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What would you say are examples of meaningful vs. pointless CS questions? Anecdotally speaking, I've heard of senior engineer interviews where the candidate has

What would you say are examples of meaningful vs. pointless CS questions? Anecdotally speaking, I've heard of senior engineer interviews where the candidate has an impressive resume but has difficulty coding solutions to "basic" problems.

bkovacev 9y ago
For a senior role - "Basic"/pointless problems are those algo questions you would ask at the big 4. Rarely will you find a senior level engineer knowing the best solution to inverting a binary tree or any other text book problem you know because 9/10 times those are not used at all in any of the most common real world cases. However, what meaningful questions will cover are advanced architectural problems, particular inner workings of a tool/framework, how to squeeze in the last few drops of optimization etc. Conversation should flow without any major breaks and the most experienced engineers will talk about edge cases of edge cases, thus continuing the conversation themselves. You can discuss different types of architectural patterns, ins and outs of each one and how it can be applied to a particular problem. You should not waste the engineers time on textbook questions if you value yourself or the interviewee, and as the parent comment stated - the engineer should walk out if they start asking "basic" questions. Someone that worked in the industry for 10-15 years should not be bothered with them.
pmorici 9y ago
Do you want employees who when they need to sort something their first thought is "I'll write this from scratch"? Pretty much every language and framework out there has it's own optimized sorting algorithm provided by the standard library of the language. In the rare cases where for whatever reason that isn't the right answer you'd be better off with someone who knows how to properly research a problem and find a solution based on the particulars not repeat some standard line from their University CS classes.

bkovacev 9y ago

For a senior role - "Basic"/pointless problems are those algo questions you would ask at the big 4. Rarely will you find a senior level engineer knowing the best solution to inverting a binary tree or any other text book problem you know because 9/10 times those are not used at all in any of the most common real world cases. However, what meaningful questions will cover are advanced architectural problems, particular inner workings of a tool/framework, how to squeeze in the last few drops of optimization etc. Conversation should flow without any major breaks and the most experienced engineers will talk about edge cases of edge cases, thus continuing the conversation themselves. You can discuss different types of architectural patterns, ins and outs of each one and how it can be applied to a particular problem. You should not waste the engineers time on textbook questions if you value yourself or the interviewee, and as the parent comment stated - the engineer should walk out if they start asking "basic" questions. Someone that worked in the industry for 10-15 years should not be bothered with them.

pmorici 9y ago

Do you want employees who when they need to sort something their first thought is "I'll write this from scratch"? Pretty much every language and framework out there has it's own optimized sorting algorithm provided by the standard library of the language. In the rare cases where for whatever reason that isn't the right answer you'd be better off with someone who knows how to properly research a problem and find a solution based on the particulars not repeat some standard line from their University CS classes.