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Stanford CS9: Problem-Solving for the CS Technical Interview

• oneplane 9y ago
  Maybe it's just me, but this seems to either miss the point of a CS interview, or makes a point about CS interviews containing pointless parts making them trivial. If an interview contains a known set of possible questions and you simply remember the answers, than in the end the whole exercise is somewhat pointless, isn't it?
  • jorgec 9y ago
    Yes, and there are a lot of HR that get cheated by simply remembering the answers.
  • pkaye 9y ago
    Yes you are right. This is why I take some standard problems but change things a little bit so they have to think a bit. And I ask additional questions like how would you test this function, how to change improve performance, etc.
  • ubernostrum 9y ago
    Yes. People who claim that typical interview processes test "coding" or "CS fundamentals" or "algorithmic thinking" or whatever basically have to face the fact that they've really been testing for a set of skills that's different from what's needed by a working programmer. If they were testing for the actual skills of a programmer, there wouldn't be a cottage industry of books and classes and training materials to learn how to do "interview coding".
• czardoz 9y ago
  This is what I was afraid of. I always thought interviews were something where you present your abilities, experience and knowledge. It should not be something you "prepare" for because then you're not showing off your skills, instead you're just regurgitating what you are trained to do. I do somewhat blame the whiteboard culture, but I guess that's the one that has given the best results so far. I've no doubt that it will change soon.
  • Rebelgecko 9y ago
    The idea of having a whole class on how to solve interview whiteboard problems (a skill that is, at least where I work, not very relevant to doing your job) is terrifying.
    • electricslpnsld 9y ago
      This isn't that far removed from an algorithms or data structures class, or what you would learn in one of those programming olympics type prep courses that people do.
    • mathattack 9y ago
      It’s 1 pass/fail credit out of 180 to graduate. The course looks as much like how to job hunt as anything else. (Resume writing, etc)
      • colmvp 9y ago
        In design school, we had one class which involved things like developing your portfolio, learning how to present yourselves to companies, interviews with Creative Directors, etc. Given that technical interviews a common method of partially evaluating engineers/developers, it doesn't strike me as particularly odd for a practical course to exist that helps students maximize their ability to get a job. As you mentioned, it's really only one class out of dozens of others they'll take over several years. Myself, I took a number of electives that had far less practical impact on my career trajectory.
        • Bukhmanizer 9y ago
          I don't think most people have a problem with the class itself. It's more that the technical interview has gotten away from a practical method of showing what you know, and is now becoming a skill to maximize itself, whether or not it actually demonstrates if you can do the job. To take an absurd example, imagine if for some reason Law firms started requiring an Irish Stepdancing component to their hiring process. I'm sure broadly speaking, you'll see the most dedicated lawyers practicing away on nights and weekends, and the best Law Schools with the best students will hire the best Irish Stepdancing teachers. But at the end of the day, Irish Stepdancing has very little to do with practicing Law. Similarly, if solving stupid whiteboard problems has so little to do with being a Software Engineer, that they can't be learned in the 40+ other courses or internships/PT work, that a student will have to do in their time at University, then the question is why are they even done?
• adamnemecek 9y ago
  I know this has been said a billion times but the CS interview is bullshit. It's like asking a pianist to describe how they would play a composition on the white board. I always thought that this is a good question to ask https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when but then again probably not for all roles. It's good because even if the interviewee has seen the question, you can really gauge how much they know.
  • nnd 9y ago
    Still very gameable, and only test domain knowledge, rather than problem-solving skills.
• cat199 9y ago
  If a stanford CS degree doesn't otherwise prepare students properly for a tech interview, I'm going to wager it is the interview process that has a problem, not the stanford CS degree..
  • adamnemecek 9y ago
    You are right but like just having to use the fucking white board is different enough to throw people off.
• jdiaz5513 9y ago
  This makes me very, very sad. I will never subject one of my potential hires to this nonsense. These concepts are valuable and academically interesting, for sure, but for the practical kind of engineering that's done at most companies it's simply not needed. Either that or it's already implemented in a library. What a waste of time.
  • akhilcacharya 9y ago
    I'm sympathetic to this viewpoint but looking at the cost/benefit for a Stanford student I think the benefit to studying for these interviews is clear - its a bit of a simplification, but for Facebook if you can do 3-6 problems over the course of 2 60 minute internship interviews you have the ability to get a $75k-$100k signing bonus if you convert to full time in addition to more shares over 4 years. Granted this depends on whether you're a high performer during the internship but I definitely understand why someone would make or take this class.
