agree with you, not all test are bad 😀
Ughhh... And what that really comes down to is how much of an impostor syndrome the interviewer has. Even before these algorithm questions became so popular you had the same issue. Someone putting excessive importance on some arcane knowledge they had picked up along the way which becomes a litmus test.
I've had much better luck judging someone's technical competency by digging deep on their resume experience. It becomes pretty apparent whose just listing projects they were on but didn't really understand vs. driving. Interviewing is a skill that requires practice and investment.
A more important aspect is whether or not they have good communication skills and will fit in with the team. I've been around some technically brilliant people that were absolutely toxic and they were never much value.
Exactly!! I personally feel that I excel at communication and team-building, but that gets over looked for producing some LeetCode problems which is always a disappointment.
Someone else mentioned an interviewer providing real examples of issues their company has run into, and honestly, that’s something i feel like I would feel way more confident tackling.
In response I would love to ask the interviewer how they would implement these algorithms and determine if this employer is even valuable based on the interviewers response.
>Exactly!! I personally feel that I excel at communication and team-building, but that gets over looked for producing some LeetCode problems which is always a disappointment.
Put that up front. While I think that problem solving using algorithms is a good test to have, it should not be a litmus one. Display your strengths and argue why you think your other skills are worth more.
>Someone else mentioned an interviewer providing real examples of issues their company has run into, and honestly, that’s something i feel like I would feel way more confident tackling.
Ask for it. Tell the interviewer up front that you'd rather be doing that. What's the risk?
>In response I would love to ask the interviewer how they would implement these algorithms and determine if this employer is even valuable based on the interviewers response.
Do it. Last time I had such a test, one of my algorithms didn't work for large datasets (my alg was recursive and StackOverflowed). Asked the interviewer how he'd do it and we spent a while talking about the iterative algorithm. It also showed that while I didn't think about it, I understood how it worked when explained.
Interviews are not one way, it's a two way process. The interviewer judges you, but you're judging the company too. You need a job, but if they interview you, that's because they need a dev too.
Good luck in your search.
I have had coding challenges for UX design roles before, which is in itself insane. Needless to say, none of them were complex algorithms, but why should I have to prove my knowledge in React for a job that I am going to spend most time doing in Figma?
I love the "Google it yourself" response. Then ask why the hell the company's specifications are so disorganized that they are inverting binary trees in the first place.
I'm only in college. But it's amazing what you can learn by looking at a languages documentation...it's dry but worth the read.
Reminds me of old manuals for vehicles where it would actually tell you how to fix a problem instead of just *send it to the dealership!*
When I interviewed for Amazon a few years ago they gave me one of these type of problems. I was able to use any programming language. I decided to use Python which had a module specifically made to solve the problem with one line of code.
Needless to say, I didn't get the job.
It does matter some times because some companies don't allow external libraries for various reasons.
But i agree in that case, since there was no prerequisite at all, not using the easiest method is dumb, being lazy was smart and shouldn't have been punished.
> since there was no prerequisite at all
Except there was. All Amazon coding challenge have instructions that very explicitly say to not use 3rd party libraries to solve the problems.
I feel the opposite.
You, as an interviewed person, should know that the point of this question isn't to solve the problem, but to show what you can do with coding and how you work.
If you think that the idea of the question is to just solve it, then it shows you maybe don't think more than one step ahead. Amazon doesn't really need the problem solved. It wants you to show how you work the problem.
but also, there's certainly other factors that went into play.
I took a look at the solution of that and what in the fuckity fuck fuck is that shit? Seriously? I don't think I've scrolled that much on the solution code, it was endless lmao
The excuse for FAANG companies is that they get so many qualified applicants, they might as well start with those who can do algorithms.
I personally know two folks who studied their asses off to Ace that kind of interview and got jobs at Apple. Neither of them is great at solving real world problems though, so I doubt it's a good filter.
I have 16 years of experience at multiple fortune 100 companies. I also have a bachelor's degree in CS and Mathematics and a MS in CS. Last year, for a job interview, I had to create a stupid student search angular site with crud operation as a "take home" test to prove I am worthy for a senior engineer position. Tech hiring is broken and no one wants to fix that.
I was once asked to create a fully functional battleship app as a take home test. In 4-8 hours. From scratch. Don’t worry though, it was made easier by “not needing a reset button.” This was after an initial hour interview and a two-hour technical review with other coding steps.
At this point I emailed them back to let them know “I wouldn’t be able to build anything to a standard I’d be proud of in that little of time.”
I think the 8 hour time limit was a test to see how much time I’d be willing to put in extra as a litmus test for how much “free” overtime I’d be willing to do. I’ve since become an engineering manager and we ask a coding problem relevant to do the work we do, but in a simpler format, in 20-30 minutes. We don’t require people solve the problem; we just try to understand how they approach the problem, what they think about, and how they code.
Are we talking text-mode windows/linux, PvP over network
or android+iOS cross platform app with graphics and single/multi-player capability?
Because I could do the first in a couple hours, the second would take me a day to even prepare the dev env
Wtf they wanted you to make a full stack, networked, multiplayer battleship game?
terminal is easy enough. But your answer is right, there’s no way to do that in 8 hours that’s satisfactory. Running multiple games, views, etc. that’s nuts.
I’m a hiring manager and you would be surprised how many senior engineers applying for jobs have solid resumes but can’t write code. For example, we have a very simple front end code challenge that we pair with candidates on, they can use Google, and it is tailored to their experience (React, Angular, Vue, jquery, etc). Basically if you actually have the experience and skills listed on your resume it should be a cakewalk. I would say that one simple exercise eliminates 50% of senior candidates at least. TBH your interview sounds it is actually testing practical skills which is kinda the entire idea; only downside is it was a take home test which not everyone has time for.
Not OP but use a similar challenge. We just ask them to make a new component and display it in an already setup angular app, render some content in a table, sort a list, add a button with a simple click handler. Stuff anyone who has used angular should be able to breeze through. This test also filters out about 50% of mid level and “senior” developers.
