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I have not been tested on the fundamentals of programming taking interviews from FAAGM and other famous tech companies. Instead I've been asked "puzzle" questio

I have not been tested on the fundamentals of programming taking interviews from FAAGM and other famous tech companies. Instead I've been asked "puzzle" questions that generally have nothing to do with the millions of lines of code I've written in the past nor anything to do with what I will do for the company. All those questions on leetcode are 95% unrelated to actual problems IMO. 95% of every web app, mobile app, or native app is just very basic stuff. How often do you need to be able reverse the first half of signally linked list? Or compute the most amount of water that will fill a vertical grid. Or find the largest rectangle in a bitmap. Or divide to giant integers. Or solve sudoku puzzles? The interview should not be "can you solve a puzzle that took 50yrs of programming before someone noticed the solution". It should be "will you be productive on our team". I don't feel most tech interviews actually check for that. In fact I know several people who got through the interviews at the last company I was at (one of the top 4 tech companies) that were not productive at all. Sure they could answer the leetcode type puzzles but they couldn't actually get work done. Many of them were eventually let go when enough colleagues reviewed them poorly. The article claims these interview questions test for fundamentals and I agree that fundamentals are important. I just don't agree the leetcode style questions asked test for that.

cjblomqvist 5y ago
To add: 1) The fundamentals of algorithms can be relevant, such as understanding that one solution is more or less computational (or memory) efficient then the next (and why), but I agree that figuring out how to do a certain a algorithm in a specific situation (usually quite far from anything the person will likely be doing) is rarely useful (unless that's the job, but that's rarely the case). There are more nuances to it, but that's the gist of it imo. 2) Fundamentals on writing maintainable code on the other hand is rarely focused on (AFAIK, I personally don't really have any experience interviewing with such companies) - even though that's usually something that is emphasized a lot in most people's jobs. Even more interesting is that, based on my experience (I've interviewed a significant amount of devs), devs are surprisingly bad at these questions and also quite often become defensive about those type of questions (very similar to how I imagine people become about algorithm questions). I believe the industry would produce better solutions if we focused more on writing cleaner, simpler and more maintainable code - also in the hiring process (thus incentivizing the educational system to align with that) than our current algorithm focus.
jiggawatts 5y ago
> 95% of every web app, mobile app, or native app is just very basic stuff. But 5% isn't, and can absolutely derail a project. I'm a consultant that goes to various orgs to help them with a huge variety of things, much of which boils down to fixing issues with "simple web apps". I literally cannot remember the last time I saw any application, written in-house or by a vendor, that had even the basic set of essentially mandatory indexes in the database. I don't mean clever stuff like partitioning, or sorting tables by a column other than the primary key. I mean that most of these databases had no indexes at all on 100M row tables. Just a week ago a large software vendor argued with me, stating that it's absolutely fine to require 10 GB of parallel table scans to display one web form to one user! That in my opinion stems from a lack of understanding of what a B-tree is, how it works, and how databases utilise it. That's firmly in the "fundamentals of programming" that every developer writing "simple web apps" should know, and in my experience almost none do. These people go about their work every day with a firmly held belief that the database server is essentially a magic black box that can never be understood. Is that okay?
- raspasov 5y ago
  No it's not ok. But the people who didn't add indices maybe even had all the basic training on DS and algos. But they were simply either incompetent or more likely simply careless and didn't give a sh_t. Because adding indices in the proper places requires a few minutes of PLANNING. Who has few minutes nowadays, when you can read HN? On top of that their management/leadership was careless, and didn't give a sh_t. In the end, the poor database tables were left all alone, in the dark, without indices :).
  - jiggawatts 5y ago
    I once had a friendly debate with a database professional. I argued that these days with storage being so cheap, databases should automatically create indexes. E.g.: anything referenced in a view or a foreign key, and also anything that occurs regularly in production. He said he thought that was a bad idea, because a tiny fraction of the time it could cause a performance regression. Now, years later, Azure SQL Database has automatic indexing and I feel a little bit vindicated. He does have a point that this can go wrong, but compared to what the typical developer does, it basically can't make things worse.
q-big 5y ago
> I have not been tested on the fundamentals of programming taking interviews from FAAGM and other famous tech companies. Instead I've been asked "puzzle" questions that generally have nothing to do with the millions of lines of code I've written in the past nor anything to do with what I will do for the company. All those questions on leetcode are 95% unrelated to actual problems IMO. > 95% of every web app, mobile app, or native app is just very basic stuff. How often do you need to be able reverse the first half of signally linked list? Or compute the most amount of water that will fill a vertical grid. Or find the largest rectangle in a bitmap. Or divide to giant integers. Or solve sudoku puzzles? I accept your point. But I do believe the much more interesting question to ask is: why do they do these puzzle questions instead of questions that are at least somewhat related to actual programming problems that might occur as part of the prospective job?
- gfxgirl 5y ago
  IIRC their claim is they are trying to avoid bad hires more than skip good hires. I haven't seen any data though that their interviewing methods achieve those results. If I was to guess why they do it that way it's just because of momentum and lack of any "known" good alternative.
fatnoah 5y ago
>I have not been tested on the fundamentals of programming taking interviews from FAAGM and other famous tech companies I've interviewed at three of those letters, but as a senior manager, and I (somewhat ironically) better covered my nearly 20 years of writing code (as an IC, to use the parlance of the industry) than the interviews given to coders. I could certainly solve hard coding problems when needed, but later in my career I was doing mostly system design, which is figuring out how to put all the bits together in a way that could be built modularly and operated efficiently. Another question from one of those focused on how to handle an actual problem that came up regarding migrating log analyzers when a simple cutover wasn't possible. In general, I love those kinds of questions because my experienced and knowledge come in to play. It boggles my mind when senior ICs get dinged because they're not able to traverse a tree in the way someone wanted in 30 minutes while coding in a plain text editor on a video chat. IMHO, 5 minutes to install the correct package and write a couple tests should be sufficient so we can get the REAL discussion which is to talk about whether a tree is the right structure and what we should do about it if it's not. ;)