    • sidlls 9y ago
      I recently got a promotion to management. I have different responsibilities, but I get paid more and have more influence over solutions to interesting engineering and technical problems. This role feels even more like what my engineer friends in real engineering disciplines do than my role as Lead did: leverage their education and experience to solve complex, large scale problems. These interviews are good at testing for jobs in software that have as an analog jobs in real engineering equivalent disciplines consisting of computing CRC integrals by hand all day. What I'm saying is: unless these students just want to sit around repeating their DS&A course(s) over and over again the rest of their lives, this sort of interview, job, and prep course is counterproductive in the long term.
      • jdiaz5513 9y ago
        Careful. Software engineering is very much a real engineering discipline, and it is a major cultural failing to not recognize it as such. Required viewing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDEpeWQHtFU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDEpeWQHtFU
• akhilcacharya 9y ago
  I've been through the ringer quite a few times now (though less than the average Stanford student) and I think about these interviews more than I probably should just for my sanity. This is a decent primer (and people need primers!) and a good resource overall but I'm very skeptical that this is terribly helpful for most interviews. I liked some of the problems but most are about a notch lower in difficulty than required for the offers Stanford students get. With that said, it's clear that the students that take this class are going to do well in their internship and job search. I'm honestly just becoming more convinced that ability to perform in these interviews is an inherent quality of top students (no matter the original field!) at this point.
• andoma 9y ago
  FWIW the second example of finding halfway points in https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs9/sample_probs/ListShuffling.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs9/sample_probs/ListShufflin... is buggy. Crashes if the list have odd number of elements.
  • stephencanon 9y ago
    "Your job is to write a function that accepts as input a pointer to a linked list with an even number of elements"
    • andoma 9y ago
      Fair enough :-) I'll read more thorough next time.
    • cabaalis 9y ago
      Would writing it to handle odd numbers of elements as well cause the employer to move forward with a different candidate?
      • SmirkingRevenge 9y ago
        Maybe. All other things being equal, they might need a reason to cut you, and hire the other guy. If you failed to complete the problem or took longer than expected to complete it because of extra complexity entailed by a more "correct", out-of-scope solution, it may especially cost you - even if in the end, your solution was "smarter". Maybe the other guy noted that there are a couple of ways to solve the problem, and asked a clarifying question about it.
      • lmartel 9y ago
        This may not have been a serious question but I'll give a serious answer: depending on the interviewer, you could get bonus points for going "above and beyond" or, yes, you could be penalized for "not reading the spec." I've found that the best way to handle it in a conventional whiteboard interview is to mention it when appropriate and offer to add the functionality later. "Now, here's the part of the code where I'd deal with odd N. Since we're guaranteed even N in the problem statement I'll skip this for now, but we can come back to harden this function later if you like."
• kjgkjhfkjf 9y ago
  Two more of my favorite interview questions rendered useless :C
• lz400 9y ago
  I think this is terrible. I feel there are many good engineers that can't possibly compete for decent jobs in tech companies because they haven't spent 6-12 months reading cracking the code interview, doing this Stanford course, practicing mock interviews in crowdsourced websites, getting their leetcode rank up, attending bootcamps where they pad their githubs and practicing any single interview question they can scrub off glassdoor. All things that are marginally useful in the job at hand. And this is getting worse all the time.
  • twblalock 9y ago
    It's really not that hard. I suppose there might be a few companies with insane expectations, but most interviews don't require that level of preparation.
    • lz400 9y ago
      I don't know. If all the candidates are that well prepared, then if you are not you are at a disadvantage, even if it didn't used to require it. And at companies where people want to work for, like Google/amazon/FB/Netflix, etc. and startups many people come prepared.
      • bearforcenine 9y ago
        No matter what system you use to interview people, if the position is desirable enough, and the number of positions is smaller than the applicant pool, isn't gaming the system the expected outcome? If people at Google were interviewed by juggling raquetballs, there would be books, courses, etc. on how to juggle better. People are willing to pay for this prep because they want to work at Google. Eventually most everyone interviewing at Google would be very well prepared to juggle.
        • lz400 9y ago
          Sure but if that were the case wouldn't you think it's silly that you need to train months to be able to juggle to land a SWE position? wouldn't it be stupid? the current interview culture in those companies is not as silly as juggling but is also not a fair representation of candidates, with too much weight being in algorithmic puzzles and behavioral checkboxes you can train for. Obviously if the process was a 100% fair assessment of knowledge and potential and people do better than you then good for them.