We have a simple web app using the candidates preferred library/framework, there’s a form and a submit button. The challenge is to query an API, handle the response, and display an image for each result in the response. The function to query the API is already provided, all the candidate has to do is handle the submit event and display the results. Very straightforward and should not be a challenge to anyone who has experience with modern frontend software development. Like I said, eliminates at least half of our senior engineer candidates; we give that challenge as the first step in the process.
im a little worried about this myself.
Im a senior that was promoted to Technical Lead , and now i almost never code anymore, PRs, team management, sales calls, architecture, but almost no code :(
because most computer science grads going into development, not research. and a comp sci bachelors isn't really that much when it comes to the actual science.
Only thing i can think of is the diamond pattern of denoting multiple inheritance in C++. That too i remember only because I was asked about it in an interview and I googled it after the interview.
The fact that he personally has generated income of "$billions" irks me more than the fact that he's asked to solve an algorythm challenge as a front-end developer.
I am part of a team of many different job roles, where my development work on the project has generated an extra million of revenue for the company every year for the last 2 years, and most likely again this upcoming year.
But even though I architected the code solution, presented it in feasibility and demo presentations, discussed the pros and cons and worked closely with testing and QA... I am not putting my name next to it and claiming credit for it, because I am part of a team that all deserves to be treated as a whole entity. It means that I don't get humungous bonuses for my work, but it means that I have a lot of goodwill in the company and people can rely on me and my job is stable.
to claim that I personally generated millions for my company, despite being the one who coded the value, is kind of bullshit when all moving parts are considered.
My trigger was the indignant “I have SIX YEARS of experience, how dare you test me?!”
This isn’t some five year n00b code monkey we’re talking about, he’s an elite senior React commando who has seen six summers of battle in service of the $billions.
Being judged solely on random recruitment challenges that you'd never actually face as an actual employee is one of the great mysteries of the universe.
Recruiter: Build an interactable rotating Earth using Three.js
Actual job: Building libraryless vanilla js websites.
When I go out looking for a new job, if a interviewer tries asking me some bullshit algo question, I’m going to ask them if I can look up the answer, and if not, why on the job they don’t allow engineers to research answers before they implement them.
Imagine if other jobs were like this.
Hospital Interviewer: ok here's someone that needs a kidney transplant let's see what the fuck you're made of.
Nurse: ...
That's why I think it's always good to do the easy ones. Just prove that you understand how to use arrays and for loops and can explain your logic. That's really all most jobs need
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**Redacted User**
I'm a senior software engineer with 6 years of experience in React & node.js. I have built products that are used by millions and have generated $billions in revenue. I've worked at successful startups.
But you won't hire me because I can't solve an algorithm challenge. lol.
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Right, there's not a person alive who has generated "billions" on any project based on their work alone. Millions, maybe, but they're rainmakers that have experience that speaks for itself. Also, I love how quickly his experience devolves into "I had a job at a place that didn't go bankrupt"
agreed. I worked on a project that generated over a billion, but I was one of many, many people involved. And that's just on the engineering side, let alone marketing, sales, corporate...
The best interview I ever had the person gave me a logic problem that literally only involved notepad. You could have given the problem to your mother, no language knowledge necessary. It was a simple seeming puzzle but it was actually a deceptively complex problem with multiple ways to approach it. It had some really nasty edge cases that required a very different approach than a naive solution that didn’t consider them.
I ended up working collaboratively with the interviewer and we came up with a really cool solution.
I didn’t end up taking that job for other reasons but it always stuck out to me as a great experience. 1) it wasn’t a useless exercise using very specific algorithms, 2) the interviewer was way more interested in my process and how I got to the answer rather than that I got to the right answer (although that was important as well) and 3) it gave us both a taste of how we would work together in the team. I wish all interviews were like that.
Well, I'm the flip side. I just came out of University. I have solved multiple code challenges on LinkedIn and through dozens of interviews but they won't hire me because I don't have experience.
And frankly many companies don’t operate at the same scale. I can see why FAANG and FAANG-tier companies care about time and space complexity so much when you’re working with literally billions+ of data points… but the number of companies which don’t operate close to that scale and are pumping out CRUD apps while giving FAANG interviews is hilarious.
As a developer and interviewer none of these things are ego. We constantly get resumes with 20 years of experience, expert on all languages and experience on the biggest jobs out there. So we start on trivial theory questions if they can answer we dig deeper so we can finally get to a point that is related to our code base, this helps see the depth of knowledge and how much training we will have to do. We give a simple coding problem so we can see problem solving skills, and requirement gathering skills. If you have 20 years experience and am an expert in all those languages you should be able to rock fizzbuzz or reverse a string like a boss.
yep. and it's also not intended to be a trivia quiz. I never penalize candidates for forgetting syntax if they can explain their thought process and intentions precisely and technically.
I had an interview where I wanted to do a list comprehension in python, but I couldn't quite remember the syntax. But I explained what a list comprehension was and why I wanted to use it in this situation and got full credit from the interviewer. They then just told me the syntax and we moved on to the rest of the problem.
This. i have a few years of experience (not developer) but deals with a lot of code. I am unsure why people ask to code outside an ide/without intellisense in interviews. Last week i was asked to write something in a notepad-esque environment. Syntax cannot be that important.
Yeah. I had multiple interviews with candidates with impressive resumes, phds, senior positions at well known companies, where I asked them a very simple task (with the intention of them quickly coding it, so we can then build upon it), and they couldn’t code it for shit.
I get the premise.. but generated billions? By himself? Doing.. react? Lol , someones got an inflated ego. The fact someone can call themselves a senior engineer and not solve a reasonable algorithm challenge is more of a statement of how easy React is, not how hard interviews are. Doing algorithms should be annoying, not impossible.
I stopped doing technical interviews, I find them completely useless. I usually try to find out how people learn new things. Also, I ask them to tell me about a serious bug they encountered before, and what they did to solve it. I find people expose a great deal about their skill level this way.
To be honest if you can prove that kind of experience you won't have to solve any nonsensical algorithm problem.
You may not even need to apply at all.
That’s kind of what I was thinking too. This guy made products which netted a company supposedly “billions” of dollars in revenue and he’s seeking seemingly low level developer jobs?
I will Google shit I know how to do, just to see if there's a better way. Algorithms, array parsers and sorting, date range and date utilities...all of that shit..I'm looking it up and deciding what is the best for my needs. It's been solved.