cjblomqvist 5y ago

To add: 1) The fundamentals of algorithms can be relevant, such as understanding that one solution is more or less computational (or memory) efficient then the next (and why), but I agree that figuring out how to do a certain a algorithm in a specific situation (usually quite far from anything the person will likely be doing) is rarely useful (unless that's the job, but that's rarely the case). There are more nuances to it, but that's the gist of it imo. 2) Fundamentals on writing maintainable code on the other hand is rarely focused on (AFAIK, I personally don't really have any experience interviewing with such companies) - even though that's usually something that is emphasized a lot in most people's jobs. Even more interesting is that, based on my experience (I've interviewed a significant amount of devs), devs are surprisingly bad at these questions and also quite often become defensive about those type of questions (very similar to how I imagine people become about algorithm questions). I believe the industry would produce better solutions if we focused more on writing cleaner, simpler and more maintainable code - also in the hiring process (thus incentivizing the educational system to align with that) than our current algorithm focus.

jiggawatts 5y ago

> 95% of every web app, mobile app, or native app is just very basic stuff. But 5% isn't, and can absolutely derail a project. I'm a consultant that goes to various orgs to help them with a huge variety of things, much of which boils down to fixing issues with "simple web apps". I literally cannot remember the last time I saw any application, written in-house or by a vendor, that had even the basic set of essentially mandatory indexes in the database. I don't mean clever stuff like partitioning, or sorting tables by a column other than the primary key. I mean that most of these databases had no indexes at all on 100M row tables. Just a week ago a large software vendor argued with me, stating that it's absolutely fine to require 10 GB of parallel table scans to display one web form to one user! That in my opinion stems from a lack of understanding of what a B-tree is, how it works, and how databases utilise it. That's firmly in the "fundamentals of programming" that every developer writing "simple web apps" should know, and in my experience almost none do. These people go about their work every day with a firmly held belief that the database server is essentially a magic black box that can never be understood. Is that okay?

raspasov 5y ago
No it's not ok. But the people who didn't add indices maybe even had all the basic training on DS and algos. But they were simply either incompetent or more likely simply careless and didn't give a sh_t. Because adding indices in the proper places requires a few minutes of PLANNING. Who has few minutes nowadays, when you can read HN? On top of that their management/leadership was careless, and didn't give a sh_t. In the end, the poor database tables were left all alone, in the dark, without indices :).
- jiggawatts 5y ago
  I once had a friendly debate with a database professional. I argued that these days with storage being so cheap, databases should automatically create indexes. E.g.: anything referenced in a view or a foreign key, and also anything that occurs regularly in production. He said he thought that was a bad idea, because a tiny fraction of the time it could cause a performance regression. Now, years later, Azure SQL Database has automatic indexing and I feel a little bit vindicated. He does have a point that this can go wrong, but compared to what the typical developer does, it basically can't make things worse.

q-big 5y ago

> I have not been tested on the fundamentals of programming taking interviews from FAAGM and other famous tech companies. Instead I've been asked "puzzle" questions that generally have nothing to do with the millions of lines of code I've written in the past nor anything to do with what I will do for the company. All those questions on leetcode are 95% unrelated to actual problems IMO. > 95% of every web app, mobile app, or native app is just very basic stuff. How often do you need to be able reverse the first half of signally linked list? Or compute the most amount of water that will fill a vertical grid. Or find the largest rectangle in a bitmap. Or divide to giant integers. Or solve sudoku puzzles? I accept your point. But I do believe the much more interesting question to ask is: why do they do these puzzle questions instead of questions that are at least somewhat related to actual programming problems that might occur as part of the prospective job?

gfxgirl 5y ago
IIRC their claim is they are trying to avoid bad hires more than skip good hires. I haven't seen any data though that their interviewing methods achieve those results. If I was to guess why they do it that way it's just because of momentum and lack of any "known" good alternative.

fatnoah 5y ago

>I have not been tested on the fundamentals of programming taking interviews from FAAGM and other famous tech companies I've interviewed at three of those letters, but as a senior manager, and I (somewhat ironically) better covered my nearly 20 years of writing code (as an IC, to use the parlance of the industry) than the interviews given to coders. I could certainly solve hard coding problems when needed, but later in my career I was doing mostly system design, which is figuring out how to put all the bits together in a way that could be built modularly and operated efficiently. Another question from one of those focused on how to handle an actual problem that came up regarding migrating log analyzers when a simple cutover wasn't possible. In general, I love those kinds of questions because my experienced and knowledge come in to play. It boggles my mind when senior ICs get dinged because they're not able to traverse a tree in the way someone wanted in 30 minutes while coding in a plain text editor on a video chat. IMHO, 5 minutes to install the correct package and write a couple tests should be sufficient so we can get the REAL discussion which is to talk about whether a tree is the right structure and what we should do about it if it's not. ;)