8 ms·

Wow there seems to be an absolutely massive amount of useful information, maybe I should learn how to read it!

renewiltord 5y ago
Google 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 ago
  As 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)
  - baskethead 5y ago
    This is exactly the type of question that is the worst for interviews. It's a completely uncalibrated, completely subjective, esoteric type of question where you can't say exactly why you liked a candidate or why you didn't like her. There's no data underneath it except for "I liked how the conversation went." It completely gives an advantage to candidates who know 3D and completely gives a disadvantage to candidates that know nothing about it. Even worse, they are relying on YOU to explain it to them. Who's to say you are sufficiently qualified to teach people the basics of 3D graphics enough such that they can answer your questions? Have you been calibrated or judged on your ability to teach even the basics of 3D graphics? Or are you assuming that you're good enough? It's completely inappropriate and relying completely on you to determine a candidate's qualifications based on nothing except your feelings. It's a horrible question and I seriously hope this is not entertained at all at your company.
    - nlh 5y ago
      So I'm not a part of this world at all and I'm super fascinated by this perspective. I hear your point entirely. How do you counter the issue with pre-structured interviews where the questions get distributed and you end up with candidates who learn how to answer your exact question (but lack the skills to actually be dynamic in their job, or even do their job)?
      - baskethead 5y ago
        If I could answer that question, I would be a billionaire already. Programming interviews are almost exactly akin to actor's auditions. Just because you flunk an audition doesn't mean that you're a bad actor. Also, auditioning takes a special skill and it's not very much like being a real actor. But they still do it to this day. Programming interviews are similar. The best hiring model I can come up with is the Netflix model. Pay top of the market, hire and fire people quickly if they don't meet expectations, with a generous severance. Have high expectations, reward the ones that can fulfill those expectations, and quickly get rid of those that don't. It's ruthless, but the Netflix engineers I know love working there.
      - raducu 5y ago
        I used to interview for a big company, and I could tell some candidates already knew the questions, but I'm a bad interviewer myself as I tend to rate most candidates as 7+/10, I very rarely found coding-illiterate candidates. When I detected the candidate knew the questions, I'd switch order, introduce new questions I didn't usually ask. The interview we did was quite extensive on the java basics and if the candidate somehow managed to learn all that stuff by knowing the questions, that was a pretty good sign anyway. It was just this one time I found a candidate who aced every question I asked, even OOP, Design Patterns, I made up on the spot a code-design challenge, the guy suddenly was not so brilliant, but still managed to hold his own and I didn't penalize him for my impression that he knew the questions, he was way better than the usual candidate anyway. Perhaps the stakes were not so high as in the USA, but I can say I've never found someone who would have failed without knowing the questions in advance; I did fail people who were trying to cheat on the phone interview, but those were rare cases. My impression is technical interviews just filter programming-illiterate programmers and people who don't give a f#ck -- as a general rule. There's also the 30% of cases where the interview is made up to show the candidate he's not really all that senior as he thinks and to lowball his salary request. And some companies have very high technical interview standards because of some cultural inferiority complex (we are just like Google, you see...).
  - o10449366 5y ago
    There's a certain irony to exploiting an ethically questionable method to obtain a job and, once you've obtained that position, using your authority as a gatekeeper to attempt to prevent others from entering the same way.
    - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
      Hey I have some suggestions to how you can improve this process that, having passed through it myself, obviously has some inefficiencies! -hmm, well that wouldn't be very ethical would it. Guess we'll just have to leave things not working very well.
