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If you were on your country's IOI team, you shouldn't be complaining about whiteboard problems. I think the major flaw of interviews is that if you did competit

by rcheu 11y ago

If you were on your country's IOI team, you shouldn't be complaining about whiteboard problems. I think the major flaw of interviews is that if you did competitive programming ever, they're super easy. If you did Olympiad training and are still bad at whiteboard/algorithms, I think that's actually a reasonable signal.

akamaka 11y ago
Spot on! Every good competition coder I've met loves the whiteboard part of the interview and would happily crack away at problems for hours.
- kafkaesq 11y ago
  If you think the only good coders are competitions coders... then put that in your posted job requirements: "Must l-o-v-e solving hyperidealized problems with clearcut answers, under gratuitous time pressure, while being watched with others (who already know the answer). For hours on end. Because that's what we do all day here. Serial olympiadists, hackerrank aficciandos, and other competition coders only need apply." It's really quite simple to do, and will (by drastically narrowing your candidate pool) make your filtering process much easier, I'm sure.
  - akamaka 11y ago
    I was responding to what the OP said about how he has lots of olympiad experience but didn't like demonstrating coding in interviews, which sounds bogus to me. I'll be honest, I did rate coding interviews as very important, but I changed my mind after working with some really great people who do really badly at them.
    - kafkaesq 11y ago
      From my reading of the blogpost, I don't see any reason to infer that he "didn't like demonstrating coding in interviews", per se. He did suggest that some of the problems one gets asked to solve are gratuitously hard, which correlates with my own experience. He also fairly acknowledged that he was getting a lot of rejection for other, e.g. cultural reasons. So it would seem that it's getting rejected, not "demonstrating coding in interviews" that he doesn't like.

by rcheu 11y ago

akamaka 11y ago

Spot on! Every good competition coder I've met loves the whiteboard part of the interview and would happily crack away at problems for hours.

kafkaesq 11y ago
If you think the only good coders are competitions coders... then put that in your posted job requirements: "Must l-o-v-e solving hyperidealized problems with clearcut answers, under gratuitous time pressure, while being watched with others (who already know the answer). For hours on end. Because that's what we do all day here. Serial olympiadists, hackerrank aficciandos, and other competition coders only need apply." It's really quite simple to do, and will (by drastically narrowing your candidate pool) make your filtering process much easier, I'm sure.
- akamaka 11y ago
  I was responding to what the OP said about how he has lots of olympiad experience but didn't like demonstrating coding in interviews, which sounds bogus to me. I'll be honest, I did rate coding interviews as very important, but I changed my mind after working with some really great people who do really badly at them.
  - kafkaesq 11y ago
    From my reading of the blogpost, I don't see any reason to infer that he "didn't like demonstrating coding in interviews", per se. He did suggest that some of the problems one gets asked to solve are gratuitously hard, which correlates with my own experience. He also fairly acknowledged that he was getting a lot of rejection for other, e.g. cultural reasons. So it would seem that it's getting rejected, not "demonstrating coding in interviews" that he doesn't like.