8 ms·

Interviewer - "That's impressive Daniel. Now can you invert a binary tree on the whiteboard?"

arenaninja 5y ago
Recently I went through a phone screen by a gentleman I imagine to be in his 50s or 60s and it was an immensely pleasant experience. No gotcha questions and any time I mentioned how his problem reminded me of so-and-so tech he would gush in excitement that he also worked in that tech Compare to a recent interview with the world's best employer (tm): the interviewer was young, was upset that my solution wasn't written in Java (???), and when I described my experience I talked about dashboards and he didn't know what that was. I described it as charts and he didn't know what that was. I described it as graphs and he also didn't know what that was. The interviewer had a bit of an accent so maybe it was a language issue but I had never run into someone who hasn't heard of a chart!
- vxNsr 5y ago
  > I described it as charts and he didn't know what that was. I described it as graphs and he also didn't know what that was. The interviewer had a bit of an accent so maybe it was a language issue but I had never run into someone who hasn't heard of a chart! It’s at this point that I would end the interview and let them know it doesn’t feel like it would be a good fit.
deleted 5y ago
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moron4hire 5y ago
Jesus christ. Inverting a binary tree is not hard. That people keep using this as a joke is more a testament to the stubbornness of people believing they shouldn't have to do no learnin' no more than it is bad interviewing practices.
- mcntsh 5y ago
  > shouldn't have to do no learnin' Expecting engineers to develop skills they don't learn/use in their actual professions to prove they're capable of working a job makes no sense. If these leetcode puzzles were actually relevant, why do so many engineers have to spend time outside of work "grinding" in order to get better at them?
  - dahart 5y ago
    > Expecting engineers to develop skills they don’t learn/use in their actual professions to prove they’re capable of working a job makes no sense. I used to feel this way, but I think I’ve changed my mind. Interviews aren’t really primarily testing for skills you’ll use day to day, they’re testing for breadth of skills and knowledge and more importantly breadth of understanding. When I’m interviewing, knowing if the candidate has the specific skills for the job is the bare minimum needed to get in the door. I’m really more interested in potential, how much they can grow, and indicators of growth potential include how interested they are in the art of programming in it’s many different forms, whether it’s algorithms or math or software architecture, or coordinating people who write software. Puzzles are only the tiniest fraction of all that, but they’re still a signal that you like thinking about algorithms, and have exposure to different ways to write code and lots of algorithmic concepts. A university CS degree isn’t particularly good at teaching job skills per se either, there isn’t much I use in my job day to day that I practiced in school, at a superficial level. But the school degree is pretty good at covering the broad concepts of computer science, and that has lasting value over the course of a software career.
    - otterley 5y ago
      How do these questions give you any indication that the candidate can do the essential job functions of shipping working code that is actually useful to your business and being a good teammate?
      - moron4hire 5y ago
        That question is impossible to answer. However, the negation is answerable. "Is the candidate incapable of the essential job function?" Questions like fizz-buzz, et. al. answer that readily. Put up a job posting on a job board and you'll get hundreds of applications. 90% of those you're going to throw out because the resume doesn't match the job description at all. What does that tell you about the candidate pool? It's an all out assault of candidate spam. You have to employ these sorts of basic filters to even get the number of interviews you do down to a managable number.
NikolaeVarius 5y ago
The amount of time people spend complaining about solving trivial problems would be better spent studying for those problems in the first place. If you literally know what questions are being asked in a test, you should probably fucking just learn it an move on.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- snarf21 5y ago
  I think the issue is that the interviewee doesn't always know what is on the "test". It is also a waste of everyone's time. If a company's only data store is SQL of some kind, which do you want: Someone who can barely do joins but has memorized red/black tree function implementations in several languages or some one who knows SQL at a production level and if they had to do something with red/black trees would just have to spend a day or two re-reading how they work? I think the thing this underscores is that we really need an association like the "bar". So you can go study all the things on the test and prove you have the knowledge and ability and then skip that as part of hiring and just focus on experience. The only thing we have today is tech company specific certification which is okay for certain things but not for more general software needs.
irateswami 5y ago
"If you know the volume of a toilet bowl 1.3 gallons, how many radii of the earth's rotation would fill the visible universe" - Google interviewer

