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>He suggested I open with something along the lines of "merge two sorted lists". We (my team at Amazon) don't start with a softball, but we try to make sure ev
by kevan 10y ago
>He suggested I open with something along the lines of "merge two sorted lists".
We (my team at Amazon) don't start with a softball, but we try to make sure every question can be down-leveled if someone is struggling. My current one degenerates to: "insert numbers in a sorted list, then find the index of a number in the list". A surprising number of people struggle with this.
I know lots of people get tripped up by graph and tree problems (myself included) because they don't use them in real life often, but simple lists are another story. At FaceGoogAzon scale you can't always rely on array.sort().
- emmelaich 10y agoFor a sysadmin/devopsy position I asked the interviewees to write a program in any language that gave the average of numbers given as command line args. Not one did it successfully. Most didn't even try. The best one assumed five numbers given. But we had to hire someone, and it wasn't this one. The deciders just hired the nicest person.
- jean_engineer 10y agoWow. Were these candidates with CS degrees? What was the problem? Did they not know how to parse command line args in any language? Not know how to compute an average? Not know how to do anything on the command line (or outside an IDE)? Something else?
- emmelaich 10y agoWe didn't go into it unfortunately. I don't want to ask it of the one we hired because I don't want to cause bad blood. :-( It's possible that what little programming they did in their 'information science' (or whatever degree, not straight CS) only involved Windows programming, and nothing on the command line.