5 ms·

If you're not interested in the algorithm bingo as /u/x0x0 put it (great description, by the way), then I would highly suggest focusing more on working at small

If you're not interested in the algorithm bingo as /u/x0x0 put it (great description, by the way), then I would highly suggest focusing more on working at smaller companies that need intelligent people with experience. They don't care about people who can sort things in polynomial time or whatever; they need people who can hit the ground running and really help them out. And I'm not necessarily talking about the 3-person mom and pop shop down the street. Even companies with hundreds of people are often starving for good employees.

kafkaesq 10y ago
FB doesn't "need" people who can actually solve problems like these with a clock ticking (because basically no one can) -- or even people capable of regurgitating the answers. They're just mindlessly following the fad like everyone else -- only they seem to think they're being clever and taking it "up to the next level" by having people live-code NP-complete problems in front of a recruiter.
- im_down_w_otp 10y ago
  Yeah, these kinds of interviews are epically stupid. What's worse is that practices like this and similar ones from places like Google, etc. give credibility to dumb things that make for a terribly inefficient (at best) or outright toxic (at worst) job marketplace. Other places follow the same practice because they hold these market leading companies up on a pedestal, which is tantamount to argument by appeal to authority. But, but, but all the top companies do this and they're successful!!! Yeah, well they're successful despite stupid practices like this, not because of them. Their business models are so resilient that they can tolerate a whole shitload of failures in other aspects or dimensions and still come out on top.
  - srtjstjsj 10y ago
    Do you think that the people who invented PageRank and planet scale social graphs and virtualized server hardware and advertising auctions and personalizatio models were not capable of solving computer science homework problems?
    - im_down_w_otp 10y ago
      1. I'm nearly 100% certain they're not hiring for the position of "Co-founder". 2. I'm nearly 100% certain they couldn't derive, in real-time and in-scope of the interview, the solution to a PhD thesis problem they had never heard of before, nor previously been given the answer to simply to recall it later. 3. I'm nearly 100% sure that if they can do #2, then they should be interviewing for #1 someplace else, not trying to become employee # X-thousandth-and-one in a mature enterprise, or that they'd never be asked these questions to begin with because they'd be interviewing for a job that was directly related to and based on their own pre-existing published academic works. I'll start to believe that these companies are pioneering best-practices around hiring when their frontline recruiters are psychiatrists and psychologists who specialize in proficiency assessment and personality profiling.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- auganov 10y ago
  When you've got 1000s of decent people applying you can't have enough half-decent sieves. You don't care about the false negatives, you only want to avoid false positives. The people that are hurting themselves are companies applying these methods to small applicant pools.
  - kafkaesq 10y ago
    You don't care about the false negatives, you only want to avoid false positives. You might want to re-examine this assumption more critically. With a high enough false negative rate, you end up burning out your candidate pool (and severely deterring those who "failed" from every applying again). Google themselves discovered this a few years ago when they did a fundamental re-evaluation of their hiring process -- having come to the conclusion that their previous filtering methods were woefully ineffective at predicting actual on-job performance. And specifically went back to their databases to try to re-recruit many of the people who had been "flushed" by the earlier incarnations of their filtering process.

kafkaesq 10y ago

FB doesn't "need" people who can actually solve problems like these with a clock ticking (because basically no one can) -- or even people capable of regurgitating the answers. They're just mindlessly following the fad like everyone else -- only they seem to think they're being clever and taking it "up to the next level" by having people live-code NP-complete problems in front of a recruiter.

im_down_w_otp 10y ago
Yeah, these kinds of interviews are epically stupid. What's worse is that practices like this and similar ones from places like Google, etc. give credibility to dumb things that make for a terribly inefficient (at best) or outright toxic (at worst) job marketplace. Other places follow the same practice because they hold these market leading companies up on a pedestal, which is tantamount to argument by appeal to authority. But, but, but all the top companies do this and they're successful!!! Yeah, well they're successful despite stupid practices like this, not because of them. Their business models are so resilient that they can tolerate a whole shitload of failures in other aspects or dimensions and still come out on top.
- srtjstjsj 10y ago
  Do you think that the people who invented PageRank and planet scale social graphs and virtualized server hardware and advertising auctions and personalizatio models were not capable of solving computer science homework problems?
  - im_down_w_otp 10y ago
    1. I'm nearly 100% certain they're not hiring for the position of "Co-founder". 2. I'm nearly 100% certain they couldn't derive, in real-time and in-scope of the interview, the solution to a PhD thesis problem they had never heard of before, nor previously been given the answer to simply to recall it later. 3. I'm nearly 100% sure that if they can do #2, then they should be interviewing for #1 someplace else, not trying to become employee # X-thousandth-and-one in a mature enterprise, or that they'd never be asked these questions to begin with because they'd be interviewing for a job that was directly related to and based on their own pre-existing published academic works. I'll start to believe that these companies are pioneering best-practices around hiring when their frontline recruiters are psychiatrists and psychologists who specialize in proficiency assessment and personality profiling.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
auganov 10y ago
When you've got 1000s of decent people applying you can't have enough half-decent sieves. You don't care about the false negatives, you only want to avoid false positives. The people that are hurting themselves are companies applying these methods to small applicant pools.
- kafkaesq 10y ago
  You don't care about the false negatives, you only want to avoid false positives. You might want to re-examine this assumption more critically. With a high enough false negative rate, you end up burning out your candidate pool (and severely deterring those who "failed" from every applying again). Google themselves discovered this a few years ago when they did a fundamental re-evaluation of their hiring process -- having come to the conclusion that their previous filtering methods were woefully ineffective at predicting actual on-job performance. And specifically went back to their databases to try to re-recruit many of the people who had been "flushed" by the earlier incarnations of their filtering process.