      - o10449366 5y ago
        I can't speak for them, but I would assume that jsiaajdsdaa still considered themselves qualified for their positions - even if they employed ethically questionable methods for passing the interviews. In the end isn't that all that matters given that's what these interviews are supposedly trying to measure? What part of jsiaajdsdaa's process do you think is more efficient? To me it sounds less objective ("the goal is not so much to solve it") which seems like it would make the process less efficient when assessing candidates.
        bryanrasmussen 5y ago
        I think as a general rule the idea that you give someone something that they are unlikely to solve because they are not completely familiar with the problem space does measure some things well - specifically, how one performs with something new and unknown (a critical programming skill) and their ability to abstractly reason as opposed to having memorized some information. Although for other things related to the job not that useful. That said I was talking about your comment that it was somewhat unethical; they didn't so much think that they gamed the system but that the system was so inefficient at doing what it should do that someone had to fit themselves to the system to get in.
    - namdnay 5y ago
      Like a company recruiting a hacker to manage their security
  - cvhashim 5y ago
    I’d bomb this interview.
  - vishnugupta 5y ago
    > point is a collection of vertices, This is the first time I’ve come across this definition of a point. Geometrically point is defined as a zero dimensional shape (or something similar) if I recall correctly. Besides, I don’t see how it’s intuitive at all! It isn’t to me at least. Larger point being, if you pick such random domain without calibration you will run into such argument/discussions during an interview. Not sure what data point could be derived from such discussion when you are looking for someone who can write a decent maintainable code. I must say that I’m terrible with geometry/graphics which hasn’t stopped me from creating value through software development in my domain, online payments. If your intention is to gather signal for collaboration then I suggest picking something you are likely to collaborate on a day to day basis. Let’s say code review or architecture review. You could discuss why such and such an architectural pattern is useful, under what conditions, what are the pitfalls to watch out for etc etc.
    - totololo 5y ago
      Point coordinates, not the point itself.
      - meheleventyone 5y ago
        A vertex is a point. So a point being a collection of vertices doesn’t make sense. A point in the sense you mean is a collection of real numbers equal to the number of dimensions of the space it’s in.
        MauranKilom 5y ago
        > A point in the sense you mean is a collection of real numbers equal to the number of dimensions of the space it’s in. Not necessarily. In 3D graphics, it is common to represent points with homogeneous coordinates, where points in N-dimensional space are represented by N+1 real numbers. Using 4x4 matrices [0] to describe affine transformations of 3D points is very convenient. (Agreed with your overall point though. Just goes to show how different some fundamental perceptions/definitions can be.) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affine_transformation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affine_transformation
  - visarga 5y ago
    > If someone doesn't quickly and intuitively grasp that a shape is a collection of faces, ..., I'm not sure that they have what I am personally looking for I was doing the same to weed out the bad candidates - asking them something they should know, something logical and basic - but got bad feedback once, been asked to instead focus my questions on the strong points described in the CV. I mean, for the practical part the candidate wasn't able to count the unique words in a text file in 30 minutes. I thought opening files and reading strings and splitting are so basic anyone should know them.
    - MauranKilom 5y ago
      I program in C++ daily and wouldn't know the currently accepted way to read lines from a text file in it off the top of my head. It's simply not something I ever have to do. A good candidate should still manage to figure it out in 30 minutes, but your programming experience is most likely a lot less universal than you think.
      - ficklepickle 5y ago
        They didn't specify needing to read the file line-by-line. You could read the whole file at once. There might not even be any new line characters in the file. You invented a requirement.
        MauranKilom 5y ago
        They specified "strings", which I interpreted as lines in a text file. But it doesn't actually matter, because I could make fundamentally the same comment no matter how words (or "strings") are separated.
  - mavelikara 5y ago
    > As someone who has studied and passed before in this manner, and is now an interviewer, Why do you believe now that the path you took is no longer ideal for other candidates?
  - cookie_monsta 5y ago
    1point3acres just added this question in their "wildcards" section - j/k
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    Are you very knowledgeable in 3d graphics yourself, some of the replies here suggest that you may have a superficial knowledge (which is what I would have), if you choose an example domain that you have some knowledge about but not deep knowledge what happens if by accident your interviewee has significantly deeper knowledge than you? I worry that person might end up sounding overly technical or even like they're BS'ing their way through the interview.