• starchild_3001 9y ago
  I kinda like the idea of having an intense data structures and algorithms class for hands-on problem solving. If a candidate has shown an ability to solve several hundred medium+ DS & Algo questions on the spot, that gives him an edge up in day to day to programming. Not everybody can do that. You can supplement that with other areas (concurrency; distributed systems; execution latency, memory management etc; quirks of and design ideas behind your favorite programming language). I think this class can be a good prep for day to day programming.
  • SmirkingRevenge 9y ago
    I hate the interviews as much as anybody... but really I wish that kind of instruction had been a bigger part of my college curriculum. Yea, we had data structures classes, algorithm classes - but none of them really made me good at any of them. Not like how math classes makes you good at the math, by forcing you to solve problems over and over, until it becomes nearly instinctual. I've actually become a better programmer by practicing interview problems, because they ultimately are a bit like the arithmetic involved in solving more large scale problems.
    • yeukhon 9y ago
      Yeah, I agree on the last part. Practice helps. Memorizing solution doesn't. It takes effort to crack those Leetcode problems.
• foobaw 9y ago
  Don't programming bootcamp classes do this kind of thing too? I feel like this just increases the probability for a student to do well on the interview. If you read their intro slide, it clearly states "Level the playing field between applicants who may learn these things through informal mentoring in their friend network, and those who would otherwise not know this stuff" It's kind of sad that there's a trick that needs to be learned to solve technical interviews without testing the candidates' inherent knowledge, but at the moment, this could seem like the most logical way to get a good job for a Stanford CS student with no knowledge on technical interviews.
• FullMtlAlcoholc 9y ago
  To everyone bemoaning the introduction of a class such as this, it's a 1 credit class, which at Stanford roughly translates to about 3hrs/week of work given that you're expected to take 15 credits per quarter. It is comparable to a class on financial responsibility or golf. Its focus isn't so much on how to crack a technical interview than it is on how to prepare for a job interview in general. Mock interviews, resume writing and critiques, life at startups, how to answer team/behavioral questions, and panels of employers and employees are all covered with sample whiteboard/coding problems only being given one week of attention. This is simply preparation for how to professionally navigate the job landscape.
• NTDF9 9y ago
  So, Stanford grads can't pass interviews without training for it. Looks like a degree is really worthless. Al that matters is memorizing these problems.
• MollyR 9y ago
  A whole class for technical interviews seems like overkill. It also gives me an uneasy feeling of being in a tech bubble.
  • bearforcenine 9y ago
    This kind of prep has been common place in other desirable fields for many years. Law, medicine, finance. They all have books, classes, etc. that you can take to prepare for interviewing, taking the bar, mcat, etc. Compared to college admissions, the CS interview process looks downright sane.
    • seanmcdirmid 9y ago
      They all have prep for everything but interviewing. An interview to get a residency or a junior assistant position will be much more about your credentials and a history of your performance.
      • bearforcenine 9y ago
        Finance at least has prep for interviewing for investment banking, trading, and consulting. When I was in undergrad it was common to have mock interviews and prep for commonly asked interview questions. Most people prepped on being able to walk you through basic financial statements, valuation, brain teasers, case interviews, and stuff like that. I'll take your word for the other fields as I can't speak directly to interview vs exams there.
      • bitL 9y ago
        Quants have insane interviews as well.
• watwut 9y ago
  If there is whole course on "interviewing", in or of top schools no less, then the interviews really became divorced from any meaning. That should be seen as major red flag that industry is doing something wrong. Maybe there should not be cookie cutter interview at all, but more of harder look at which skills and personality traits are really needed for this or that position. And I tend to do good on whiteboard interviews.
• bb88 9y ago
  I always thought the the technical white board interview never really matched what was expected. A binary tree search has little to do with figuring out the pros and cons of which api to code against. How about a scenario where you get to try to find a bug with legacy code?
• davesque 9y ago
  The on-the-spot technical interview is the biggest waste of time in the history of humanity. Everyone underperforms in technical interviews. I've conducted a number of them and I've never learned a single thing other than the fact that people make surprising mistakes when under pressure in contrived situations. Here's something that I think works much better: come up with a novel challenge that requires a couple hours of honest effort and have candidates present their solution to you when they come in.