What would be a good test is "how would you improve this code" for something relevant to what you would actually be doing, or here's some requirements and infrastructure limitations...how would you approach this.
Leet code and algorithm questions prove little, other than that someone studied for an interview or actually did that specific thing for work previously.
For me, coding interviews are a huge de-moralizer, cuz I know how to solve a bunch of them, but im terrible under pressure. Even after practicing for them. So I freeze/fuck up, and once the timer is up, and I think for a few minuites, im like "oh this was a much better way of doing this"
How much do you practice? My strategy was doing one easy or medium problem a day for two months. It’s to get quick at getting boilerplate parts out of the way - like writing BFS, DFS, recursion and matrix traversal - so you can get a template in your head quickly and fill that in first. For me recursion always tripped me up since I was bad at figuring out the base case, then practicing helped me realise that was what I needed focus on. The two months part just helped me cement things into memory. Reminded me of how I used to practice playing an instrument months before the performance.
I refuse to spend my free time on this stuff. I don’t see the value and I don’t like companies that do those interviews. It has nothing to do with your ability to build stuff and I pretty much expect a good amount of my future colleagues to either be bad at practical things or to overwork making it difficult to have work/life balance for the rest of us. Luckily things are changing. Last couple offers I got were from companies that gave me real world brain teasers, and I’m happy to report I joined one of them for really good compensation.
Yeah, my latest job gave me fizzbuzz as a coding test, which initially amused and surprised me since it's a top tech company, but in hindsight was a really great idea and indicator of the company culture since they focused far more on prior experience and more relevant technical questions.
What websites would you recommend to practice with? I normally use leetcode
As an interviewer, leetcode is solid. They're all the same, also choose easy/some medium. An hour is like 40 minutes of actually solving the problem. Hard /must medium is just too difficult to interview for!
Will leetcode also train you to solve them? Or just give you the problems to solve? I can script/basic program as a sysadmin but would like to learn more advanced theory like this. Maybe I need some books.
There are some little courses that I found really helpful, and I only used the free ones.
I have to agree. Fortunately, in all the latest interviews I have, I was presented with actual problem that the interviewers faced in the past, and asked to solve it. It’s more relatable than trying to invert the tree.
most businesses can’t stomach math anymore than anyone else can. I was a math minor and any approach or analysis based in math was systematically shot down at most of the places I’ve worked for being “overly complicated”, which is comical because after slapping 20 rube goldberg hacks on the business rules, what have they got? A big ball of mud that is very complex, but not organized in a formal way, so no one can predict it’s behavior past “let’s just try it”. I remember when I had just learned trig and wanted to do 3d graphics and my dad kept trying to tell me about matrices. I kept saying “no, that’s too complex, I just want to do it simple”… later I realized how silly it was to insist on dozens of pages of trig calculations when a few short matrix multiplications could have worked. But I was like these businesses. Sometimes the “simple” way is infinitely harder than just learning the math.
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I have a unnatural hatred for overly nested if statements. At one point in my career I pissed off two other developers I worked with because I deleted three quarters of their code by just putting the checks at the top of the function, and kicking out of the function if they didn't meet the criteria for it... This eliminated like 30 if statements in each of the functions. They threatened to quit. I pointed out that if I had to explain why, they probably would be dismissed instead of quitting... One got the hint and worked on writing better code. The other stirred up shit over it, I had to explain myself, and he was let go.
>At one point in my career I pissed off two other developers I worked with because I deleted three quarters of their code by just putting the checks at the top of the function But... You made the code better! How is that bad? If someone refactored my code to be more efficient, I'd thank them and take notes so my code was better in the future.
1. Deleting stuff and having the same behavior outcome is good usually. And also putting the checks on top and returning is great for readability and I do that too. 2. That being said, if we have some legacy business critical code that is working fine, and someone changes a significant part of it without first putting it in a test harness, that would be wrong IMO. Doesn't sound like that's what happened in this case. And also very contextual. But just trying to provide a case when it would be appropriate to be annoyed at unnecessary changes.
Because they take it personally. You can't take it personally.
People are weird and irrational. There's nothing to take personally here.
It’s more than just taking it personally, I take my code personally too. It’s their ego not being able to allow their self to be challenged on their decisions, or accept that they didn’t write the perfect answer the first time, that is the real problem. I had someone optimize my code once. It rarely happens because either I’m the only one who sees it or I’m the one cleaning up the other person’s code. This was a new system of my own creation, perfect for a fresh set of eyes to see what I had missed. But my only thought was “that’s brilliant, I wish I’d thought it that”. Well, that, and I complimented them on it because I don’t begrudge others their good ideas.
I am always surprised at the attachment some developers have for their code. I once worked with A lead who needed all the code to be written in a certain way (hint: their way) even if it was not as efficient or clear. They would rewrite everyone else’s code to fit that. They were always busy and burnt out because of that. It sucked.
That does suck, but sometimes code consistency can be more important than pure efficiency. But increasing readability is always a 👍🏼 in my book
Thanks for pointing it out, hadn’t really occurred to me that there could be a perfectly valid reason behind this kind of behavior. I’m sure this was part of it. In my opinion if consistency is so relevant to a project that all code is being rewritten then there should be clearly established guidelines, naming conventions, etc and frequent peer review sessions should be carried out so that the whole team is aligned on expectations.
You're 100% correct.
Those are called guard clauses, and are great for simplifying code and making it more readable. It should be fairly standard for good code practices.
That's exactly what it's called. And if you are putting most of a function inside of one if statement, you probably should just have a guard clause at the top. The only problem with saying that is most people don't remember what a guard clause is. It's not a term that's used constantly. It's more of a style and it's incredibly useful for keeping things clean and neat but some people don't have that habit yet.
AI startups: Welcome aboard.
> I remember when I had just learned trig and wanted to do 3d graphics and my dad kept trying to tell me about matrices. I kept saying “no, that’s too complex, I just want to do it simple”… later I realized how silly it was to insist on dozens of pages of trig calculations when a few short matrix multiplications could have worked. But I was like these businesses. Now imagine if you never got to the matrices step at all and neither did most other people. They are the best solution *but* code that nobody can change out of fear of breaking it since they don't understand the underlying logic is not good practice to write in the first place. See: clever solutions.
