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I wonder if they asked him algorithm problems in his interview /s This is cool though. I'll be curious to see what he works on.
by maxioatic 6y ago
I wonder if they asked him algorithm problems in his interview /s
This is cool though. I'll be curious to see what he works on.
- marta_morena_28 6y agoI am pretty sure they did, unless he got hired at some VP/Distinguished Engineer level. And to be clear: If you are unable to solve these common algorithmic questions that companies like Microsoft ask, then that's not the right place for you to work. This is a tangent, but there are literally thousands of companies that won't require you to solve these problems. The thing is, at Microsoft & co. you don't just do this in an interview. You do it at your job too. We do foundational work in many teams and we need to solve algorithmic problems practically every week. If you are unable to code yourself out of a DP problem or scared of NP completeness and approximation algorithms, then maybe find a different job instead of complaining about the interview process?
- whoisjuan 6y ago> I am pretty sure they did Lol! I'd bet my year salary they didn't.
- esyir 6y agoWell, you might want to check guido's twitter before making that bet.
- fayyazkl 6y agoEvery body is asked some thing close enough. At higher levels, often focus is not on coding, but enough depth of design where a person of such profile might end up educating the interviewer - while satisfying their requirements. That being said, ability to solve coding problems efficiently (not necessarily spit A* graph algo in sleep), but a decent close to real life coding challenge is fair game.
- adamnemecek 6y agoYou really don't do it at your job.
- paganel 6y agoI’m taking a cheap shot here, but the people maintaining Skype at MS certainly don’t do it. And there are such examples at other big companies.
- jzebedee 6y agoHe was hired as a Distinguished Engineer.
- ithkuil 6y agoYes, they hired him at Distinguished Engineer level.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- lcfcjs 6y agoIt wouldn't be such a problem if developers actually needed to know these ridiculous "algorithmic questions" to do their job. There are Youtube videos that you can memorize to get through the interview, its not difficult. You are acting like on an elite few can work for an awful company like Microsoft.
- JackFr 6y ago> unless he got hired at some VP/Distinguished Engineer level. Google or Wikipedia can tell you who Guido van Rossum is.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoI believe the "unless" was about the position he was hired for, not about who he is.
- andi999 6y agoEverybody needs to invert B-trees before breakfast
- echelon 6y agoI wholeheartedly disagree. 1. This is Guido van Rossum. If I were him and asked to solve puzzles, I'd tell the hiring company to fuck off. 2. These quizzes aren't so bad, but the pressure and stakes make it incredibly stressful. There's no standard, and often times the interviewer is the one that sucks. > We do foundational work in many teams and we need to solve algorithmic problems practically every week. If you are unable to code yourself out of a DP problem or scared of NP completeness and approximation algorithms, then maybe find a different job instead of complaining about the interview process? I'm pretty sure your opinion here is not that of your employer.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- nostrademons 6y agoCounterpoint: When I was leaving Google the first time, I asked my skip lead (who was employee #48 there, ended up running all of Search, and was previously a core HotSpot engineer at Sun) why he chose to work at a small startup when, coming off of HotSpot in 1999, he could work anywhere. He replied "Aside from them being one of very few companies with an engineer-centric culture, they were the only company that required I interview. Everybody else was willing to hire me on the spot." For some personality types - and particularly the ones likely to do world-class work - being challenged is a positive sign. It means that the employer does their due diligence, and they will mostly be working with other people who react positively to a challenge.
- Alex3917 6y ago> It means that the employer does their due diligence, and they will mostly be working with other people who react positively to a challenge. To me, due diligence would be more like using software that someone has created. If it feels snappy then they're good enough at algorithms for the kind of software that they create, if it doesn't then maybe it's worth looking into whether or not there's a good reason for that. Like if you apply for a job at the NYT, I doubt they make you do a timed writing test with people staring at you and asking you questions in the middle. They probably just read some of the previous work you've done.
- ownagefool 6y agoFrom his twitter profile: """ Python's BDFL-emeritus, Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft, Computer History Fellow. Opinions are my own. He/him. """
- strikelaserclaw 6y ago"Hello Guido thanks for coming in, we would like you to open up visual studio code and create a sudoku solver that can solve this partially filled out board"
- speedgoose 6y agoTime to use prolog to get your revenge on the interviewers.