  • bearforcenine 9y ago
    How do you prevent cheating? Someone can very easily have a friend complete the challenge and walk them through it in a lot of detail. They could prep well enough that you hire someone who is massively under-qualified. Then if your company is large enough, your novel challenge gets leaked and everyone knows it ahead of time. Solutions start being sold or distributed. Then your interview is meaningless. I'm all for a viable alternative to the whiteboard interview, but I haven't encountered one yet.
    • davesque 9y ago
      If your challenge is novel, as I said, then it should be difficult for them to cheat. All the same, people are welcome to cheat. It should become clear that they've done so when you're interviewing them if you ask the right questions when they're explaining what they did. And if they somehow make it through anyway, you should be evaluating the quality of their work until they get established in your company. If they're underperforming over the first month, you should be showing them the door.
      • bearforcenine 9y ago
        Any challenge that doesn't change across applicants at a company that has a large enough applicant pool, will eventually be solved and prepared for so well, that almost any question you can ask will be prepped for. Beyond that, if you do use a single question, you're now playing a game of whack-a-mole: I used to ask this question about the challenge, now I can't because it is leaked and people prepped for it. How do you scale that across an engineering organization? Do you have weekly meeting with every interviewer informing them of the questions about the challenge that are now blacklisted? It's going to be infeasible for any reasonable sized organization. The challenge with this idea as well is that the risk of false positives is much higher than the whiteboard interview. The current interview process is designed around minimizing false negatives. False positives are really costly to an engineering organization. It's not good for morale when engineers are being hired and fired in the same month on a regular basis. It's takes time to onboard, and slows the team down. It's also not good for the company reputation - would you apply to a company who had a reputation of firing a good chunk of its new software engineers within the first month?
• mariopt 9y ago
  What the hell? Shouldn't we focus on creating great engineers instead of training them to make a good impression on an interview? I think is completely immoral. Becoming good at something is a matter of consistent practice that brings experience and expertise over time. There is not other way around it. People might pass the interview but their hat will fall in a matter of weeks. This is PUA for interviews by a University, this is really depressing. The only thing that gives me hope is that great engineers will always solve problems no matter what. Tech hiring is going to become much harder.
  • ksml 9y ago
    This is a _single_ pass/no pass unit out of 180 required to graduate. Stanford absolutely focuses on creating great engineers (or computer scientists, for those more interested in the math or theory sides), but it still helps to have a small course pointing out tips and things to look for in the interviewing process.
• quotheth 9y ago
  Say what you will about the state of the software dev interview, it sounds like it could be a fun class.
• fecak 9y ago
  I'm glad they are teaching students about resume writing, and hopefully the professors are versed in hiring outside academia. I write hundreds of resumes a year for my clients, and a high percentage of young clients are using really poor resumes when they engage my services. It seems many new grads are being drawn to highly-visualized resumes with fancy templates, often featuring a bar graph for skills ranking (some ranking themselves as "8 out of 10 in JavaScript", which comes across as laughable and out of touch). My feelings on memorizing data structures aside, the resume lessons may at least help some grads get interviews that they wouldn't have otherwise, and that's a good thing.
• tw1010 9y ago
  This is a natural response to the incentive structure that has evolved. But fear not, the fact that this metric is being overemphasized to this large a degree surely must mean that the adversarial species (the industry) will respond by changing their strategy. The more universities focus on vanity metrics (helping students build their peacock tail), the more likely it is that the industry realizes the kink in their armour and shifts to some wiser signaling measure.
• tinokid 9y ago
  Could there be a clearer sign that the quality of higher education in our time is in steep decline? If, one hundred years ago, Oxbridge had floated the idea of sanctioning a student to embark on a program of study designed to anticipate questions that might arise in a job interview, it would have been as preposterous as suggesting that the Queen should take her meals in a pub. And yet today, we have one of the preeminent universities not just of the United States but of the world offering a course that appears to amount to Kaplan for a tech job.
  • bearforcenine 9y ago
    I doubt this is a sign of a decline in quality of higher ed, and more a sign of the popularity of CS as a major and software engineering as a career. These kinds of courses and prep has existed in similarly popular fields for many yeas: law, medicine, finance, etc.
    • tinokid 9y ago
      1) Those are professional schools 2) Even so, no respectable law school offers a bar prep class. Nor does any med school offer "How to ace the USMLE".
      • sjg007 9y ago
        But do most law school grads take bar prep classes?
        • lr4444lr 9y ago
          Yes, but good law schools aren't squandering the value of their most cherished currency on them - the reputation of their course credits in the world of academia.