    - itronitron 5y ago
      There is also another way of creating 3D graphics that does not involve the use of faces and vertices, so developers with that background would be at a loss (or win depending on your viewpoint.)
  - halt40 5y ago
    I don't understand how a point is a collection of vertices. Are you talking about X, Y, and Z coordinates? This is a good example of how ambiguity kills an interview and reduces it to quickly figuring out what the interviewer is talking about so I might have a decent chance of solving the problem with the time remaining. My experience with interviewing at Google, Facebook, and Amazon can be reduced to "What the hell are you talking about?"
- shinazueli 5y ago
  It’s ridiculously obvious when people have seen the question before. The way we do it is like this: we have like 3 or 4 different small variations on each question. Such that the solution is measurably different, in quite telling ways, but that the given problem looks almost identical. In one specific case the given is identical, but there are 3 variations to the question based on how the candidate asks questions about it (if they don’t ask questions the question is not possible to solve as we don’t give all of the information you need.) We started doing it this way precisely because we kept running into people who would have 3 nearly perfect interviews and one “hard fail”, and we eventually realized it was because they were so good at faking that they’d seen it before but if they hadn’t seen it before they bombed it hard. So now that we have the “variations”, at least once a month someone will “hard fail” the interview because they’re obviously cheating and will quite literally give the right answer to the wrong question, just rote memorizing it. It’s an arms race. And one that I enjoy.
  - thih9 5y ago
    > It’s an arms race. And one that I enjoy. This sounds like focusing on the wrong thing in the interview process.
  - vanusa 5y ago
  - krtwllndr 5y ago
    Having been on both sides of interviews but fortunate enough to no have to do leetcode interviews I have a genuine question for those that do. Why do them? Are you really facing those problems frequently enough at FAANG to have know them? Is it uppity engineers? Gatekeeping? Or are you just getting so many applicants that you have to filter somehow and leetcode interviewing has some nice properties (easy to apply remotely, can be done by engineers, strong pass/fail criteria). Genuine interest. Ignore the negative subtext, that's just me on this subject.
    - coldtea 5y ago
      Never underestimate the "everybody else is doing them too" factor.

Google 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 ago
As 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)
- baskethead 5y ago
  This is exactly the type of question that is the worst for interviews. It's a completely uncalibrated, completely subjective, esoteric type of question where you can't say exactly why you liked a candidate or why you didn't like her. There's no data underneath it except for "I liked how the conversation went." It completely gives an advantage to candidates who know 3D and completely gives a disadvantage to candidates that know nothing about it. Even worse, they are relying on YOU to explain it to them. Who's to say you are sufficiently qualified to teach people the basics of 3D graphics enough such that they can answer your questions? Have you been calibrated or judged on your ability to teach even the basics of 3D graphics? Or are you assuming that you're good enough? It's completely inappropriate and relying completely on you to determine a candidate's qualifications based on nothing except your feelings. It's a horrible question and I seriously hope this is not entertained at all at your company.
  - nlh 5y ago
    So I'm not a part of this world at all and I'm super fascinated by this perspective. I hear your point entirely. How do you counter the issue with pre-structured interviews where the questions get distributed and you end up with candidates who learn how to answer your exact question (but lack the skills to actually be dynamic in their job, or even do their job)?
    - baskethead 5y ago
      If I could answer that question, I would be a billionaire already. Programming interviews are almost exactly akin to actor's auditions. Just because you flunk an audition doesn't mean that you're a bad actor. Also, auditioning takes a special skill and it's not very much like being a real actor. But they still do it to this day. Programming interviews are similar. The best hiring model I can come up with is the Netflix model. Pay top of the market, hire and fire people quickly if they don't meet expectations, with a generous severance. Have high expectations, reward the ones that can fulfill those expectations, and quickly get rid of those that don't. It's ruthless, but the Netflix engineers I know love working there.
