5 ms·

Whenever you post an interview question online your interviewers life get a little bit harder. These questions get blacklisted for being associated with their c

by erhk 6y ago

Whenever you post an interview question online your interviewers life get a little bit harder. These questions get blacklisted for being associated with their company and they then have to synthesize a new question

kadoban 6y ago
They're fun problems though typically. Don't problems have to be rotated eventually anyway? You'd think otherwise there would be secret silos of problems and those in the know will have much better results than anyone else.
- 21eleven 6y ago
  I feel like this is an often overlooked fact about these programming exercises, once you get into solving them they are surprisingly fun.
  - scsilver 6y ago
    Sure, but as someone 5 years into this career, I keep wanting to make my life not all about programming. Its isolating.
visarga 6y ago
I'm just going to use this list to steal a problem for my interviews. It's hard to find a problem that is good at selecting candidates yet doable in 30-60 minutes and different from the problems other colleagues use in their interviews. Most problems are either too difficult or too easy.
copperx 6y ago
I don't see anything wrong with that.
newbie578 6y ago
While I do feel sorry them, the game is broken and we cannot just sit idle by. I am all supportive of people trying to game these big companies. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
- volkk 6y ago
  by stupid prizes you mean a gigantic salary that no other company can match?
tudelo 6y ago
On the other hand, some of the questions can be rather interesting to solve. I also notice there are just a few patterns/techniques that you can use to solve them so the questions themselves do not seem all that important.
- jciochon 6y ago
  Which patterns and techniques are you referring to, in particular?
  - manfredo 6y ago
    It's almost always a combinations of: * Searching algorithms * Sorting algorithms * Dynamic Programming (memoization) * Graph operations (traversal, best path, minimum spanning set) * Maps & Hashing. * Heaps or trees. E.g. finding a median or top-k elements. Every once in a while you'll get a more exotic problem that requires something like a bloom filter or a trie. But that's just enough to get the solution. A good interviewer will also see if you can build this solution in a way that has effective abstractions. They'll also probe real-world concerns like data locality. For instance, one solution might be better in terms of big-O notation performance but might have worse access data pattern than other solutions.
justaguy88 6y ago
Perhaps they should ask questions relevant to the job then.
fizixer 6y ago
Which is a good thing right? All questions and their solutions should be exposed, so big tech can get to work on fixing their interview process?
- sumtechguy 6y ago
  Not a bad idea. The idea of 'fizzbuzz' was to just filter out the total unable to do it at all people. Not to filter for people who can do coding interviews. Honestly, that these questions are out there and people study for them make an interviewers life easier. 'Oh you saw this problem online great! explain why it works'. It cuts through a lot of gruff. Had it happen a few times with the particular problem I like to use. If they can read cracking the coding interview and understand the problems in it and explain them back you are half way there!
klodolph 6y ago
The blacklist can only get so long. There is a bank of questions but they only really get blacklisted if a bunch of candidates show up and they’ve obviously memorized an answer to it. Or if it shows up in a high-profile place. Like, if your question is the first question in a new edition of “Cracking the Coding Interview” it will probably get dropped. I think individual questions that got posted would be blacklisted ten years ago. But nowadays, there are so many people doing interviews and such a large bank of questions (public and otherwise) that the blacklist isn’t so big a deal. Because there are so many vetted questions to ask, you can pick one and not worry to hard candidates may have done drills using that specific question. And if they have, you can have a second question on standby. As an interviewer, I’m happy to see questions posted. You get to see people share their experiences answering it and make the question better, rephrase things to be less ambiguous or misleading, maybe tweak some wording that trips up non-native speakers, or decide that people have a bad experience answering it and you should drop the question. As an interviewer, I also ask questions from the blacklist. I’m not gonna say something arrogant like “I can tell” if you knew the question ahead of time, but my job as interviewer is to get the best information about you that I can to the hiring committee, and balancing that with the goal of giving you a pleasant enough experience during the interview that you want to accept an offer. Trying to catch cheaters is not my top priority. All of this being colored by the facts that the interview process itself is a bit traumatic and people running interviews often don’t run them well.
- manfredo 6y ago
  The way some companies work is that there's a set list of question archetypes, but interviewers come up with their own methods of presenting the problem. For example, a seam carving problem might get presented as finding a horizon in an image. I would often present the same problem as finding a pass through a mountain range given a height map of the terrain. Also, it's possible for interviewers to detect candidates who study the problem beforehand. A couple questions at Dropbox were spread online for years, and it would become clear which candidates read up on those questions online. Some would propose, without prompting, solutions to older iterations of the interview question.
  - 6y ago
drpgq 6y ago
Everything is an arms race
danbmil99 6y ago
What's the point of hiding the interview questions? What does the hiring company care whether the applicant learned that years ago or crammed for it recently?
underwater 6y ago
I've had to stop interviewees and if they've seen a question before - it's pretty obvious when they have. As an interviewer you then have to scrap that question and ask a new question on the fly. This is bad for the candidate because there is now less time and it might be a question the interviewer is less comfortable asking.
- jasonpeacock 6y ago
  When this happens, don't switch questions, ask the candidate to teach the solution to you. e.g. Why is this the right solution? Why not another approach? What are the tradeoffs? Where does this solution fail?

by erhk 6y ago

kadoban 6y ago

They're fun problems though typically. Don't problems have to be rotated eventually anyway? You'd think otherwise there would be secret silos of problems and those in the know will have much better results than anyone else.