      • eli_gottlieb 9y ago
        >1) Those are professional schools And a computer science degree is deliberately, emphatically NOT a professional training regimen towards a career in software engineering.
• Yhippa 9y ago
  As crazy as these interviews are they have to be working right? Some people must be passing these things otherwise there would be a lot of unfilled positions. So much for there being a staffing shortage in our field. These types of interviews imply there is a much higher bar that exists to weed out all the chaff due to oversupply or companies won't settle for anything less than the most academically best people.
  • seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    Not everyone is (or pays as well as) Google. Many companies don't have a bar as high, there is still a lot of work for B and C players to do (albeit, that is probably true even at Google).
  • expertentipp 9y ago
    > Some people must be passing these things otherwise there would be a lot of unfilled positions. The point is - there are a lot of unfilled positions. Companies notoriously complain for not being able to find "good" software specialists, because... people with minimal clue on how to judge relevant skills introduce increasingly more cut-throat filters and processalize everything.
• adjkant 9y ago
  My school does co-op's and has a 1 credit co-op prep course. We do have practice interviewing there. We also do resume workshops, general best practices for the industry you're in, etc. You can do both the content and the prep, as I am sure is the case with Stanford CS. While it's unique to have a course specifically named for this and am sad to see it as well, I don't think this is as big as people are making it out to be, nor is it a canary in the coal mine for higher education. To me, this only signifies the growing shift in education, as it becomes more available to all, being about preparing for your career as much as learning itself. The simple fact is that most attending college today are not doing so just out of the desire to learn alone, but also want to, well, have a nice career in their respective industry. To be able to make a living. While I would also agree with cautioning about education for career alone, I think it's important that modern education focuses on both. It's the reality of an increasingly college educated world.
  • Eridrus 9y ago
    Hey it could be worse, people could be getting a degree because they need it for signaling purposes and/or to satisfy an arbitrary immigration bureaucracy and don't actually need any of the things they're being taught. Oh, wait :)
• keeptrying 9y ago
  Institutionalzing a broken process. :-/
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• Fazilka18 9y ago
  Stanford?! This is typically seen in India. Memorize and vomit!
• tentakull 9y ago
  What a joke, but I'm completely unsurprised. Prep for the SAT, prep for jobs, prep on the job - minus the whizkids, Stanford grads make great corporate drones.
  • akhilcacharya 9y ago
    Corporate drones that are paid $50-$100k more than me total comp their first year, yes.
• wbillingsley 9y ago
  I know universities are sometimes accused of "teaching for the test" anyway, but, well, wowsers
• methodin 9y ago
  Not all jobs require this preparation-style. If you don't like it - shop around and find companies with different styles that match your preference. Interviews are equally important to the interviewee as the interviewer.
• numbers 9y ago
  The last two places I've interviewed and was turned away would have loved a "software engineer" who had taken this class. I am a typical developer, I can get shit done but there are rough edges I have because I'm human. I think, interviewing in general is tough for me and when there's a set way of showing your abilities comes up, I'm not great at presenting that. My github is active, I work on things that a potential employer as well as fellow developers would be interested in and I also am trying to grow by showing bad, good, and some code that I'm very proud of on my github. But, the thing I noticed at the two aforementioned interviews was that they hadn't even taken a look at my github.
• bitL 9y ago
  Just wait until you start interviewing at even crazier companies than FB/Google that would like you to tell them 20 ML algorithms, 20 computer vision algorithms, compare expected results of non-linear optimizations applied to some weird Deep Learning problem and analytically justify it (why is it worse/better than SGD on this loss function?), then off to some deep domain knowledge, conjure graph algorithms on the spot on problems you've never seen before, all in 1.5h, expecting Stanford/MIT PhD-level answers.
  • reallymental 9y ago
    If you're interviewing at Deep Mind, sure.
  • optymizer 9y ago
    Sharing a data point: I've interviewed with Google multiple times and at no point during the interview was I asked a question that required an ML/CV/DL algorithm. I suspect those would be more appropriate for a 'data scientist' / 'researcher' position - for a generalist, the interviews were very standard and not crazy at all. In hindsight, if I had taken the time to review basic CS algorithms ahead of the interview, I would have done much better. That said, I'm not sure I'd be a better employee at Google if the only difference between my being hired or not hired is the fact that I reviewed some basic data structures and algorithms.
• yigitdemirag 9y ago
  “Most metrics are good until you start optimizing for any of them”
• kramer1416 9y ago
  Off-topic probably: This timing! I'm going to interview on Tuesday with a startup in SF. I've spent better part of last 3 weekends studying and solving DS&A. Any advice from HN on what could I do in ~14 hours of prep time?
