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Having done interviews at a few of time, I'd say that's mostly false, at least for the last 2-3 years. As far as I can tell, there's always a pre-defined pool
by rb2k_ 10y ago
Having done interviews at a few of time, I'd say that's mostly false, at least for the last 2-3 years.
As far as I can tell, there's always a pre-defined pool of questions. Some of them are pretty 'open ended', but still targeted towards getting a good impression of a certain area of knowledge.
That being said, I had an interview with Google at some point in the past where one of the interviewers almost seemed appalled that I didn't know the exact list of items that can be found in a filesystem superblock. But at all other companies it seemed a bit more sane. I guess it's partially a function of the type of personalities a company is willing to hire :)
- anonymoushn 10y agoRecently I failed an interview at Facebook because I chose to serialize a binary tree into a list of N items, rather than a list of N items and O(N) sentinels. Most of the interview was spent convincing the interviewer that this could possibly be correct.
- dastbe 10y agowas it a binary tree or a binary search tree? a BST can be uniquely identified by one of pre/post-order traversal, whereas a binary tree requires an in-order traversal and one other. or placing sentinels that specify a state machine [PUSH_LEFT, PUSH_RIGHT, POP] that specify how to move down and up the tree structure.
- anonymoushn 10y agoIt was a BST.
- z3t4 10y agoi recently failed a programming test after acing all tests except one where i needed a text diff and pulled in a library instead of writing my own in less then ten minutes. they said i need to get better at algos. which is fair. but i dont know anyone that can program a decent working text diff in less then ten minutes.
- mquander 10y agoBased on your description, it sounds possible they were just looking for a Levenshtein distance implementation, which is definitely in the Universal Weird Corpus of Interview Questions and for which people who prepare for interviews a ton would have a good shot.
- flukus 9y agoI ported a diff algorithm (a simple one at that) just a few months ago because the language I was working in didn't have one. I couldn't do it off the top of my head today, or probably the day after, it was transient knowledge that I didn't even try to remember.
- mquander 10y agoWhy did you conclude that you failed because of that? That sounds like a pass with flying colors. Did you specifically get feedback about that segment?
- anonymoushn 10y agoIn the few remaining minutes after we agreed that it was possible to correctly deserialize a tree serialized in this way, I did not produce a linear time deserializer.
- mquander 10y ago:-(
- akhilcacharya 9y agon sentinels? What do you mean? Do you mean characters to indicate a null child?
- tptacek 10y agoCareful. First and most obviously, the "pool of questions" concept is structured only if you have a Google-scale volume of candidates and reliably assigning specific subsets of those questions to candidates. But even then, for such a process to be rigorously structured, the questions themselves need to be determined a priori and without reference to the candidates background or preferences. Otherwise: * You're subject to the interviewers and judges (probably subconscious) biases about the merits of different questions. * You're more exposed to the candidates own innate ability to interview well by navigating themselves to more easily-answered questions.