- Cactus2018 6y agoA Sudoku Solver in APL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmT80OseAGs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmT80OseAGs
- jodrellblank 6y agoMore appropriately, in Prolog (by Markus Triska) https://youtube.com/watch?v=5KUdEZTu06o https://youtube.com/watch?v=5KUdEZTu06o
- speedgoose 6y agoVery nice, and I can understand this one.
- cgh 6y agoThanks for this link. I took a course on logic programming in school and it made a big impression. I found Prolog to be pretty mindblowing at the time and I'm happy to see it still is.
- kop316 6y agoI think this was in response to this: https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768 https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768
- orthonormel 6y agoHis Twitter actually says "Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft"
- kodah 6y agoThis comment really just drives home the nail of how awful the state of interviewing, and especially the mental state of some interviewers, in this industry with a backhoe bucket. I really just want to thank you for putting this useless mentality on display.
- whymauri 6y agoI know it's not Microsoft, but D. E. Shaw asked Larry Summers math puzzles when he interviewed there. At the time, he was the president of Harvard University. I think it's my favorite example of how crazy some interview processes can get, lol.
- creddit 6y agoI’m not sure what’s crazier to me: asking someone to demonstrate a live proficiency of an abstract skill that is only tangentially related to that actual day-to-day activities of a role or just assuming that because someone has some high credential that they would be good in a given role.
- user5994461 6y agoDE Shaw is a financial company filled with maths guys, doing statistical analysis and modeling all day. A math puzzle is the most normal question you could be asked there. The real question is why Larry Summers is going to a quant interview? Did he apply for a quant role?
- whymauri 6y agoThey hired him as a managing director.
- dddbbb 6y agoFor many roles at a hedge fund, being able to do mathematics quickly and intuitively is a valuable skill. Not sure why an economist applying for an MD job would need to be tested on that, though.
- maxioatic 6y agoWow, so much salt. It was a joke.
- LeifCarrotson 6y agoYou should have left "/s" at the end of your comment, it's really hard to distinguish between a joke and stupidity on the Internet.
- AQuantized 6y agoTo me this undermines any humour the comment may had to begin with.
- chippy 6y agoThey did add a /s to the end. The user you were replying to wrote the comment that the stupid comment was replying to!
- maxioatic 6y agoIt is there. At the end of the line.
- xapata 6y agoIn that case, it was an unnecessary joke and not helpful to the conversation.
- maxioatic 6y agoSorry, I'll refrain from humor from now on?
- xapata 6y agoSeems reasonable.
- vamos_davai 6y agoGo to reddit if you want to make average IQ humor.
- ponker 6y agoYou must be injecting crack directly into your frontal lobe if you think that the creator of the world's third most important programming language being asked an algorithms question (unlikely) and failing it (entirely possible) means that he's unqualified to do "foundational work." I had a Nobel Prize winner as a physics professor in college who got three successive different wrong answers when attempting a freshman physics problem in office hours. That doesn't mean that physics isn't the right place for him to work.
- jrib 6y ago> third most important programming language not going to debate that, but I'm curious, what do you rank as #1 and #2?
- phkahler 6y agoThe tiobe index lists Java and C in those spots.
- dkarlovi 6y agoThat's fair, I guess.
- fermigier 6y agoPython is number 2 now, according to https://www.techrepublic.com/article/python-overtakes-java-to-become-the-second-most-popular-programming-language/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/python-overtakes-java-t... :) We should not give too much importance to this, but the fact is that Python is now ranked consistently #1, #2 or #3 in sufficiently many rankings to consider it seriously.
- webmaven 6y ago> The tiobe index lists Java and C in those spots. That list is ranking languages by current popularity, though, rather than 'importance'. I'd define 'importance' as more along the lines of "amount of havoc created if all software written using that language were broken/deleted at once".
- coldtea 6y ago>I am pretty sure they did, unless he got hired at some VP/Distinguished Engineer level No way they even considered doing it... That's for people out of college...
- fayyazkl 6y agoThats certainly invalid. People with 20 years of experience or more, are asked questions based upon the role they are interviewing for. If you are applying for a principal or higher engineer role and your job involves coding, you are asked coding questions. May be not just focused on a complex bookish algorithm only, but rather more close to a real life distributed programming / synchronization problem etc. for example.