21eleven 6y ago
I feel like this is an often overlooked fact about these programming exercises, once you get into solving them they are surprisingly fun.
- scsilver 6y ago
  Sure, but as someone 5 years into this career, I keep wanting to make my life not all about programming. Its isolating.

visarga 6y ago

I'm just going to use this list to steal a problem for my interviews. It's hard to find a problem that is good at selecting candidates yet doable in 30-60 minutes and different from the problems other colleagues use in their interviews. Most problems are either too difficult or too easy.

copperx 6y ago

I don't see anything wrong with that.

newbie578 6y ago

While I do feel sorry them, the game is broken and we cannot just sit idle by. I am all supportive of people trying to game these big companies. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

volkk 6y ago
by stupid prizes you mean a gigantic salary that no other company can match?

tudelo 6y ago

On the other hand, some of the questions can be rather interesting to solve. I also notice there are just a few patterns/techniques that you can use to solve them so the questions themselves do not seem all that important.

jciochon 6y ago
Which patterns and techniques are you referring to, in particular?
- manfredo 6y ago
  It's almost always a combinations of: * Searching algorithms * Sorting algorithms * Dynamic Programming (memoization) * Graph operations (traversal, best path, minimum spanning set) * Maps & Hashing. * Heaps or trees. E.g. finding a median or top-k elements. Every once in a while you'll get a more exotic problem that requires something like a bloom filter or a trie. But that's just enough to get the solution. A good interviewer will also see if you can build this solution in a way that has effective abstractions. They'll also probe real-world concerns like data locality. For instance, one solution might be better in terms of big-O notation performance but might have worse access data pattern than other solutions.

justaguy88 6y ago

Perhaps they should ask questions relevant to the job then.

fizixer 6y ago

Which is a good thing right? All questions and their solutions should be exposed, so big tech can get to work on fixing their interview process?

sumtechguy 6y ago
Not a bad idea. The idea of 'fizzbuzz' was to just filter out the total unable to do it at all people. Not to filter for people who can do coding interviews. Honestly, that these questions are out there and people study for them make an interviewers life easier. 'Oh you saw this problem online great! explain why it works'. It cuts through a lot of gruff. Had it happen a few times with the particular problem I like to use. If they can read cracking the coding interview and understand the problems in it and explain them back you are half way there!

klodolph 6y ago

The blacklist can only get so long. There is a bank of questions but they only really get blacklisted if a bunch of candidates show up and they’ve obviously memorized an answer to it. Or if it shows up in a high-profile place. Like, if your question is the first question in a new edition of “Cracking the Coding Interview” it will probably get dropped. I think individual questions that got posted would be blacklisted ten years ago. But nowadays, there are so many people doing interviews and such a large bank of questions (public and otherwise) that the blacklist isn’t so big a deal. Because there are so many vetted questions to ask, you can pick one and not worry to hard candidates may have done drills using that specific question. And if they have, you can have a second question on standby. As an interviewer, I’m happy to see questions posted. You get to see people share their experiences answering it and make the question better, rephrase things to be less ambiguous or misleading, maybe tweak some wording that trips up non-native speakers, or decide that people have a bad experience answering it and you should drop the question. As an interviewer, I also ask questions from the blacklist. I’m not gonna say something arrogant like “I can tell” if you knew the question ahead of time, but my job as interviewer is to get the best information about you that I can to the hiring committee, and balancing that with the goal of giving you a pleasant enough experience during the interview that you want to accept an offer. Trying to catch cheaters is not my top priority. All of this being colored by the facts that the interview process itself is a bit traumatic and people running interviews often don’t run them well.

manfredo 6y ago
The way some companies work is that there's a set list of question archetypes, but interviewers come up with their own methods of presenting the problem. For example, a seam carving problem might get presented as finding a horizon in an image. I would often present the same problem as finding a pass through a mountain range given a height map of the terrain. Also, it's possible for interviewers to detect candidates who study the problem beforehand. A couple questions at Dropbox were spread online for years, and it would become clear which candidates read up on those questions online. Some would propose, without prompting, solutions to older iterations of the interview question.
- 6y ago

drpgq 6y ago

Everything is an arms race

danbmil99 6y ago

What's the point of hiding the interview questions? What does the hiring company care whether the applicant learned that years ago or crammed for it recently?

underwater 6y ago

I've had to stop interviewees and if they've seen a question before - it's pretty obvious when they have. As an interviewer you then have to scrap that question and ask a new question on the fly. This is bad for the candidate because there is now less time and it might be a question the interviewer is less comfortable asking.

jasonpeacock 6y ago
When this happens, don't switch questions, ask the candidate to teach the solution to you. e.g. Why is this the right solution? Why not another approach? What are the tradeoffs? Where does this solution fail?