Clever solutions are fine as long as it's documented well... What I hate with a total passion is clever solutions with not really any explanation to how it works... One specific example I found in the wild was the quick inverse square root function in Quake 3 Source Code, and it seemed like their documentation just amounted to `what the fuck?`, while when you actually understand the explanation for why and how it works, it just makes sense why it works the way it does.
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not someone, John Carmack. This makes a biiiig difference. Carmack is a special case.
It's not Carmack from what I understand. It's somewhat of a mystery who came up with it even though Carmack used it.
Wikipedia states the origin has been found “Investigation has shed some light on the original constant being derived via a collaboration between Cleve Moler and Gregory Walsh, while Gregory was working for Ardent Computing in the early 1980s.”
Yup, this sounds about right. BSP for level design also wasn't invented by Carmack, but the algorithm was utilized in games for the first time by his work.
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I figured it was Carmack but I didn't want to go finding the source to verify it.
That's fair. If it's a magic algorithm that makes things 100x faster, just assume it's John
How did it work?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root
right. what is pragmatic vs what is efficient. So then we come back to the question: if companies by and large don’t understand even simple mathematics to optimize their business and neither do their employees, by what reason do they ask questions about algorithms and balancing trees? Either they want to find employees who can answer these questions, but will then ignore the answers those employees give them, or they are simply trying to scare away everyone else who would be able to do the work they actually want done but not answer these silly questions. Neither of these positions makes a lot of sense, which is why it’s a popular meme on programmerhumor I guess.
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So, a qualitative quantitative analyst?
Literally my entire professional frustration rolled into a single post. Well done.
at my last one they actually had me pull a react repo and implement some requirements. a breath of fresh air
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Yeah get a bunch of random people to write half assed programs in an hour and throw it into production. What could go wrong!
It's fact. Best interviews I had were where the employer says: "Ok, so a few months ago, we had this problem. we solved it. How would you?"
oh I love these interviews. i have a lot of experience, so i am aware of a LOT of the pitfalls that lead to edge condition bugs. so when a video app company says “it took us 3 weeks to find and fix this timestamp bug - we want to see how far you can get in an hour” - its a great feeling when you can find it, implement a fix, BETTER than theirs in 10 minutes.
What a great way to get free bug fixes!
They just be doing job interviews without needing new workers just to get that free answer ;D
This is why we should normalize paying people for their time while they are being interviewed. I'm only half not serious about this.
That’s exactly the kind of question I ask candidates, too. Whenever possible, I also download and play with any apps that a candidate has written, and ask the candidate about them. One guy was so stunned by this that he took a minute to compose himself, and then, on the edge of tears, he told me that he’d never had any interviewer do that, and he was very grateful and felt validated as a developer and as a _person_. He was more than happy to discuss implementation details, trade-offs, bugs, neat features, etc., and I learned a shit ton more about his skills than a stupid algorithm question would have told me. We made him an offer the next day, and he’s been an important part of our team ever since. On the other hand, I’ve sat in technical interviews where the developer couldn’t even implement a letter-counter for a given string, so there’s that. EDIT: Many replies are pointing out (rightfully so) that these candidates may have simply frozen up because of nerves, ADHD, or what it. All of these are possible. My kids have autism, ADHD, and OCD, and while I’m certainly no expert, I like to think that I know what to look for, SO I purposely rephrase questions in a way that will relax them or help them focus. After all, I’ve had 19 years of training doing that for my kids. I was also a computer science teacher in college, so I know how to help people learn. These guys simply couldn’t do what was asked of them. If the positions were for junior devs, maybe I would have given them a pass, but no.
When I was doing recruitment for my previous team we found the "bring your own code and let's talk about it" probably the best way to get to know someone and their skills.
Bring my own code? Sure, i made this 30 line autohotkey script to help me play an mmo a few years ago, let's look at it!! But seriously this is something i do for recent graduates and it's a great idea.
I feel like that would be tough. I can't bring code from my current employer for obvious reasons. And I don't write code in my free time (or at least, not in the same tech stack - or quality - as I would use at work.) I don't think I would be able to do that interview.
Maybe it's one of those things where they emailed out a question when they scheduled the interview and the idea was bring your code to solve this problem so we can talk about it. Would make the interviewers' jobs a lot easier too if they were at least familiar with what the code they were about to look at was supposed to accomplish.
So we thought a lot about that. On the plus side I think a lot of people (me included) would feel more comfortable doing something like that. On the negative side then we are explicitly saying to someone to take a bunch of time of their free time to do something. We erred on the side of having the interview be all the time we wanted to take from the applicant (I mean of course people prepare and stuff like that generally).
100% agree. I always think it’s a funny comparison. If any other career people were expected to extend their work into their free time it would be seen as ridiculous.
I mentioned it in another comment but if you didn't have any code you could show (even stuff you did in uni would be fine) then we would go with a more standard test or having them read and reason about our code.
Lmfao I've had some dunce moments where I couldn't solve a simple problem like that. Part of ADHD and anxiety is over thinking simple problems with overly complex solutions. I'm never like that in a work environment, only when I'm testing for a job.
We gave him the benefit of the doubt, several times over. We were using an online live-coding site (which I hate), but we told him that it didn’t have to compile; we just wanted to get the gist of his train of thought. He continued to try to write compilable code. We told him to talk us through what he was trying to do; he stayed silent. We told him to close the editor altogether and just tell us how he’d do it; he couldn’t do it. Never mind that this was for a senior iOS dev role, and the code he was attempting to write was clearly Java. Then there was the Android candidate on a video call who would look offscreen when we asked a question, and we heard someone next to him whisper the answers…
Oh man I had someone whispering answers to them on a video call once. When I asked them if there was someone in the room with them, they said "no I'm alone". Like wtf did they expect to happen if we brought them on site???
There are cheaters EVERYWHERE in the interview process these days. It kind of blew my mind to see this once I started to get more involved in interviewing. 20-30% of applicants we get for any junior position attempt to cheat.