- Thaxll 6y agoI know we're talking about FANG itw but come on you really think people like Guido needs to do any of that? They probably don't do "regular" itw, they go to a restaurant with some important people and that seels the deal.
- cannabis_sam 6y agoWhy the fuck would CS graduates be afraid of DP problems, NP-completeness or approximation algos??? That’s literally the table stakes of our profession. The problem is rewarding rote memorization in a whiteboard interview, at the expense of actual understanding, and ability to research the problem.
- AI_WAIFU 6y agoBecause unlike in the real world, you can't just google the solution or look it up in a textbook during an interview.
- mayank 6y ago> that’s literally the table stakes of our profession Table stakes for what exactly?
- cannabis_sam 6y agoComputer science graduates...? Like I said in the comment.
- kristianov 6y agoFor sudo scientists.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> Why the fuck would CS graduates be afraid of DP problems, NP-completeness or approximation algos??? That’s literally the table stakes of our profession. If the profession being discussed is "academic work in Computer Science", sure. If it is "software development", those things absolutely are not really "table stakes". If it is "software engineering", then I don't think there is broad consensus on what that profession even is, much less what table stakes in it are.
- cannabis_sam 6y agoAre you seriously claiming Guido van Rossum was hired for software development/engineering..? I don’t understand the context switching here.
- paulnechifor 6y ago> NP completeness Programmer here. It's true. I deal with NP completeness every day.
- __s 6y agoHi, I'm a programmer for Microsoft. I didn't have to answer silly algorithm questions for them to hire me. I'm nowhere close to VP/Distinguished Engineer level (that said, my path to being hired did involve writing a sudoku solver, but that wasn't in an interview for a position at Microsoft)
- FeistySkink 6y agoPerhaps you could share your story to show that not all is dire like HN would make it seem.
- __s 6y agoEvery story is unique. I was responding to a comment that was making sweeping claims My story likely isn't replicable, but everyone has to find their way I interviewed for Citus a couple weeks before they announced being acquired. I found out about the acquisition on Hacker News before having received an offer. They were able to get me in without going through the hiring process again Initially I'd be moving to San Francisco but I wasn't eligible for any visas as I don't have a post secondary education. Staying in Canada's worked out Some examples of things working out here: I was asked to implement some parsing, & well that's not so hard when you've written a Lua parser a year beforehand: https://github.com/serprex/luwa/blob/master/rt/astgen.lua https://github.com/serprex/luwa/blob/master/rt/astgen.lua (an astute reader will notice I don't handle precedence here, which is pretty important for arithmetic parsing. That's because I opted to implement shunting yard during codegen phase) What value does this story give a reader? I only think it'd serve to continue an argument about how not everyone is so lucky, which isn't the original argument of "unless you're VP/Distinguished Engineer, not even Guido van Rossum gets to skip whiteboarding"
- deeeeplearning 6y ago>We do foundational work in many teams and we need to solve algorithmic problems practically every week. Keep telling yourself that as you fix mindless bugs in some Advertising platform lol.
- nxmnxm99 6y agoLOL what an obnoxious comment.
- atraac 6y ago> The thing is, at Microsoft & co. you don't just do this in an interview. You do it at your job too. Oh so that's why the Azure Portal UI is such garbage. Their frontend developers are just busy solving knapsack problems...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- strulovich 6y agoThere’s plenty of issues around algorithmic questions, and it’s even possible he would fail them, but there’s still important value in asking them. Senior engineers in such companies need to work and cooperate with hundreds of people. If they find solving such problems beneath them, or expect to be treated as a higher class of person, or not willing to get hands dirty, they will not be as valuable as employees. (Occasionally, the lone genius is great, but the lone genius is a worse employee than the genius that can cooperate well) My company would keep doing such interviews, but the expectations change of course. A new grad needs to do these well. More senior people can do worse, and make up for it using other skills showcased in other interviews, or based on their record. But if you find a senior person that finds solving algorithmic questions is beneath them, you might want to be careful about them and how they will interact with your company’s culture.
