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Interviews are really a dumb game these days so if you want to really game it you can go with a statistical approach: * Practice questions by company on LeetCo
by arduinomancer 5y ago
Interviews are really a dumb game these days so if you want to really game it you can go with a statistical approach:
* Practice questions by company on LeetCode, sort by frequency of last 6 months and work down the list, do maybe 75-100, the list updates once a week
* Search for the company on the LeetCode forums and sort by most recent. If a question is not on LC yet it will likely get posted there, so you can get really fresh intel.
I've read of people doing this and getting like 6/6 questions they've seen before.
- henning 5y agoThis is a great way to start off a business relationship with dishonesty and cynicism. Enjoy your career.
- ThalesX 5y agoCan I have some of that ‘work through tens or hundreds of coding problems that are of no future relevance to me’ dishonesty and cynicism?
- WalterBright 5y agoIt filters out the frauds. Fraud on resumes is very common.
- aaronbrethorst 5y agoThis is a great way to start off a business relationship with a company that wants to haze you to get you to prove your desire to work there.
- dang 5y agoPlease don't cross into personal attack, no matter how wrong's interview preparation strategy is or you feel it is. Perhaps you don't feel you owe them better, but you owe this community better if you're participating here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- diehunde 5y agoMany people say this. But the reality is that solving 100 LC questions and actually understand the solution enough to solve a variation of the problem is a lot of work. Especially if you are working full-time. I wouldn't call that "game it", just usual study and hard work.
- kache_ 5y agoWhen gaming it is just passing by studying, a repeatable process that anyone (with a CS degree) can do, just means the interview process is quite well designed. The interview process is a test of endurance, not intelligence. And it should be exactly that, since software engineering is mostly an exercise of endurance and focus. Every time a friend of mine QQs about failing a FANG interview, I give them the study prescription that worked for me. The reaction is always the same: they don't do it. If you can't get past these interviews, you probably won't make it past a year in these high performance companies anyways. Because you actually have to exhibit the same work ethic that interview studying requires.
- titanomachy 5y agoI don’t know if it’s as useful a signal as you imply. For me, it’s easy to be motivated studying leetcode: small, self-contained puzzles with just the right amount of challenge and immediate gratification. Actually doing a FAANG job can be a slog where it takes months to see results from your work. I can get hired as a software engineer wherever, but I’m only mediocre at doing the job. I’m not the only person I know like this.
- smallnamespace 5y agoNo matter what the filtering process is, the average person in [industry] will be mediocre by definition.
- titanomachy 5y agoSure. But I’m (by my own estimation) a mediocre software engineer who is very above-average at solving fun coding puzzles, and therefore at interviewing. Usually these threads are full of people complaining that they are good engineers who aren’t good at interviews; I’m suggesting that the opposite isn’t uncommon, even if it’s more rarely admitted.
- mrfusion 5y agoI’ve gotten interview questions I’d recently solved and my problem was it was too easy. I had trouble acting like it was the right amount of struggle. Is there a trick for that?
- kortilla 5y agoEmpty your bowel into your underwear. It’s all a show anyway, at least make it a good one.
- arduinomancer 5y agoYes, you need to pull a George Costanza and look/sound really annoyed while you code the solution
- netizen-936824 5y agoWhy would you want to seem like you're struggling?
- kadoban 5y agoThe interviewers are ideally trying to get a sense of how you think through problems, not just that you can spit out an answer you know. At least that's what they say.
- netizen-936824 5y agoSo does struggle equate to working through a problem? I don't think it does.
- o10449366 5y agoNo, if you really want to game it you sign up for membership on Chinese forums where people post the questions word for word minutes after completing the interview. That or work exclusively with private recruiters that tell you the questions verbatim because they have a vested interest in you passing. Interview questions don't rotate that frequently, especially for smaller companies or more specialized roles, and a $60 membership for a month will buy you internal referrals and potentially land you hundreds of thousands of dollars of value in a new position.
- nomy99 5y agocan you give me a link to one of these forums?
- o10449366 5y ago1point3acres is the most prolific, but there are many others.
- nomy99 5y agoThx
- fermentation 5y agoWow there seems to be an absolutely massive amount of useful information, maybe I should learn how to read it!
- renewiltord 5y agoGoogle translate is sufficient. They’ll do it pretty carefully, complete with “pretend you get stuck at this specific point and if you get asked why to use a hashmap, act baffled for a moment, and then say X”
- jsiaajdsdaa 5y agoAs someone who has studied and passed before in this manner, and is now an interviewer, I have a simple solution that other companies should follow: for at least one round of interviewing, let me (the interviewer) use my own custom question, where the goal is not so much to solve it but rather to reason outloud collaboratively about many different aspects of the question. I like to use 3d graphics as a domain that candidates most likely havent seen before, but sufficiently motivated/smart ones can hold their own in. If someone doesn't quickly and intuitively grasp that a shape is a collection of faces, and a face is a collection of points, and a point is a collection of vertices, I'm not sure that they have what I am personally looking for (even though we dont do any 3d graphics in our project)
- pjmlp 5y agoI have a better one, refuse to play the game unless desperate to get a job no matter what.