    - raducu 5y ago
      I used to interview for a big company, and I could tell some candidates already knew the questions, but I'm a bad interviewer myself as I tend to rate most candidates as 7+/10, I very rarely found coding-illiterate candidates. When I detected the candidate knew the questions, I'd switch order, introduce new questions I didn't usually ask. The interview we did was quite extensive on the java basics and if the candidate somehow managed to learn all that stuff by knowing the questions, that was a pretty good sign anyway. It was just this one time I found a candidate who aced every question I asked, even OOP, Design Patterns, I made up on the spot a code-design challenge, the guy suddenly was not so brilliant, but still managed to hold his own and I didn't penalize him for my impression that he knew the questions, he was way better than the usual candidate anyway. Perhaps the stakes were not so high as in the USA, but I can say I've never found someone who would have failed without knowing the questions in advance; I did fail people who were trying to cheat on the phone interview, but those were rare cases. My impression is technical interviews just filter programming-illiterate programmers and people who don't give a f#ck -- as a general rule. There's also the 30% of cases where the interview is made up to show the candidate he's not really all that senior as he thinks and to lowball his salary request. And some companies have very high technical interview standards because of some cultural inferiority complex (we are just like Google, you see...).
- o10449366 5y ago
  There's a certain irony to exploiting an ethically questionable method to obtain a job and, once you've obtained that position, using your authority as a gatekeeper to attempt to prevent others from entering the same way.
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    Hey I have some suggestions to how you can improve this process that, having passed through it myself, obviously has some inefficiencies! -hmm, well that wouldn't be very ethical would it. Guess we'll just have to leave things not working very well.
    - o10449366 5y ago
      I can't speak for them, but I would assume that jsiaajdsdaa still considered themselves qualified for their positions - even if they employed ethically questionable methods for passing the interviews. In the end isn't that all that matters given that's what these interviews are supposedly trying to measure? What part of jsiaajdsdaa's process do you think is more efficient? To me it sounds less objective ("the goal is not so much to solve it") which seems like it would make the process less efficient when assessing candidates.
      - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
        I think as a general rule the idea that you give someone something that they are unlikely to solve because they are not completely familiar with the problem space does measure some things well - specifically, how one performs with something new and unknown (a critical programming skill) and their ability to abstractly reason as opposed to having memorized some information. Although for other things related to the job not that useful. That said I was talking about your comment that it was somewhat unethical; they didn't so much think that they gamed the system but that the system was so inefficient at doing what it should do that someone had to fit themselves to the system to get in.
  - namdnay 5y ago
    Like a company recruiting a hacker to manage their security
- cvhashim 5y ago
  I’d bomb this interview.
- vishnugupta 5y ago
  > point is a collection of vertices, This is the first time I’ve come across this definition of a point. Geometrically point is defined as a zero dimensional shape (or something similar) if I recall correctly. Besides, I don’t see how it’s intuitive at all! It isn’t to me at least. Larger point being, if you pick such random domain without calibration you will run into such argument/discussions during an interview. Not sure what data point could be derived from such discussion when you are looking for someone who can write a decent maintainable code. I must say that I’m terrible with geometry/graphics which hasn’t stopped me from creating value through software development in my domain, online payments. If your intention is to gather signal for collaboration then I suggest picking something you are likely to collaborate on a day to day basis. Let’s say code review or architecture review. You could discuss why such and such an architectural pattern is useful, under what conditions, what are the pitfalls to watch out for etc etc.
  - totololo 5y ago
    Point coordinates, not the point itself.
    - meheleventyone 5y ago
      A vertex is a point. So a point being a collection of vertices doesn’t make sense. A point in the sense you mean is a collection of real numbers equal to the number of dimensions of the space it’s in.