- rndgermandude 6y agoI never remember the nitty-gritty details of the more complex algorithms and data structures, I only remember they exist and their important properties. If I then have to implement one, I consult google or books. Googling often has the neat side effect that you'll sometimes find refinements/improvements or other (new) potentially better algorithms to solve a particular problem. Or somebody might have done the heavy lifting already and packaged it up under a compatible license (if it isn't something simple like leftPad). I mean, it's OK to ask for basic algorithms in interviews, to see if the interviewee has at least some understanding of basic stuff and/or can think on their feet and/or can reason about problems appropriately... But I would still welcome it if instead of giving an interviewee a boring, memorizable problem like "invert a binary tree", the interviewer would find a more general problem and would see how the employee would tackle it, and if the interviewee refers to binary trees as part of the solution without writing out a full implementation from memory that's OK (as long as binary trees would be a valid approach to solve the problem, of course).
- fernandotakai 6y ago> the interviewer would find a more general problem and would see how the employee would tackle it those are the best interviews imho. specially when both the candidate and the interviewer engage into a productive discussion about the solution the candidate gave. at the same time, those take time and a lot of companies want a "fast" hiring pipeline, which leads to "invert a binary tree on this whiteboard!".
- pcj-github 6y agoNot taking anything away from GVR, but I bet he does not pass leetcode medium/hards in time allotted without specifically practicing these for a while. I could be wrong.
- breck 6y agoI did a dozen or so interviews at MS. No one ever asked me if an interviewee "passed/failed". The only boolean was "hire/no hire", which took into account many more dimensions. But I know people that interviewed over 1,000 people, so my knowledge is more anecdotal. I'd imagine no matter the problem he would breeze through an interview and leave the interviewer with some enlightenment on programming. It wasn't necessarily about whether the code was "correct". I remember once interviewing a ~20-year old for the summer program who when I gave him a problem he started talking about some linear algebra and geometry that I didn't even know were relevant but quickly made sense to me. But he was so humble about it, and looking to me like he wasn't sure if it was the right approach to take (It was hard to keep a poker face and not give away that he was a "definite hire" after about 5 minutes). His 5-liner to solve it had one bug but he clearly "passed" with flying colors. Unfortunately for us he ended up joining a startup in SV (and now is doing big things there).
- JJMcJ 6y agoPossibly a six hour panel interview on Javascript trivia, instead.
- bit_logic 6y agoWow, the replies to this actually saying Guido van Rossum should do an algorithm/DS leetcode interview. It's so ridiculous to see these replies. So Microsoft should've sent Guido van Rossum a note saying, hey study algorithm/DS for at least a month and do 100 leetcode before you come talk to us or it's a waste of time, thanks, bye. Discussions of the industry tech interview process are now poisoned by these factors: * There is an entire industry built around tech interview prep now (books, websites, practice/mock interviews). Many would defend this practice because their paycheck directly depends on it. * Many see this as a hazing ritual that protects their high compensation and often their egos as well. These people are often young and will eventually see how harmful these interviews are when they get older and need to switch jobs. But by then there will be a new generation of young engineers defending the practice.
- 908B64B197 6y ago> There is an entire industry built around tech interview prep now (books, websites, practice/mock interviews). Many would defend this practice because their paycheck directly depends on it. Or you know... an algorithm and data structures class that's part of a serious Engineering/CS curriculum.
- closeparen 6y agoThat's enough for passing familiarity with what the algorithms are / pointers to reference material when appropriate. Not nearly enough to perform on command from memory in 20-40 minutes.
- 908B64B197 6y agoI mean, If someone knows he's interviewing at a place where there will be a coding interview, he would be crazy not to take a look at his algorithm textbook. And maybe if the course only only gave the candidate a passing familiarity it wasn't thorough enough?
- closeparen 6y ago
- groos 6y agoWith a known quantity like Guido, you just try to convince them how fun it would be work at Microsoft.
- psyc 6y agoNotable programmers, those you know by name, are given positions that you get by having a conversation with a VP. Source: worked there for a long time.
- names_are_hard 6y agoMicrosoft hiring is my centralized, and not all teams do leetcode interviews. Many non- famous developers have been hired there without leetcode as well.
- Iv 6y ago"So, tell me about how you would develop a threaded application" (Runs for cover)
- hulitu 6y ago> This is cool though. I'll be curious to see what he works on. Well, after seeing what happened to Leslie Lamport, i don't have high expectations.