3 ms·
Not being able to get 100% of the small edge cases the first time on complex algorithms problems. --every large tech company
by user1324345 8y ago
Not being able to get 100% of the small edge cases the first time on complex algorithms problems.
--every large tech company
- NTDF9 8y agoThis. You can be a gold standard human who invented a distributed database. But at a large company, you're not going to be hired if you can't solve some string subsequence problem.
- cbluth 8y agoa million times this.
- marssaxman 8y agoMaybe that's how it works at Amazon and Apple, but that wasn't my experience when I interviewed at Microsoft (twice!), Google, or Facebook. They weren't especially complex algorithm problems, either (how complex can it really get, when you're doing it on a whiteboard?). You just have to be able to think your way through a problem and explain what you're doing as you go; you should know what assumptions you're making about the limits of the problem, what you might do differently with different assumptions, and what kind of performance characteristics you should expect with those tradeoffs. There were definitely some complex design problems, especially during the Google interview, but I have really never experienced anything like the supposed "gotcha" coding interviews people stress out about so much.