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I've worked with some folks who were decent engineers who originally didn't get offers from FANG companies because they blew the interview; they later studied t

I've worked with some folks who were decent engineers who originally didn't get offers from FANG companies because they blew the interview; they later studied their ass off on leetcode and got offers. This did not make them better engineers at all. Ultimately, its just studying for the test, very much like the ACT/SAT in high school. You can be great at taking tests but ultimately a terrible student or vice versa.

fossuser 8y ago
It feels very much like that to me which is why it’s strange there isn’t a Kaplan equivalent. There’s interview cake and leetcode, but I think people would pay $2k for a class that focuses on the questions and in person whiteboard practice. They could collect information about the interviews at the major companies and then use those to create the program. For payment could also help candidates negotiate and then take a cut of the signing bonus. If this isn’t part of lambda school already I think it should be. I already work at a competitive tech company, but I’d sign up for this in a second to help me stay competitive for interviews.
- austenallred 8y ago
  > If this isn’t part of lambda school already I think it should be It’s part of classes for our existing students, but it isn’t a single offering. One day.
  - fossuser 8y ago
    Cool - if you need somebody to help I’d be interested.
- acb1990 8y ago
  App Academy was working on something like this, last time I checked. I believe it's more focused on people who've already been through their program working on getting the next-step-up job from their first so I don't know if it's generally advertised/ available
- pmiller2 8y ago
  Those courses are out there. I saw one for $5k and ran for, IIRC, 8 weeks, that covered the entire interview process.
  - Frost1x 8y ago
    I've noticed several groups that offer SE interview specific training out there now that I'm stepping through this interview process after the landscape has changed since my last position. It's funny that after doing some searching, many proponents of this widely adopted and poorly researched interviewing methodology appear to be running businesses selling training for these interview processes... surprise, surprise.
- chooseaname 8y ago
  The only way I would consider paying for a course like this is if, upon successfully completing it, I would not have to do the technical portion of the interview at companies I applied to. They would accept this cert and just do the soft skills interview.
  - Apocryphon 8y ago
    Sounds like a neat segment for Triplebyte to move to- or for a competitor to capitalize upon.
  - alboy 8y ago
    One could argue that CS undergraduate degrees are perfectly suited for this purpose. FAANG & Co don't seem to care for that. You've successfully passed a few dozen exams at MIT or Stanford? Well, let's make the reasonable assumption that you have no clue about algorithms and data structures and start with our third whiteboarding session, that should be a way better proxy for your knowledge.
    - erik_seaberg 8y ago
      Those incentives are misaligned. Not every law school grad can pass the bar.
      - alboy 8y ago
        They may very well be, but is the quality of signal truly worse than that which an interviewer can extract from a few hours of your writing code on the board?
        erik_seaberg 8y ago
        There are people with degrees who can't code. I'd prefer we don't hire them, so we ask for coding.
  - reificator 8y ago
    That's called college, and experience has shown that the people who have the certificate aren't guaranteed to know how to write a fizzbuzz.
- Apocryphon 8y ago
  The major ones seem to be Outco and Interview Kickstart. But agreed, there's far fewer whiteboarding/interview process-specific bootcamps compared to web/mobile bootcamps.
- TrinaryWorksToo 8y ago
  This is exactly what Outco.io does, and I highly recommend them for this purpose.
  - fossuser 8y ago
    Looks interesting - have you used them?
    - TrinaryWorksToo 8y ago
      Yes! I felt I was noticeably better at selling myself in interviews, which was my primary goal for going through them. I didn't feel I had enough of a support network to properly prepare otherwise. There's a lot of technical stuff, that goes by very quickly, and also equal amount of non-technical, this-is-how-recruiting-works content.
FabHK 8y ago
> This did not make them better engineers at all. How do you know? I understand that FANG have themselves come to the conclusion that brain teasers are not necessarily very predictive for engineering performance. But CS/programming questions for CS/programming roles? That seems sensible. You can study lots of vocabulary to achieve better results on the verbal section of the GRE or similar tests. But afterwards, you will, in fact, have better vocabulary, I submit. I am surprised that you categorically deny that they were better engineers after studying CS/programming questions.
- Buldak 8y ago
  >You can study lots of vocabulary to achieve better results on the verbal section of the GRE or similar tests. But afterwards, you will, in fact, have better vocabulary, I submit. Yeah, but tests like the GRE claim to predict academic performance, not vocabulary. So unless you think augmenting one's vocabulary alone will make one a substantially better student, there's still a gap there.
- ivanhoe 8y ago
  Oh, you'll certainly be better at solving programming puzzles type of problems, but the thing is that those questions usually don't translate well into real-life problems that you'll encounter at work later. You can't architect a good solution IRL by trying to figure our what the test author wanted you to do, like with programming puzzles. And for implementing some algorithm keeping every detail of it in head definitely helps, but it's not a significant advantage over someone who just googled all those details 10 minutes ago. So both types of tests are not testing the real dev capabilities, they test how much they prepared for the test. IMO only tasking the candidate to build some real piece of software or even better refactor some real code, with enough time and full access to google and stack overflow, and being fully able to ask other people for suggestions & help will show you the realistic picture of the candidate's future performance as a part of the dev team. Put them in a real situation and give them the real type of problems, and you'll get the real results. Everything else is like giving sudoku tests hoping to choose the best mathematician.
  - meko 8y ago
ng12 8y ago
If you're FANG you kind of want to hire that guy though -- the one who sees there's a task and a set of things he can do to accomplish that task. Same thing with the ACT/SAT, colleges want good test-takers because they're going to be giving a lot of tests.
tombert 8y ago
I go back and forth about how I feel about doing heavy algorithm/data-structure stuff in interviews. On the one hand, I have never once written any kind of sort algorithm or LRU cache by hand for a production system, because why would I? Pretty much every language's standard library has a fairly-optimized sort and caching thing built in, and if they don't then there's still probably a million outside libraries to do it for me. On the other hand, I genuinely do feel theory is really important. While not knowing the minutia of a tim-sort doesn't indicate that you'll be a bad engineer, not knowing the runtime efficiency of a sort can lead to some really awful code. Not knowing when to use a hash table instead of a nested-for loop can be a sign that you don't really know what you're doing, and not knowing some rough theory on concurrency indicates that I might be stuck debugging your race conditions or deadlock. I try to not be a complete jerk and I won't do stuff like give out an NP-complete problem (which an interviewer gave me once), nor will I ask for intimate details of how one would implement CSP, but I do tend to focus on theory-heavy questions more than my peers, but I try to give a fairly-generous amount of hints so that people don't get too stuck.
- bunderbunder 8y ago
  I'd be curious to see if there is any value in questions that focus on understanding of the basic ideas behind algorithms and data structures as a subject. Time complexity, sure, but what I would really want to know is, given a description of a data structure and some algorithms for manipulating it, can you identify the invariants that should be true of these rules? That sort of thing might give a better sense of if someone has an instinct for how to verify whether the code is working. And, by extension, if they have a grasp of some concepts that go a long way toward helping a person come up with more reliable and maintainable designs.
- Waterluvian 8y ago
  I think the important thing here is the difference between understanding complexity and implementing a sorting algorithm. If I were hiring a carpenter I would want to know they understand their tools and when to use them. I don't care if they don't know how to make them. But of course knowing how to make them suggests an intimate appreciation for the craft (looking your way Matthias Wandel)
fancyfish 8y ago
What's more, it's funny reading that Google sends out prep packets saying to learn/relearn these algorithms. So they don't expect their recruits to know them, just be able to memorize them for the interview.

