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its like the leetcode tests we get get to take for interviews, i can tell you that practice has made me much much much faster at solving these problems than whe

its like the leetcode tests we get get to take for interviews, i can tell you that practice has made me much much much faster at solving these problems than when i first started. I know a ton of people who delibrately practice for the SATs/ACTs, and they improve their score a lot over consecutive attempts.

olliej 5y ago
Whiteboard coding interviews should not be requiring l33tcode (you spelled it wrong :D :D :D), and if they are it reflects poorly on the interviewer/company. I’ve only had one interview where I would consider the goal to be in the realms of leetcode and that was imo a terrible google interview question[1]. But even then the code I wrote on the board was not a thing that would compile, it was pseudo code that described the implementation. The point of those interview questions is such that the language should not matter (Junior/uni-hire devs should probably have a couple of real code interviews), but to see how you think, your approach to solving a problem, and your ability to find logic bugs in your solution. Starting from a point of assuming you generally know the language you’re working in (depending on experience), in interviews where I’m the interviewer I try to make it very clear that I don’t care about perfect C/Python/whatever as long as you’re reasonably consistent and I can understand what you’re doing. I also ask about test cases (I want the general behavior and edge cases), and then we work through testcases and see if we find any issues (which you likely will because I’m not going to ask something trivial), and then go through fixing it. I do not consider having a bug in your code in a whiteboard interview to be a problem, and generally expect it. I just want to see you find, diagnose, and fix them if you do have any (see above re testcases) [1] I disagree with google on many of their decisions about whether certain problems are/aren’t “leetcode” problems

olliej 5y ago

Whiteboard coding interviews should not be requiring l33tcode (you spelled it wrong :D :D :D), and if they are it reflects poorly on the interviewer/company. I’ve only had one interview where I would consider the goal to be in the realms of leetcode and that was imo a terrible google interview question[1]. But even then the code I wrote on the board was not a thing that would compile, it was pseudo code that described the implementation. The point of those interview questions is such that the language should not matter (Junior/uni-hire devs should probably have a couple of real code interviews), but to see how you think, your approach to solving a problem, and your ability to find logic bugs in your solution. Starting from a point of assuming you generally know the language you’re working in (depending on experience), in interviews where I’m the interviewer I try to make it very clear that I don’t care about perfect C/Python/whatever as long as you’re reasonably consistent and I can understand what you’re doing. I also ask about test cases (I want the general behavior and edge cases), and then we work through testcases and see if we find any issues (which you likely will because I’m not going to ask something trivial), and then go through fixing it. I do not consider having a bug in your code in a whiteboard interview to be a problem, and generally expect it. I just want to see you find, diagnose, and fix them if you do have any (see above re testcases) [1] I disagree with google on many of their decisions about whether certain problems are/aren’t “leetcode” problems