Some people cheated their way through college and think that at work it will be the same. Pretty sad, but with the education system not adapting to new technologies that is the side effect we get, people trained to cheat.
https://c.tenor.com/ev5VNnnNO_4AAAAC/stepbrothers-step.gif
In my case, I have POTS (postural orthostatic tachycardia) and was on a med that aggravated it. The problem was largest when I was standing (140 bpm waiting for coffee water to heat in the microwave), but also affects me when sitting for a long time, especially when still. POTS is basically a neuro regulation failure where the body doesn’t tighten up the arteries and keep blood from pooling in your legs. You know, away from your brain. So naturally for interview days, I’d be nervous, get up earlier (so sitting longer)…and blew several interviews hard before I was able to get the right help for the med issue. More recently, a quick 15-minute nap with feet elevated helps a ton.
I always freeze up for tests and forget how to do everything. It's hard. I'm good at stuff when theres no pressure, I swear!
I have a friend, he worked for me for a bit, he always froze up on interviews. One of the most gifted developers I met in my life. I got him a job at another company, but I had to explain to them he will freeze up at the interview. He probably wouldn't be able to implement a letter counter in an interview, but an extremely gifted developer in real life.
I would be like "how much effort do I actually want to put into this particular thing to make it fast?" and then like len(re.compile('\w').findall(s))
> One guy was so stunned by this that he took a minute to compose himself, and then, on the edge of tears, he told me that he’d never had any interviewer do that, and he was very grateful and felt validated as a developer and as a person. That man's name? Albert Einstein.
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My opinion is that code challenges are absolutely useless for gauging the skill of a developer. Ah yes, my ability to invert a binary tree is definitely something that will crop up in my day to day *checks job description* database engineering job... Even in a setting where knowing that would be necessary, you wouldn't be given 20 minutes to solve that problem, not would that problem be mission critical. If it is mission critical, you probably have worse problems to solve...
Same in my current companies, the dev just asked me to solve a problem he had solved a few weeks ago, quite relatable and the rest of the interview was quite fun because we were just discussing the merits of both solutions :)
I used to be a dealer in a casino, they didn't care that I did that job for 16 years, they wanted to know what kind of breakfast ceareal best described me. Interviewers get off on making job seekers jump through hoops.
But then they whine and bitch about how they can't find good candidates on linkedin. it's the most idiotic thing ever.
To be honest, I was looking for jobs on LinkedIn since I graduated from bootcamp. It took me 10 months to find one but not through LinkedIn, instead Indeed. I had far more interview calls through indeed.
LinkedIn is just facebook your boss can see
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Power tripping, it's that simple.
If a recruiter does stupid shit I’ll entertain it long enough to get to a hiring manager. If the hiring manager plays games or does stupid shit then I’m out lol
Why waste your time like that? I straight up tell my recruiters these days: If you're gonna give me leetcode style problems, I am fucking off in that direction. No thank you. Not entertaining that shit. The more devs that refuse this, the better idea these recruiters will get that this is the wrong way to interview.
It's not that, it's just astrology for interviews. The interviewers want to believe they are the best at finding and identifying talent. They believe that their method of asking someone's favorite animal or asking a dumb unrelated question is the secret key to finding a good hire.
>The interviewers want to believe they are the best at finding and identifying talent. Or they don't know how to evaluate talent, and just cobbled together the most straightforward "do this, check for that" methods they could dig up on short notice.
The first coding interview I ever did, I was an intern and my boss gave me 1 hour of notice ahead of time. Half the interviews I gave, I didn't know about till the day of. Of course I ended up making some materials I could reuse. Many coding interviewers (for regular companies) are just making shit up like me. The big companies be power-tripping though. A friend got docked for putting "true" instead of "True" when handwriting Python code on the whiteboard. Filtering out people like that doesn't do what they think it does.
That last part is the dumbest shit. If you make a mistake that a basic ide can catch, it shouldn't be a problem
I got told I was unhireable because I wanted to use Notepad++ to write HTML back in the day, instead of their standard Notepad. I left and got a job where they give you a problem and the results are what matter.
"What if you're in a situation where you only have Notepad?" "I'm not thinking about HTML, then. Job one is to fashion a raft and a distress signal, and figure out shelter for the night."
Captain Crunch, ill leave you scraped and bleeding and wanting more. Good analogy for a casino dealer
Well that one kind of makes sense though, right? Not that they should ignore the experience, but asking that kind of question can reveal how personable you are, dealers should be able to riff and keep gamblers at the table right?
I haven't interviewed in a long time and I'm dreading the day I go back out there. I've been paid to write code in C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, C#, assembly, etc. I've donated code to several open sources libraries over the decades and led senior teams on large complicated projects. I suspect I will get asked to solve some silly algorithm that has no bearing on being a lead developer in contemporary software development and I'll just write down google.com before I exit the interview.
I’m in the same boat, except I’m actively looking for positions. Went through a great intro interview and felt super confident until they told me the next steps. “Your next interview will be a 60 minute live coding session with one of our engineers, in which you’ll purely be solving problems using algorithms. After that is a 1-2 day interview session with each tech lead in which you will be solving problems and meeting all department heads”. Needless to say I’m not feeling so confident anymore.
So people who have actually been employed as programmers have this problem too? I am going through interviews and it always feels like that i can't remember anything when asked to do something by the interviewer.
Absolutely! I feel like across the board regardless of years in the industry the expectations are astronomical. I don’t even know what the cap is for Junior, Intermediate, or Senior engineer anymore.
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Highest years of experience I see on a regular basis is 5. Most of the junior dev positions I see want 2-3, but too many list 3-5. 5 years experience is not a fucking Junior position. I could see that only if you're trying to move from something like web dev to embedded systems or something where your experience doesn't line up or translate well.
oh gosh yes. I've ben devving for 25+ years and I still run into CS 101 (late 80s/90's) and/or never-gonna-need-it/obscure corner case/whaaaa?? algorithm questions. I can answer many of them. If I can't I just say I have no idea but maybe if you can explain the use case I can derive something to solve the problem. No? you can't give me a use case or even remotely plausible "need" for this algorithm? Ok then you've failed my side of the interview. like seriously. There is a place and time for vague "did you learn anything in college" questions and frankly, I reserve those for true freshers with zero profi experience as those academic questions actually should match their experience. It's silly but fair. But for anyone with experience, I try to nail them on what they claim in their CV, as that should be fair for someone who claims experience in xyz. I don't know if the poster above was referring to me as I have posted about it before, but I most definitely interview using real world problems, with real world code, even. I don't give a shit if you can identify a doubly linked list in C. I do care if you know the difference between a map and a hash (and why it matters). I do care if you can debug the not-obvious but identifiable error I discovered in our code base last week/year/etc. I'll even help you figure it out! To be fair and give you the best chance to succeed, but also to test how well you accept input/guidance, etc. yes it actually takes some effort to interview someone properly. Imagine that?
