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Except that skews the candidates that pass younger. If you’re fresh out of school, you remember binary trees or sorting algorithms. After doing software develo

Except that skews the candidates that pass younger. If you’re fresh out of school, you remember binary trees or sorting algorithms. After doing software development for 20+ years, you’ve been using those structures as a small part of the larger problems you now solve. If you go looking for a new job, you don’t necessarily remember all these tricks to invert a binary tree, and you fail. Even though you have all that experience in what you actually will be asked to do on the job.

ratorx 5y ago
I’m a fairly new interviewer at FAANG. I wouldn’t consider “invert a binary tree” to be a good question. If a question did require “invert a binary tree” to be part of the optimal answer, then identifying this would be the most important thing. If the candidate then coded an suboptimal version, whilst mentioning that a more optimal one could exist, that’s almost max points. I think there is a slight focus on “tricks” for coding interviews, but from the questions I’ve done and seen, these are more general problem solving strategies, rather than the slightly esoteric algorithmic tricks that get brought up on HN. I haven’t seen a current question where a very specific algorithmic trick is required to get a good rating (but that could very well be my lack of experience). I guess dynamic programming may be the closest thing. But I would say that’s a more general strategy and the questions I’ve seen that use it are fairly rare. I’ve never seen a question require it for a good rating, the ones I’ve seen have it as extension type stuff.
- throwmeawaycs 5y ago
  Your mentality is “throw them at a hacker rank problem and rate who had the best American Idol performance.” Which is braindead. You can claim that’s not your process but ultimately you’re trying to get someone to present an output based on your input while also not accepting that the process is not always the same. Let’s explain by analogy here: I’m hiring a great /Painter/ for a portrait of my family. Would it be reasonable to call in 10 painters and show them a photo of my family and say “show me what you can paint in 10 minutes!”? Do you think that’s a good metric to hire creative talent? Or, perhaps you don’t think they’re creative, and you make your portrait a paint by numbers, and then say “quick, take this color and mix it, then paint in the numbers, let’s see who can mix the color really fast!” Or maybe you call the 10 painters in and say “show me your personal gallery, that will be all!” So you dismiss 7/10 painters because they sold their work and it doesn’t ride around with them. Do you feel that you’re hiring a good painter?
  - ratorx 5y ago
    Firstly, I never said whether algorithmic interviews were good or not (still unsure tbh), I wanted to provide a counter-point against a common trope that it is just memorising algorithmic tricks to do the interview. I’m not sure I understand your point. My guess is that you’re saying that I’m expecting a very specific answer whilst the difference in process might result in different answers? My binary tree question is a made up example to illustrate a point, but it is a bit misleading. There’s no expectation that people will identify the “invert a binary tree”, as long as they can describe the optimal solution some other way. However, in case the candidate doesn’t immediately spot the full optimal solution, they can break it down into steps, one of which might be to identify a good data structure (a binary tree) and a useful operation (inversion) and go from there. I’m not sure how to even start engaging the painter analogy, but I will point out a flaw in the problem. A large reason FAANG does the interviews this way is because they can quantise it better and distribute not just the interviewing between interviewers, but also the training of new interviewers. So I guess a slightly more relevant analogy would be you trying to hire 100 painters worldwide for your large painting company after interviewing 1000 people whilst not having the time to interview them all personally.
    - throwmeawaycs 5y ago
      >A large reason FAANG does the interviews this way is because they can quantise it better and distribute not just the interviewing between interviewers, but also the training of new interviewers. Almost! They do it this way because they are stupid individuals who are paid to hire individuals more intelligent than they are. If anyone finds out they aren’t necessary then you and your job go away. To wit: if your hiring process is transparent and commands no respect why would your daily operations be different? Lol! Oh no!
      - ratorx 5y ago
        > They do it this way because they are stupid individuals who are paid to hire individuals more intelligent than they are. This is partly inevitable, not every interviewer will be smarter than the candidates they are interviewing. I’m curious why your distribution is so skewed though (all interviewers are dumber than all candidates). I’m not sure how satisfiable this is, considering that some of the candidates become employees and then future interviewers. To keep this constraint, there must continue to be an unbounded growth of intelligence at FAANG. If that’s the case, it seems like a great place to learn from smart people. > To wit: if your hiring process is transparent and commands no respect Would definitely say the hiring process is not as transparent as it could be. Not sure about “commands no respect”. Considering how popular algorithmic interviews have become for non-FAANG companies, there must be some people who decided to value it. Perhaps you don’t consider the opinion of anyone who does value it important enough to include. But then your sample becomes slightly biased right?
BoiledCabbage 5y ago
Agreed that it's not perfect. But asking to talk about technical topics is what is essentially trivia - is an absolutely worse approach.

