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I am preparing myself for a week of onsite interviews as we speak. Of course I hate them, but what other choice do I have? The biggest problem is that the que

I am preparing myself for a week of onsite interviews as we speak. Of course I hate them, but what other choice do I have? The biggest problem is that the questions are so random and span almost anything. Will I get asked: a pthread question? implement mergesort or quicksort? implement a Read/Write lock? implement a smart pointer? a bit manipulation question? topological search? dynamic programming? graph question? backtracking question? What the default timeout for TCP/IP is? a Java internals question? best practices about Cassandra? N-ary tree search? linked list? b-tree? Paxos vs Raft? What is the access time for an SSD vs spinning disk? How does Hadoop work? Design Netflix various random programming questions, as evidenced by Leetcode's 1000+ questions It's impossible to know everything and yet this what people expect and ask. I've been asked those questions above over the last 6 years. It's utterly insane the expectations that interviewers have. I personally also interview candidates, I've done hundreds of interviews throughout my career. These days, I do about one interview a week, and often 2. My coding question is a simple recursion question, with a for loop and some basic knowledge of data structures. It's not hard, but I look for perfect code. If you can't code a bug-free 15 line function in 45 mins, that's my red flag. I don't think that's unreasonable. As long as the person asks good questions, we work together well, and they can code in a sane way, to me that's a pass. Interestingly, 70% of the people fail the interview because they can't code properly, even after the phone screen. I think because people are expecting a hard leetcode algorithm question, they can't think properly when someone asks them a simple question.

hjk05 7y ago
> It's utterly insane the expectations that interviewers have. Not really though. They always manage to fill the position. Interview’s see the system as unfair because they think their interview happens in a vacuum. You get x questions answer all correctly and your awarded with a job. So naturally you complain when you feel half the questions are too advanced or that more brain understanding is enough. In reality the interviews are just a sorting, and when everyone can answer the relevant questions you start asking harder ones because “we picked a candidate at random from those who got the questions right” is just not a satisfying endstate.
- blub 7y ago
  > In reality the interviews are just a sorting, and when everyone can answer the relevant questions you start asking harder ones because “we picked a candidate at random from those who got the questions right” is just not a satisfying endstate. That's just silly. If they can answer the relevant questions, they're qualified period.
  - hackinthebochs 7y ago
    Generally people don't just want to know that they got a qualified candidate, they want to know that they got the best candidate available. And so having a more sensitive differentiator than 'passes basic qualifications' is important to most people.
  - hjk05 7y ago
    If you are filling one position, it doesn’t matter if 20 people technically qualify, you hire one. Imagine a single resturant forced to hire 200 chefs because each of them managed to live up to the minimum qualifying criteria for the position...
perrygeo 7y ago
> The biggest problem is that the questions are so random and span almost anything. Exactly. I have no problem coding up a solution if I have an hour to do some research. Either give the topics ahead of time or ask it as a homework assignment. If the job requires hurry-up coding solutions to whatever crap falls on your desk without any design, research or discussion of alternative, the quality of their product and codebase probably reflect this.
deleted 7y ago
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hjk05 7y ago

> It's utterly insane the expectations that interviewers have. Not really though. They always manage to fill the position. Interview’s see the system as unfair because they think their interview happens in a vacuum. You get x questions answer all correctly and your awarded with a job. So naturally you complain when you feel half the questions are too advanced or that more brain understanding is enough. In reality the interviews are just a sorting, and when everyone can answer the relevant questions you start asking harder ones because “we picked a candidate at random from those who got the questions right” is just not a satisfying endstate.

blub 7y ago
> In reality the interviews are just a sorting, and when everyone can answer the relevant questions you start asking harder ones because “we picked a candidate at random from those who got the questions right” is just not a satisfying endstate. That's just silly. If they can answer the relevant questions, they're qualified period.
- hackinthebochs 7y ago
  Generally people don't just want to know that they got a qualified candidate, they want to know that they got the best candidate available. And so having a more sensitive differentiator than 'passes basic qualifications' is important to most people.
- hjk05 7y ago
  If you are filling one position, it doesn’t matter if 20 people technically qualify, you hire one. Imagine a single resturant forced to hire 200 chefs because each of them managed to live up to the minimum qualifying criteria for the position...

perrygeo 7y ago

> The biggest problem is that the questions are so random and span almost anything. Exactly. I have no problem coding up a solution if I have an hour to do some research. Either give the topics ahead of time or ask it as a homework assignment. If the job requires hurry-up coding solutions to whatever crap falls on your desk without any design, research or discussion of alternative, the quality of their product and codebase probably reflect this.

deleted 7y ago

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