3 ms·

The authors address this: the induced stress is not necessarily similar to the stress experienced on the job they're applying for.

• planet-and-halo 6y ago
  This has been my experience. Time is crunched in a rather unrealistic way. Not that time crunches don't happen, but it's never once been the case in my real job that I was approaching an unpracticed academic algorithm problem which had a 30 minute time cap. Recent example: I was asked to do a density map with about ~20 minutes remaining in an interview. I could immediately see the performance issue of the naive solution (re-summing the same positions), but I needed some time to think through an efficient solution. But because of the time limit and the fact that I had someone watching my every step (i.e. there was more performance than problem solving going on), we agreed that I would take the naive approach and simply sum all of the positions as quickly as I could. When I wasn't asked back for a second round, it was obviously in part because I had resorted to such an ugly and inefficient solution. I don't blame the interviewer—he was actually one of the best I've ever interacted with—and I actually think the problems selected fit the role very well. But at the end of the day I don't feel that format gave a very good snapshot of my abilities. (Case in point, I looked up solutions afterwards and an intuitive approach I had thought of was very close to the optimal solution, but I didn't feel I had time to go down that route.) I don't think there is a perfect interview format. They all have downsides. But this is definitely a tradeoff you're making with timed algos.