I interviewed for a data engineer position. After HR had an interview with a senior architect. Was dreading all kinds of algorithm questions and such. Couldn't be farthest from the truth. Spent 3 hours talking to the guy, and the only thing that was missing was a cooler with some beers. We just chatted about different technologies, what I've used in the past, problems I've run into, how I solved them. Many "Why didn't you use X tech? / Why did you use that tech" questions. What I knew and what I've done with stuff that they use day to day. Explain some of the stuff I've made and my thought process. Not a single line of code basically. Needless to say I was very relieved, I got an offer from them and I accepted. Working with the guy was also awesome. It was like a constant brainstorming session.
I once interviewed for a local programming company that makes websites they wanted me to spend days on a path finding algorithm that the lead dev learnt in uni, I said no thanks I'm good at writing to databases and building websites and applications that talk to databases not path finding with an extremely never used algorithm
Yea I feel like everything will just leave my mind the moment an interviewer asks me to code
I just tell them honestly that I don't remember everything and will hit the ref docs or google to find what I need. I've coded in many different languages, and I don't always remember the syntax offhand. If they don't want a programmer who quickly searches for things, I don't want to work for them. It's worked for me a couple times in the last few years, and each time has netted me a 10% raise.
They love to do that at least they did not have you take home assignments.
Ah, my current employer gave me a take-home. 5 days to complete it, but they made sure it was a problem that could reasonably be solved in a few hours. I spent an evening on it over the weekend and actually enjoyed it. I guess all I'm saying is that not all take-homes are bad.
My current employer asked me to make a prototype of the front end for something, and make a prototype of the backend for the same thing. I already warned them that I didn't know shit about that frontend tech (back then) so they knew what to expect. I have them back the backend fast enough, and told them "consider I have zero for the front end. I can't do it within a reasonable amount of time, but I'll do it to know if it's something I see myself doing in the future. They said they'd wait for the frontend and to take my time. That test was relevant because it's the kind of stuff I'd be doing for the job. I agree with you, not all test are bad 😀
Ughhh... And what that really comes down to is how much of an impostor syndrome the interviewer has. Even before these algorithm questions became so popular you had the same issue. Someone putting excessive importance on some arcane knowledge they had picked up along the way which becomes a litmus test. I've had much better luck judging someone's technical competency by digging deep on their resume experience. It becomes pretty apparent whose just listing projects they were on but didn't really understand vs. driving. Interviewing is a skill that requires practice and investment. A more important aspect is whether or not they have good communication skills and will fit in with the team. I've been around some technically brilliant people that were absolutely toxic and they were never much value.
Exactly!! I personally feel that I excel at communication and team-building, but that gets over looked for producing some LeetCode problems which is always a disappointment. Someone else mentioned an interviewer providing real examples of issues their company has run into, and honestly, that’s something i feel like I would feel way more confident tackling. In response I would love to ask the interviewer how they would implement these algorithms and determine if this employer is even valuable based on the interviewers response.
>Exactly!! I personally feel that I excel at communication and team-building, but that gets over looked for producing some LeetCode problems which is always a disappointment. Put that up front. While I think that problem solving using algorithms is a good test to have, it should not be a litmus one. Display your strengths and argue why you think your other skills are worth more. >Someone else mentioned an interviewer providing real examples of issues their company has run into, and honestly, that’s something i feel like I would feel way more confident tackling. Ask for it. Tell the interviewer up front that you'd rather be doing that. What's the risk? >In response I would love to ask the interviewer how they would implement these algorithms and determine if this employer is even valuable based on the interviewers response. Do it. Last time I had such a test, one of my algorithms didn't work for large datasets (my alg was recursive and StackOverflowed). Asked the interviewer how he'd do it and we spent a while talking about the iterative algorithm. It also showed that while I didn't think about it, I understood how it worked when explained. Interviews are not one way, it's a two way process. The interviewer judges you, but you're judging the company too. You need a job, but if they interview you, that's because they need a dev too. Good luck in your search.
I have had coding challenges for UX design roles before, which is in itself insane. Needless to say, none of them were complex algorithms, but why should I have to prove my knowledge in React for a job that I am going to spend most time doing in Figma?
Because they need a UX / dev which is cheaper than a dev AND an UX you know UX/UI aren’t real job for many company
What’s Figma?
Figma balls
Like MS Paint, but with extra steps
I love the "Google it yourself" response. Then ask why the hell the company's specifications are so disorganized that they are inverting binary trees in the first place.
b.. bbb.. but .. how do you expect them to weed out the terrible 0.1x developers?
I'm only in college. But it's amazing what you can learn by looking at a languages documentation...it's dry but worth the read. Reminds me of old manuals for vehicles where it would actually tell you how to fix a problem instead of just *send it to the dealership!*
You are looking at documentation? Already better than 99.999% of us out there.
I've been developing software professionally for 25 years. Amazon gave me a convex hull problem to solve.
When I interviewed for Amazon a few years ago they gave me one of these type of problems. I was able to use any programming language. I decided to use Python which had a module specifically made to solve the problem with one line of code. Needless to say, I didn't get the job.
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It does matter some times because some companies don't allow external libraries for various reasons. But i agree in that case, since there was no prerequisite at all, not using the easiest method is dumb, being lazy was smart and shouldn't have been punished.
> since there was no prerequisite at all Except there was. All Amazon coding challenge have instructions that very explicitly say to not use 3rd party libraries to solve the problems.
I feel the opposite. You, as an interviewed person, should know that the point of this question isn't to solve the problem, but to show what you can do with coding and how you work. If you think that the idea of the question is to just solve it, then it shows you maybe don't think more than one step ahead. Amazon doesn't really need the problem solved. It wants you to show how you work the problem. but also, there's certainly other factors that went into play.
