7 ms·

I do think there's a real place for interview questions where you identify algorithmic opportunities in real world problem scenarios quickly, but you also may b

I do think there's a real place for interview questions where you identify algorithmic opportunities in real world problem scenarios quickly, but you also may be missing some of the incentives for testing the way it's currently tested: Coding floyd-warshal importantly shows that you can code, and generally signals at least one of two things: 1. You studied hard for the interview, you're willing to do difficult and unpleasant intellectual work for rewards and do so in a structured enough manner to get results. 2. You have such a deep understanding of graphs and graph algorithms you were able to re-construct floyd-warshal in 45 minutes. This implies time will not be an issue if you see an opportunity for these problems, and you can probably handle much harder problems as well. Filtering for these two traits might work very well depending on the hiring needs of a particular company.

YZF 5y ago
I would say: 1. You're fresh out of school or you have a lot of time on your hands. 2. You memorized some interview preparation book. I do agree that a candidate that has shown some effort preparing for an interview is a positive. Other than that this seems like a silly game. The flip side is the candidate that memorized the book, prepared like it's a test at school, and is useless on the job, can't operate at all outside that memorized domain, can't write the simplest bit of real world code.
- Hermitian909 5y ago
  > The flip side is the candidate that memorized the book, prepared like it's a test at school, and is useless on the job, can't operate at all outside that memorized domain, can't write the simplest bit of real world code. I think this leaves out the possibility of high mastery. I think it is instructive think about algorithm skills as similar to those for algebra. If the most advanced algebra you ever solved was linear equations, remembering how to solve a linear equation may be difficult. However if you're skilled at solving advanced calculus problems by hand, your understanding of algebra is so deep that you could re-derive the process as necessary. Many of us with a lot of math experience will never forget how to solve linear or quadratic equations barring steep cognitive decline and this is also so true for certain classes of algorithms. Personally, I've studied graphs and graph algorithms beyond what you might find in just CLRS or other introductory algorithms textbooks and as a result I can re-derive many classic graph algorithms on the fly, no memorization necessary. I have done this interviews as have people I know.
- XorNot 5y ago
  I mean it's also a pretty good filter by age: if you're middle aged, working and have children, then you're not going to really have the time to get through memorising a bunch of leetcode. Which is handy because Google et al don't really want employees who look at the in-office perks and wonder why they'd be appealing at all if you're just going to go home at the end of the day.
  - BurningFrog 5y ago
    If you're a good middle aged engineer, you should have enough former coworkers happy to hire you that you don't need get on the leetcode treadmill.
  - joshuamorton 5y ago
    This is such a funny thing to read, because I see new L6 and 7 tech managers hired (above me) all the time. They're often middle aged people with kids. They don't bemoan this stuff (and yes, while they have fewer of them, they still need to solve a whiteboard problem or two to get hired)
    - disgruntledphd2 5y ago
      But you're seeing the outcome of a selection process. You might feel differently if you saw the top of the funnel.
      - joshuamorton 5y ago
        In what way? If you mean that there might be management wizards who are just fantastic but we skip, perhaps. But that isn't the point I was making, just that despite what people think, these interviews don't actually filter out experienced people with families and kids. Those kinds of people get hired regularly.
        disgruntledphd2 5y ago
        Well you don't actually know that, because you don't know what the top of the funnel looks like. Consider a world where every L6+ manager candidate has a family and kids. However, only 5% of these can make time to do the LC stuff (revising most likely if they've been managing for a while). So your company will end up filtering out 95% of candidates immediately, but people in the company will say that there's no problem as all of the successful candidates have a family and kids, so it can't be biased. Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of technical screening for managers, but I'm making the point that you can't look at the output of a funnel and conclude that everything's fine, you need to look at the complete funnel to understand this.

YZF 5y ago

I would say: 1. You're fresh out of school or you have a lot of time on your hands. 2. You memorized some interview preparation book. I do agree that a candidate that has shown some effort preparing for an interview is a positive. Other than that this seems like a silly game. The flip side is the candidate that memorized the book, prepared like it's a test at school, and is useless on the job, can't operate at all outside that memorized domain, can't write the simplest bit of real world code.

Hermitian909 5y ago
> The flip side is the candidate that memorized the book, prepared like it's a test at school, and is useless on the job, can't operate at all outside that memorized domain, can't write the simplest bit of real world code. I think this leaves out the possibility of high mastery. I think it is instructive think about algorithm skills as similar to those for algebra. If the most advanced algebra you ever solved was linear equations, remembering how to solve a linear equation may be difficult. However if you're skilled at solving advanced calculus problems by hand, your understanding of algebra is so deep that you could re-derive the process as necessary. Many of us with a lot of math experience will never forget how to solve linear or quadratic equations barring steep cognitive decline and this is also so true for certain classes of algorithms. Personally, I've studied graphs and graph algorithms beyond what you might find in just CLRS or other introductory algorithms textbooks and as a result I can re-derive many classic graph algorithms on the fly, no memorization necessary. I have done this interviews as have people I know.
XorNot 5y ago
I mean it's also a pretty good filter by age: if you're middle aged, working and have children, then you're not going to really have the time to get through memorising a bunch of leetcode. Which is handy because Google et al don't really want employees who look at the in-office perks and wonder why they'd be appealing at all if you're just going to go home at the end of the day.
- BurningFrog 5y ago
  If you're a good middle aged engineer, you should have enough former coworkers happy to hire you that you don't need get on the leetcode treadmill.
- joshuamorton 5y ago
  This is such a funny thing to read, because I see new L6 and 7 tech managers hired (above me) all the time. They're often middle aged people with kids. They don't bemoan this stuff (and yes, while they have fewer of them, they still need to solve a whiteboard problem or two to get hired)
  - disgruntledphd2 5y ago
    But you're seeing the outcome of a selection process. You might feel differently if you saw the top of the funnel.
    - joshuamorton 5y ago
      In what way? If you mean that there might be management wizards who are just fantastic but we skip, perhaps. But that isn't the point I was making, just that despite what people think, these interviews don't actually filter out experienced people with families and kids. Those kinds of people get hired regularly.
      - disgruntledphd2 5y ago
        Well you don't actually know that, because you don't know what the top of the funnel looks like. Consider a world where every L6+ manager candidate has a family and kids. However, only 5% of these can make time to do the LC stuff (revising most likely if they've been managing for a while). So your company will end up filtering out 95% of candidates immediately, but people in the company will say that there's no problem as all of the successful candidates have a family and kids, so it can't be biased. Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of technical screening for managers, but I'm making the point that you can't look at the output of a funnel and conclude that everything's fine, you need to look at the complete funnel to understand this.