fossuser 8y ago

It feels very much like that to me which is why it’s strange there isn’t a Kaplan equivalent. There’s interview cake and leetcode, but I think people would pay $2k for a class that focuses on the questions and in person whiteboard practice. They could collect information about the interviews at the major companies and then use those to create the program. For payment could also help candidates negotiate and then take a cut of the signing bonus. If this isn’t part of lambda school already I think it should be. I already work at a competitive tech company, but I’d sign up for this in a second to help me stay competitive for interviews.

austenallred 8y ago
> If this isn’t part of lambda school already I think it should be It’s part of classes for our existing students, but it isn’t a single offering. One day.
- fossuser 8y ago
  Cool - if you need somebody to help I’d be interested.
acb1990 8y ago
App Academy was working on something like this, last time I checked. I believe it's more focused on people who've already been through their program working on getting the next-step-up job from their first so I don't know if it's generally advertised/ available
pmiller2 8y ago
Those courses are out there. I saw one for $5k and ran for, IIRC, 8 weeks, that covered the entire interview process.
- Frost1x 8y ago
  I've noticed several groups that offer SE interview specific training out there now that I'm stepping through this interview process after the landscape has changed since my last position. It's funny that after doing some searching, many proponents of this widely adopted and poorly researched interviewing methodology appear to be running businesses selling training for these interview processes... surprise, surprise.
chooseaname 8y ago
The only way I would consider paying for a course like this is if, upon successfully completing it, I would not have to do the technical portion of the interview at companies I applied to. They would accept this cert and just do the soft skills interview.
- Apocryphon 8y ago
  Sounds like a neat segment for Triplebyte to move to- or for a competitor to capitalize upon.
- alboy 8y ago
  One could argue that CS undergraduate degrees are perfectly suited for this purpose. FAANG & Co don't seem to care for that. You've successfully passed a few dozen exams at MIT or Stanford? Well, let's make the reasonable assumption that you have no clue about algorithms and data structures and start with our third whiteboarding session, that should be a way better proxy for your knowledge.
  - erik_seaberg 8y ago
    Those incentives are misaligned. Not every law school grad can pass the bar.
    - alboy 8y ago
      They may very well be, but is the quality of signal truly worse than that which an interviewer can extract from a few hours of your writing code on the board?
      - erik_seaberg 8y ago
        There are people with degrees who can't code. I'd prefer we don't hire them, so we ask for coding.
- reificator 8y ago
  That's called college, and experience has shown that the people who have the certificate aren't guaranteed to know how to write a fizzbuzz.
Apocryphon 8y ago
The major ones seem to be Outco and Interview Kickstart. But agreed, there's far fewer whiteboarding/interview process-specific bootcamps compared to web/mobile bootcamps.
TrinaryWorksToo 8y ago
This is exactly what Outco.io does, and I highly recommend them for this purpose.
- fossuser 8y ago
  Looks interesting - have you used them?
  - TrinaryWorksToo 8y ago
    Yes! I felt I was noticeably better at selling myself in interviews, which was my primary goal for going through them. I didn't feel I had enough of a support network to properly prepare otherwise. There's a lot of technical stuff, that goes by very quickly, and also equal amount of non-technical, this-is-how-recruiting-works content.