      - MauranKilom 5y ago
        > A point in the sense you mean is a collection of real numbers equal to the number of dimensions of the space it’s in. Not necessarily. In 3D graphics, it is common to represent points with homogeneous coordinates, where points in N-dimensional space are represented by N+1 real numbers. Using 4x4 matrices [0] to describe affine transformations of 3D points is very convenient. (Agreed with your overall point though. Just goes to show how different some fundamental perceptions/definitions can be.) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affine_transformation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affine_transformation
- visarga 5y ago
  > If someone doesn't quickly and intuitively grasp that a shape is a collection of faces, ..., I'm not sure that they have what I am personally looking for I was doing the same to weed out the bad candidates - asking them something they should know, something logical and basic - but got bad feedback once, been asked to instead focus my questions on the strong points described in the CV. I mean, for the practical part the candidate wasn't able to count the unique words in a text file in 30 minutes. I thought opening files and reading strings and splitting are so basic anyone should know them.
  - MauranKilom 5y ago
    I program in C++ daily and wouldn't know the currently accepted way to read lines from a text file in it off the top of my head. It's simply not something I ever have to do. A good candidate should still manage to figure it out in 30 minutes, but your programming experience is most likely a lot less universal than you think.
    - ficklepickle 5y ago
      They didn't specify needing to read the file line-by-line. You could read the whole file at once. There might not even be any new line characters in the file. You invented a requirement.
      - MauranKilom 5y ago
        They specified "strings", which I interpreted as lines in a text file. But it doesn't actually matter, because I could make fundamentally the same comment no matter how words (or "strings") are separated.
- mavelikara 5y ago
  > As someone who has studied and passed before in this manner, and is now an interviewer, Why do you believe now that the path you took is no longer ideal for other candidates?
- cookie_monsta 5y ago
  1point3acres just added this question in their "wildcards" section - j/k
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  Are you very knowledgeable in 3d graphics yourself, some of the replies here suggest that you may have a superficial knowledge (which is what I would have), if you choose an example domain that you have some knowledge about but not deep knowledge what happens if by accident your interviewee has significantly deeper knowledge than you? I worry that person might end up sounding overly technical or even like they're BS'ing their way through the interview.
  - itronitron 5y ago
    There is also another way of creating 3D graphics that does not involve the use of faces and vertices, so developers with that background would be at a loss (or win depending on your viewpoint.)
- halt40 5y ago
  I don't understand how a point is a collection of vertices. Are you talking about X, Y, and Z coordinates? This is a good example of how ambiguity kills an interview and reduces it to quickly figuring out what the interviewer is talking about so I might have a decent chance of solving the problem with the time remaining. My experience with interviewing at Google, Facebook, and Amazon can be reduced to "What the hell are you talking about?"
shinazueli 5y ago
It’s ridiculously obvious when people have seen the question before. The way we do it is like this: we have like 3 or 4 different small variations on each question. Such that the solution is measurably different, in quite telling ways, but that the given problem looks almost identical. In one specific case the given is identical, but there are 3 variations to the question based on how the candidate asks questions about it (if they don’t ask questions the question is not possible to solve as we don’t give all of the information you need.) We started doing it this way precisely because we kept running into people who would have 3 nearly perfect interviews and one “hard fail”, and we eventually realized it was because they were so good at faking that they’d seen it before but if they hadn’t seen it before they bombed it hard. So now that we have the “variations”, at least once a month someone will “hard fail” the interview because they’re obviously cheating and will quite literally give the right answer to the wrong question, just rote memorizing it. It’s an arms race. And one that I enjoy.
- thih9 5y ago
  > It’s an arms race. And one that I enjoy. This sounds like focusing on the wrong thing in the interview process.
- vanusa 5y ago
- krtwllndr 5y ago
  Having been on both sides of interviews but fortunate enough to no have to do leetcode interviews I have a genuine question for those that do. Why do them? Are you really facing those problems frequently enough at FAANG to have know them? Is it uppity engineers? Gatekeeping? Or are you just getting so many applicants that you have to filter somehow and leetcode interviewing has some nice properties (easy to apply remotely, can be done by engineers, strong pass/fail criteria). Genuine interest. Ignore the negative subtext, that's just me on this subject.
  - coldtea 5y ago
    Never underestimate the "everybody else is doing them too" factor.