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> Almost no one passes all their programming interviews. This is true because of randomness in many interview processes (even great people are bad at some thing
by Fiahil 11y ago
> Almost no one passes all their programming interviews. This is true because of randomness in many interview processes (even great people are bad at some things, and an interviewer focusing on this can yield a blocking no).
Reading this is somewhat reassuring. I've been over some interviews lately and I had some trouble getting past the tech phone screen.
One particular rejection was very frustrating, because I've spend quite some time preparing for the interview. Failed the first one. Got a second chance. And I knew it was over about 5 minutes after it began. "Can you write an algorithm that would sort efficiently this k-sorted array with a complexity strictly inferior to O(n log n)?". Yeah. No. Neither my job nor my hobbies includes sorting almost sorted arrays of integers, and O(n) complexity calculations.
It really seems to me that, being hired by a tech company is just completely random. Tech interviews in general are completely random. "Just a numbers game"
- taurath 11y agoNot completely random, but by my estimation being self-taught fully 40-60% of engineering organizations (trending higher as they get bigger) care much more deeply about academic CS than they do about whether you're able to ship a product. Those companies are looking for people who fit a mold (a generalized interface) so they can scale their teams out. Startups and smaller companies tend to value people who are flexible and can learn new things very quickly and are less likely to test you on alg analysis and are much more likely to throw you an unfamiliar problem and see how you solve it.
- Fiahil 11y agoI agree, I've been far more successful with startups than with bigger organizations. The irony is, I have a Master's degree in software engineering, but I never gave (until now) too much attention to these common O(n) sorting problems. In practice, I would end up using whatever standard library's default sort function and it would be perfectly okay for most use cases. I wish tech screens didn't rely so much on these exercises; I have limited brain space and I don't like to archive more important stuff.
- sliverstorm 11y agoWell, you could argue that maybe they aren't looking for somebody to use a library, maybe they're looking for someone to write a library.
- CardenB 11y agoIt's not "completely random". It's a process biased toward false negatives with some variance. I've managed to land some really stellar opportunities, and I've bombed several opportunities that are better, worse, and on par with my experience. Please get lucky and unlucky. The truth is, it's hard to tell which category you belong to. It's best to just try your best and try not to get discouraged. Someone will notice if you're talented, eventually.
- jpgvm 11y agoAt the end of the day that sort of interview process is a super huge red flag anyway. You don't want to work with people that value that sort of knowledge over actual ability to ship good code. Unless of course you are one of those people that cares about toy problems ofcourse, then you probably do want to work with other people like you.
- imh 11y agoIf you're really concerned and want to change that, I had great success with one of those books of practice interview questions. It sounds cheesy, but (obvious in retrospect) simply practicing the reasoning patterns tested in that kind of interview helped me do well in them.