FabHK 8y ago

> This did not make them better engineers at all. How do you know? I understand that FANG have themselves come to the conclusion that brain teasers are not necessarily very predictive for engineering performance. But CS/programming questions for CS/programming roles? That seems sensible. You can study lots of vocabulary to achieve better results on the verbal section of the GRE or similar tests. But afterwards, you will, in fact, have better vocabulary, I submit. I am surprised that you categorically deny that they were better engineers after studying CS/programming questions.

Buldak 8y ago
>You can study lots of vocabulary to achieve better results on the verbal section of the GRE or similar tests. But afterwards, you will, in fact, have better vocabulary, I submit. Yeah, but tests like the GRE claim to predict academic performance, not vocabulary. So unless you think augmenting one's vocabulary alone will make one a substantially better student, there's still a gap there.
ivanhoe 8y ago
Oh, you'll certainly be better at solving programming puzzles type of problems, but the thing is that those questions usually don't translate well into real-life problems that you'll encounter at work later. You can't architect a good solution IRL by trying to figure our what the test author wanted you to do, like with programming puzzles. And for implementing some algorithm keeping every detail of it in head definitely helps, but it's not a significant advantage over someone who just googled all those details 10 minutes ago. So both types of tests are not testing the real dev capabilities, they test how much they prepared for the test. IMO only tasking the candidate to build some real piece of software or even better refactor some real code, with enough time and full access to google and stack overflow, and being fully able to ask other people for suggestions & help will show you the realistic picture of the candidate's future performance as a part of the dev team. Put them in a real situation and give them the real type of problems, and you'll get the real results. Everything else is like giving sudoku tests hoping to choose the best mathematician.
- meko 8y ago

ng12 8y ago

If you're FANG you kind of want to hire that guy though -- the one who sees there's a task and a set of things he can do to accomplish that task. Same thing with the ACT/SAT, colleges want good test-takers because they're going to be giving a lot of tests.

tombert 8y ago

I go back and forth about how I feel about doing heavy algorithm/data-structure stuff in interviews. On the one hand, I have never once written any kind of sort algorithm or LRU cache by hand for a production system, because why would I? Pretty much every language's standard library has a fairly-optimized sort and caching thing built in, and if they don't then there's still probably a million outside libraries to do it for me. On the other hand, I genuinely do feel theory is really important. While not knowing the minutia of a tim-sort doesn't indicate that you'll be a bad engineer, not knowing the runtime efficiency of a sort can lead to some really awful code. Not knowing when to use a hash table instead of a nested-for loop can be a sign that you don't really know what you're doing, and not knowing some rough theory on concurrency indicates that I might be stuck debugging your race conditions or deadlock. I try to not be a complete jerk and I won't do stuff like give out an NP-complete problem (which an interviewer gave me once), nor will I ask for intimate details of how one would implement CSP, but I do tend to focus on theory-heavy questions more than my peers, but I try to give a fairly-generous amount of hints so that people don't get too stuck.

bunderbunder 8y ago
I'd be curious to see if there is any value in questions that focus on understanding of the basic ideas behind algorithms and data structures as a subject. Time complexity, sure, but what I would really want to know is, given a description of a data structure and some algorithms for manipulating it, can you identify the invariants that should be true of these rules? That sort of thing might give a better sense of if someone has an instinct for how to verify whether the code is working. And, by extension, if they have a grasp of some concepts that go a long way toward helping a person come up with more reliable and maintainable designs.
Waterluvian 8y ago
I think the important thing here is the difference between understanding complexity and implementing a sorting algorithm. If I were hiring a carpenter I would want to know they understand their tools and when to use them. I don't care if they don't know how to make them. But of course knowing how to make them suggests an intimate appreciation for the craft (looking your way Matthias Wandel)

fancyfish 8y ago

What's more, it's funny reading that Google sends out prep packets saying to learn/relearn these algorithms. So they don't expect their recruits to know them, just be able to memorize them for the interview.