Recently I went through a phone screen by a gentleman I imagine to be in his 50s or 60s and it was an immensely pleasant experience. No gotcha questions and any time I mentioned how his problem reminded me of so-and-so tech he would gush in excitement that he also worked in that tech Compare to a recent interview with the world's best employer (tm): the interviewer was young, was upset that my solution wasn't written in Java (???), and when I described my experience I talked about dashboards and he didn't know what that was. I described it as charts and he didn't know what that was. I described it as graphs and he also didn't know what that was. The interviewer had a bit of an accent so maybe it was a language issue but I had never run into someone who hasn't heard of a chart!

vxNsr 5y ago
> I described it as charts and he didn't know what that was. I described it as graphs and he also didn't know what that was. The interviewer had a bit of an accent so maybe it was a language issue but I had never run into someone who hasn't heard of a chart! It’s at this point that I would end the interview and let them know it doesn’t feel like it would be a good fit.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

moron4hire 5y ago

Jesus christ. Inverting a binary tree is not hard. That people keep using this as a joke is more a testament to the stubbornness of people believing they shouldn't have to do no learnin' no more than it is bad interviewing practices.

mcntsh 5y ago
> shouldn't have to do no learnin' Expecting engineers to develop skills they don't learn/use in their actual professions to prove they're capable of working a job makes no sense. If these leetcode puzzles were actually relevant, why do so many engineers have to spend time outside of work "grinding" in order to get better at them?
- dahart 5y ago
  > Expecting engineers to develop skills they don’t learn/use in their actual professions to prove they’re capable of working a job makes no sense. I used to feel this way, but I think I’ve changed my mind. Interviews aren’t really primarily testing for skills you’ll use day to day, they’re testing for breadth of skills and knowledge and more importantly breadth of understanding. When I’m interviewing, knowing if the candidate has the specific skills for the job is the bare minimum needed to get in the door. I’m really more interested in potential, how much they can grow, and indicators of growth potential include how interested they are in the art of programming in it’s many different forms, whether it’s algorithms or math or software architecture, or coordinating people who write software. Puzzles are only the tiniest fraction of all that, but they’re still a signal that you like thinking about algorithms, and have exposure to different ways to write code and lots of algorithmic concepts. A university CS degree isn’t particularly good at teaching job skills per se either, there isn’t much I use in my job day to day that I practiced in school, at a superficial level. But the school degree is pretty good at covering the broad concepts of computer science, and that has lasting value over the course of a software career.
  - otterley 5y ago
    How do these questions give you any indication that the candidate can do the essential job functions of shipping working code that is actually useful to your business and being a good teammate?
    - moron4hire 5y ago
      That question is impossible to answer. However, the negation is answerable. "Is the candidate incapable of the essential job function?" Questions like fizz-buzz, et. al. answer that readily. Put up a job posting on a job board and you'll get hundreds of applications. 90% of those you're going to throw out because the resume doesn't match the job description at all. What does that tell you about the candidate pool? It's an all out assault of candidate spam. You have to employ these sorts of basic filters to even get the number of interviews you do down to a managable number.

NikolaeVarius 5y ago

The amount of time people spend complaining about solving trivial problems would be better spent studying for those problems in the first place. If you literally know what questions are being asked in a test, you should probably fucking just learn it an move on.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
snarf21 5y ago
I think the issue is that the interviewee doesn't always know what is on the "test". It is also a waste of everyone's time. If a company's only data store is SQL of some kind, which do you want: Someone who can barely do joins but has memorized red/black tree function implementations in several languages or some one who knows SQL at a production level and if they had to do something with red/black trees would just have to spend a day or two re-reading how they work? I think the thing this underscores is that we really need an association like the "bar". So you can go study all the things on the test and prove you have the knowledge and ability and then skip that as part of hiring and just focus on experience. The only thing we have today is tech company specific certification which is okay for certain things but not for more general software needs.

irateswami 5y ago

"If you know the volume of a toilet bowl 1.3 gallons, how many radii of the earth's rotation would fill the visible universe" - Google interviewer