5 ms·

I usually give a data structure coding interview: Here's some data models, and here's how you can reference eachother by properties. Cool. Let's do 3 levels of

I usually give a data structure coding interview: Here's some data models, and here's how you can reference eachother by properties. Cool. Let's do 3 levels of nested loops to extract the relationships and map them. That's like 99% of what they'll be doing. The signals I'd look for are "do they start the entire thing by looking at structures or not", etc. But unfortunately this breaks down when you're interviewing 10-year+ candidates. It doesn't yield anything useful. So sticking for those positions with a really really basic problem and pseudocoding it, and using the remaining time to instead have them map out solutions they did in the past seems to be useful. Most things leet code interviews screen is "does this person know how to cram" because I tell you, everyone I know who aced leet code interviews crammed for 3 months and literally knew any one you can think of, and every variation. Juniors tend to do better in those, ironically enough.

lapcat 4y ago
> Juniors tend to do better in those, ironically enough. Is it ironic or intentional? Seems like a great way to hide age discrimination under the guise of "fairness" (everyone gets the same test).
wespiser_2018 4y ago
That's an interesting observation: if you are hiring someone whose role is largely high level decision making, like a principal engineer, that skillset is orthogonal to anything you could get them to show you on a keyboard. Almost by definition: the role is simply more than what a single person can do at the keyboard in X amount of time, so testing for that would be an incomplete test.
lelanthran 4y ago
> Most things leet code interviews screen is "does this person know how to cram" because I tell you, everyone I know who aced leet code interviews crammed for 3 months and literally knew any one you can think of, and every variation. As I commented above, I successfully passed multiple leetcode interviews in the last four years, including FAANG. I did not spend a single minute on prep.

lapcat 4y ago

> Juniors tend to do better in those, ironically enough. Is it ironic or intentional? Seems like a great way to hide age discrimination under the guise of "fairness" (everyone gets the same test).

wespiser_2018 4y ago

That's an interesting observation: if you are hiring someone whose role is largely high level decision making, like a principal engineer, that skillset is orthogonal to anything you could get them to show you on a keyboard. Almost by definition: the role is simply more than what a single person can do at the keyboard in X amount of time, so testing for that would be an incomplete test.

lelanthran 4y ago

> Most things leet code interviews screen is "does this person know how to cram" because I tell you, everyone I know who aced leet code interviews crammed for 3 months and literally knew any one you can think of, and every variation. As I commented above, I successfully passed multiple leetcode interviews in the last four years, including FAANG. I did not spend a single minute on prep.