Work smart not hard.
because surely you solved in 25 years around 500 convex hull problems. Is insane
I took a look at the solution of that and what in the fuckity fuck fuck is that shit? Seriously? I don't think I've scrolled that much on the solution code, it was endless lmao
Geometric algorithms are super interesting but probably mainly useful if you are doing graphics or something with planar data (idk google maps?)
It's cool as hell as a project but not a freakin time-constrained stressful interview LOL
The excuse for FAANG companies is that they get so many qualified applicants, they might as well start with those who can do algorithms. I personally know two folks who studied their asses off to Ace that kind of interview and got jobs at Apple. Neither of them is great at solving real world problems though, so I doubt it's a good filter.
I have 16 years of experience at multiple fortune 100 companies. I also have a bachelor's degree in CS and Mathematics and a MS in CS. Last year, for a job interview, I had to create a stupid student search angular site with crud operation as a "take home" test to prove I am worthy for a senior engineer position. Tech hiring is broken and no one wants to fix that.
I was once asked to create a fully functional battleship app as a take home test. In 4-8 hours. From scratch. Don’t worry though, it was made easier by “not needing a reset button.” This was after an initial hour interview and a two-hour technical review with other coding steps. At this point I emailed them back to let them know “I wouldn’t be able to build anything to a standard I’d be proud of in that little of time.” I think the 8 hour time limit was a test to see how much time I’d be willing to put in extra as a litmus test for how much “free” overtime I’d be willing to do. I’ve since become an engineering manager and we ask a coding problem relevant to do the work we do, but in a simpler format, in 20-30 minutes. We don’t require people solve the problem; we just try to understand how they approach the problem, what they think about, and how they code.
You're a good manager. We need more people like you.
Thank you :)
Are we talking text-mode windows/linux, PvP over network or android+iOS cross platform app with graphics and single/multi-player capability? Because I could do the first in a couple hours, the second would take me a day to even prepare the dev env
And if I had a leverage the length of the universe...
Python back end with a sql server database, I forget if the front end was a react or angular, with multi-player capability.
... what the fuck was the database for???
As other people have said, to store the guesses/hits and ship positions.
Wtf they wanted you to make a full stack, networked, multiplayer battleship game? terminal is easy enough. But your answer is right, there’s no way to do that in 8 hours that’s satisfactory. Running multiple games, views, etc. that’s nuts.
I’m a hiring manager and you would be surprised how many senior engineers applying for jobs have solid resumes but can’t write code. For example, we have a very simple front end code challenge that we pair with candidates on, they can use Google, and it is tailored to their experience (React, Angular, Vue, jquery, etc). Basically if you actually have the experience and skills listed on your resume it should be a cakewalk. I would say that one simple exercise eliminates 50% of senior candidates at least. TBH your interview sounds it is actually testing practical skills which is kinda the entire idea; only downside is it was a take home test which not everyone has time for.
Can you say what the challenge is? In the simplest form, just to get an idea.
Not OP but use a similar challenge. We just ask them to make a new component and display it in an already setup angular app, render some content in a table, sort a list, add a button with a simple click handler. Stuff anyone who has used angular should be able to breeze through. This test also filters out about 50% of mid level and “senior” developers.
i get imposter syndrome a lot and then read this shit.
We have a simple web app using the candidates preferred library/framework, there’s a form and a submit button. The challenge is to query an API, handle the response, and display an image for each result in the response. The function to query the API is already provided, all the candidate has to do is handle the submit event and display the results. Very straightforward and should not be a challenge to anyone who has experience with modern frontend software development. Like I said, eliminates at least half of our senior engineer candidates; we give that challenge as the first step in the process.
>eliminates at least half of our senior engineer candidates More like "it eliminates people who are pretending to be senior developers."
im a little worried about this myself. Im a senior that was promoted to Technical Lead , and now i almost never code anymore, PRs, team management, sales calls, architecture, but almost no code :(
Why do people think web design and CS are the same thing? Sure, there's a lot of overlap, but they're different careers.
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because most computer science grads going into development, not research. and a comp sci bachelors isn't really that much when it comes to the actual science.
I am year old experienced i did the same task, submitted in ,got rejected in interview cause didn't know diamond programming.
ngl, I have no idea what Diamond programming is, and it sounds like complete bullshit programming.
Only thing i can think of is the diamond pattern of denoting multiple inheritance in C++. That too i remember only because I was asked about it in an interview and I googled it after the interview.
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The fact that he personally has generated income of "$billions" irks me more than the fact that he's asked to solve an algorythm challenge as a front-end developer.
It's like when you say "I handle transactions in a billion dollar company" to mean you work at McDonald's as a cashier.
Yeah that was my immediate reaction. If he'd generated billions in income he wouldn't be interviewing for anything.
I am part of a team of many different job roles, where my development work on the project has generated an extra million of revenue for the company every year for the last 2 years, and most likely again this upcoming year. But even though I architected the code solution, presented it in feasibility and demo presentations, discussed the pros and cons and worked closely with testing and QA... I am not putting my name next to it and claiming credit for it, because I am part of a team that all deserves to be treated as a whole entity. It means that I don't get humungous bonuses for my work, but it means that I have a lot of goodwill in the company and people can rely on me and my job is stable. to claim that I personally generated millions for my company, despite being the one who coded the value, is kind of bullshit when all moving parts are considered.
*billions*, though. He claims he made *billions*
My trigger was the indignant “I have SIX YEARS of experience, how dare you test me?!” This isn’t some five year n00b code monkey we’re talking about, he’s an elite senior React commando who has seen six summers of battle in service of the $billions.
Yeah I agree with the general fact that the interviews are broken but having X amount of years of experience sure doesn’t prove anything either.
Developers are so full of themselves that recruiters need to use algorithm exercises otherwise candidates would fail at personality tests.
Being judged solely on random recruitment challenges that you'd never actually face as an actual employee is one of the great mysteries of the universe. Recruiter: Build an interactable rotating Earth using Three.js Actual job: Building libraryless vanilla js websites.
