3 ms·
I got a more general comment / question regarding this form of interview. Is this some kind of hidden age discrimination? Now I just might not be the target a
by guenthert 6y ago
I got a more general comment / question regarding this form of interview. Is this some kind of hidden age discrimination? Now I just might not be the target audience for those interviews or exactly one of those they mean to filter out, but after more than two decades of experience in the field (in various roles, but my first paid job as programmer was in '92) I feel uncomfortable with the kind of brain teasers I find on leetfree.org. Some are outright silly (e.g. "wiggle-sort"), some might be valid in some niche, but hardly common place (e.g. sparse matrix multiplication -- I haven't ever had the need to multiply matrices since leaving the University, but I haven't done any 3D graphics or robot control since then either).
If the companies which employ such interviews are aware of the distance of those puzzles to the day-to-day labor of a software engineer, then I suppose it's OK. But seeing that the interviewer himself was direct hire from University with no outside professional experience makes me wonder whether they are creating their own ivory tower. In case of Google this seems to work out for them (they decidedly wanted to make things different than then already established enterprises and having seen those, I say more power to them), but will it for others?
- stmw 6y agoThere is probably some of that, no process is perfect... If nothing else, at least it's more objective than a more bias-prone personality fit approach. But it's also possible to practice - even 20+ years after University - if one wants to interview at Google or another company that uses those kinds of interviews. Reading a few blogs like this and some live interviews on a site like interviewing.io or some such will put you back to graph walks or sparse matrix multiplication in no time.