ratorx 5y ago

I’m a fairly new interviewer at FAANG. I wouldn’t consider “invert a binary tree” to be a good question. If a question did require “invert a binary tree” to be part of the optimal answer, then identifying this would be the most important thing. If the candidate then coded an suboptimal version, whilst mentioning that a more optimal one could exist, that’s almost max points. I think there is a slight focus on “tricks” for coding interviews, but from the questions I’ve done and seen, these are more general problem solving strategies, rather than the slightly esoteric algorithmic tricks that get brought up on HN. I haven’t seen a current question where a very specific algorithmic trick is required to get a good rating (but that could very well be my lack of experience). I guess dynamic programming may be the closest thing. But I would say that’s a more general strategy and the questions I’ve seen that use it are fairly rare. I’ve never seen a question require it for a good rating, the ones I’ve seen have it as extension type stuff.

throwmeawaycs 5y ago
Your mentality is “throw them at a hacker rank problem and rate who had the best American Idol performance.” Which is braindead. You can claim that’s not your process but ultimately you’re trying to get someone to present an output based on your input while also not accepting that the process is not always the same. Let’s explain by analogy here: I’m hiring a great /Painter/ for a portrait of my family. Would it be reasonable to call in 10 painters and show them a photo of my family and say “show me what you can paint in 10 minutes!”? Do you think that’s a good metric to hire creative talent? Or, perhaps you don’t think they’re creative, and you make your portrait a paint by numbers, and then say “quick, take this color and mix it, then paint in the numbers, let’s see who can mix the color really fast!” Or maybe you call the 10 painters in and say “show me your personal gallery, that will be all!” So you dismiss 7/10 painters because they sold their work and it doesn’t ride around with them. Do you feel that you’re hiring a good painter?
- ratorx 5y ago
  Firstly, I never said whether algorithmic interviews were good or not (still unsure tbh), I wanted to provide a counter-point against a common trope that it is just memorising algorithmic tricks to do the interview. I’m not sure I understand your point. My guess is that you’re saying that I’m expecting a very specific answer whilst the difference in process might result in different answers? My binary tree question is a made up example to illustrate a point, but it is a bit misleading. There’s no expectation that people will identify the “invert a binary tree”, as long as they can describe the optimal solution some other way. However, in case the candidate doesn’t immediately spot the full optimal solution, they can break it down into steps, one of which might be to identify a good data structure (a binary tree) and a useful operation (inversion) and go from there. I’m not sure how to even start engaging the painter analogy, but I will point out a flaw in the problem. A large reason FAANG does the interviews this way is because they can quantise it better and distribute not just the interviewing between interviewers, but also the training of new interviewers. So I guess a slightly more relevant analogy would be you trying to hire 100 painters worldwide for your large painting company after interviewing 1000 people whilst not having the time to interview them all personally.
  - throwmeawaycs 5y ago
    >A large reason FAANG does the interviews this way is because they can quantise it better and distribute not just the interviewing between interviewers, but also the training of new interviewers. Almost! They do it this way because they are stupid individuals who are paid to hire individuals more intelligent than they are. If anyone finds out they aren’t necessary then you and your job go away. To wit: if your hiring process is transparent and commands no respect why would your daily operations be different? Lol! Oh no!
    - ratorx 5y ago
      > They do it this way because they are stupid individuals who are paid to hire individuals more intelligent than they are. This is partly inevitable, not every interviewer will be smarter than the candidates they are interviewing. I’m curious why your distribution is so skewed though (all interviewers are dumber than all candidates). I’m not sure how satisfiable this is, considering that some of the candidates become employees and then future interviewers. To keep this constraint, there must continue to be an unbounded growth of intelligence at FAANG. If that’s the case, it seems like a great place to learn from smart people. > To wit: if your hiring process is transparent and commands no respect Would definitely say the hiring process is not as transparent as it could be. Not sure about “commands no respect”. Considering how popular algorithmic interviews have become for non-FAANG companies, there must be some people who decided to value it. Perhaps you don’t consider the opinion of anyone who does value it important enough to include. But then your sample becomes slightly biased right?

BoiledCabbage 5y ago

Agreed that it's not perfect. But asking to talk about technical topics is what is essentially trivia - is an absolutely worse approach.