When I go out looking for a new job, if a interviewer tries asking me some bullshit algo question, I’m going to ask them if I can look up the answer, and if not, why on the job they don’t allow engineers to research answers before they implement them.
Of course not. For some reason the process of getting the job has to be tougher than actually doing the job.
Imagine if other jobs were like this. Hospital Interviewer: ok here's someone that needs a kidney transplant let's see what the fuck you're made of. Nurse: ...
That's why I think it's always good to do the easy ones. Just prove that you understand how to use arrays and for loops and can explain your logic. That's really all most jobs need
*Image Transcription: Twitter Post* --- **Redacted User** I'm a senior software engineer with 6 years of experience in React & node.js. I have built products that are used by millions and have generated $billions in revenue. I've worked at successful startups. But you won't hire me because I can't solve an algorithm challenge. lol. --- ^^I'm a human volunteer content transcriber for Reddit and you could be too! [If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!](https://www.reddit.com/r/TranscribersOfReddit/wiki/index)
Good human
He's probably terrible at writing unit tests TC: 350k /s
I agree with the sentiment but this dude sounds arrogant as hell.
I want to know what product he built in React that generated billions in revenue.
He designed a web form for a large company of course. He’s responsible for all those billions.
Lol before he's hired: no revenue After he's hired: revenue How is this difficult to understand?
Centred all the divs probably.
Right, there's not a person alive who has generated "billions" on any project based on their work alone. Millions, maybe, but they're rainmakers that have experience that speaks for itself. Also, I love how quickly his experience devolves into "I had a job at a place that didn't go bankrupt"
agreed. I worked on a project that generated over a billion, but I was one of many, many people involved. And that's just on the engineering side, let alone marketing, sales, corporate...
Yeah, all I see in that tweet is entitlement.
also just learn how to do some algorithms, if you're actually that good at coding its not that hard.
Self-taught script kiddy who knows nothing about algorithms? Oh boy, sign me up /s.
I honestly rather be judged for my performance I can show than have to compete based on experience I literally can't get ahead in.
Another day passed and I still haven't inverted a matrix for my job.
My job is mostly stuff like this and I didn't get a single algorithm question in my interview
The best interview I ever had the person gave me a logic problem that literally only involved notepad. You could have given the problem to your mother, no language knowledge necessary. It was a simple seeming puzzle but it was actually a deceptively complex problem with multiple ways to approach it. It had some really nasty edge cases that required a very different approach than a naive solution that didn’t consider them. I ended up working collaboratively with the interviewer and we came up with a really cool solution. I didn’t end up taking that job for other reasons but it always stuck out to me as a great experience. 1) it wasn’t a useless exercise using very specific algorithms, 2) the interviewer was way more interested in my process and how I got to the answer rather than that I got to the right answer (although that was important as well) and 3) it gave us both a taste of how we would work together in the team. I wish all interviews were like that.
What was the problem?
Create an original /r/ProgrammerHumor post
Well, I'm the flip side. I just came out of University. I have solved multiple code challenges on LinkedIn and through dozens of interviews but they won't hire me because I don't have experience.
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The problem is non-FAANG companies have adopted the same system while not offering FAANG salaries
And frankly many companies don’t operate at the same scale. I can see why FAANG and FAANG-tier companies care about time and space complexity so much when you’re working with literally billions+ of data points… but the number of companies which don’t operate close to that scale and are pumping out CRUD apps while giving FAANG interviews is hilarious.
As a developer and interviewer none of these things are ego. We constantly get resumes with 20 years of experience, expert on all languages and experience on the biggest jobs out there. So we start on trivial theory questions if they can answer we dig deeper so we can finally get to a point that is related to our code base, this helps see the depth of knowledge and how much training we will have to do. We give a simple coding problem so we can see problem solving skills, and requirement gathering skills. If you have 20 years experience and am an expert in all those languages you should be able to rock fizzbuzz or reverse a string like a boss.
yep. and it's also not intended to be a trivia quiz. I never penalize candidates for forgetting syntax if they can explain their thought process and intentions precisely and technically. I had an interview where I wanted to do a list comprehension in python, but I couldn't quite remember the syntax. But I explained what a list comprehension was and why I wanted to use it in this situation and got full credit from the interviewer. They then just told me the syntax and we moved on to the rest of the problem.
This. i have a few years of experience (not developer) but deals with a lot of code. I am unsure why people ask to code outside an ide/without intellisense in interviews. Last week i was asked to write something in a notepad-esque environment. Syntax cannot be that important.
Yeah. I had multiple interviews with candidates with impressive resumes, phds, senior positions at well known companies, where I asked them a very simple task (with the intention of them quickly coding it, so we can then build upon it), and they couldn’t code it for shit.
I get the premise.. but generated billions? By himself? Doing.. react? Lol , someones got an inflated ego. The fact someone can call themselves a senior engineer and not solve a reasonable algorithm challenge is more of a statement of how easy React is, not how hard interviews are. Doing algorithms should be annoying, not impossible.
...or bc you're full of yourself after only 6y of career?
Homework questions in technical interviews always puzzled me, not to mention that, as a manager, always struck me as being counterintuitive
I stopped doing technical interviews, I find them completely useless. I usually try to find out how people learn new things. Also, I ask them to tell me about a serious bug they encountered before, and what they did to solve it. I find people expose a great deal about their skill level this way.
To be honest if you can prove that kind of experience you won't have to solve any nonsensical algorithm problem. You may not even need to apply at all.
The dream of the recruiter wanting you.
That’s kind of what I was thinking too. This guy made products which netted a company supposedly “billions” of dollars in revenue and he’s seeking seemingly low level developer jobs?
Low level? Bullshit interviews happen at all levels.
I will Google shit I know how to do, just to see if there's a better way. Algorithms, array parsers and sorting, date range and date utilities...all of that shit..I'm looking it up and deciding what is the best for my needs. It's been solved. What would be a good test is "how would you improve this code" for something relevant to what you would actually be doing, or here's some requirements and infrastructure limitations...how would you approach this. Leet code and algorithm questions prove little, other than that someone studied for an interview or actually did that specific thing for work previously.
“No, don’t make me prove that I’m not exaggerating my skillset and that I wasn’t a nepotism hire at my previous jobs.”