  • bitL 9y ago
    Do Codelab at Facebook, sleep, avoid jetlag.
• sk2104 9y ago
  I understand this encourages an imperfect system, but I would have really appreciated this as an undergraduate who didn't understand how interviews worked. While the system is admittedly problematic, does it really come as a surprise that for extremely competitive jobs at the entry level, such artificial hurdles need to be used to filter the plethora of black-box applicants? I can't speak to more senior roles, but for entry-level, this only seems like a natural (and practical) response. It happens everywhere, not just CS: For any competitive school admissions, SAT/LSAT/MCAT what-have-you are all poor indicators of student performance, and boil down to trainable tests. In finance (both quant finance/and positions like sell side banking, private equity), people constantly practice math/financial modeling/accounting, for interviews. Many of the more selective quant shops (for undergrad hiring, I should mention) have much more difficult problems than MS/GOOG/AMZN technical interviews, and I would argue the type of competition level math/probability are just as unrelated to their jobs. In management consulting, people spend hundreds of hours practicing for case study interviews. Just search consulting interview prep, and you'll find an egregious number of prep companies. Some people brought up law and medicine. First, I don't think the grueling nature of the medicine certification is even close to what it takes to be an entry level developer. In law, while "technical" interviews are rare, often times employers filter you by much cruder means: pedigree (both the school you attend, and at top echelon law firms, clerkship status, and top-top grades within those schools). Is that any better? The common denominator here is the high demand for all of these schools/jobs, and the problem always seems to come down to, how to optimally recruit -given- resource constraints. Maybe I'm cynical but almost any reasonable entry-level interview can be "gamed" or trained for, and most firms are either small and lack resources to extensively evaluate their applicants holistically, especially if they're only in undergrad, or they are large and get way too many applicants, so some proxy is necessary.
• tzhenghao 9y ago
  How is this conceptually different than a course that focuses on standardized tests like the SAT? Having worked for only almost 2 years after college graduation, I can still see that there are many more technical and non-technical skills that affect one's and his/her colleagues' performance on the job. Being nice and helpful is one. Constantly learning from mistakes and rapidly iterating while adding value to the team/company is another. More examples: Picking up technical books, writing toy projects to learn new languages/frameworks/libraries and being able to come up with good engineering decisions. The list goes on. Not to be too salty about this, but I remember friends from college who are terrible teammates (no significant contributions to group projects, barely understanding the project material, but knowingly do so cause others will finish it for them etc.) but go on to get job offers from the Big Four. Having these technical whiteboard interviews will not filter for such soft skills that are needed to succeed in the workplace.
  • austenallred 9y ago
    People measure what’s easy to measure, not what’s valuable.
• abiox 9y ago
  maybe a bit meta but i've been wondering why course links are posted to HN. is this a tradition or something?
• pjmlp 9y ago
  This just feels wrong.
• RafiZ 9y ago
  As other commenters alluded, interviewing and coding are indeed two different skills. However, contrary to some of the comments, I don't think there is anything wrong with preparing for an interview or even taking an entire course for that matter. If it helps you shine and showcase your real skills to an employer then why not? I’ve seen many brilliant software engineers get rejected for positions cut out for them only because they were so nervous at interviews that they had trouble even understanding simple questions until right after the interview ended. I know that because I'm a co-founder at Pramp.com, a free p2p mock interviewing platform for software engineers. It's incredible to see the improvement in one's confidence even after a single practice interview.
• sov 9y ago
  Do people actually put "objective" on a resume? It seems laughably hackneyed. My experience is that something near 40% of people have it, and it usually is the most trite sentence possible.
• paulus_magnus2 9y ago
  Question from European side. We hear there's a shortage of good people in SV / USA. What if you plainly ignored all companies that whiteboard? There should be plenty well paying jobs left. disclaimer. a major tech company whiteboarded me twice (codility + live coding via google docs). They were really selective, none of my friends passed. In the end the job was lousy so ultimately the test selected more for willingness to jump through irrational hoops than productivity.
• sigi45 9y ago
  I trained for google and failed. Still it didn't feelt like stupid or a waste of time. It was interessting to do so, i think it made me better and i will try it again. And yes there are people who don't care enough to work for companies like google and there are. Also while i did more interviews as the person who is interviewing: I feel that i like to have more better prepared people to interview.