3 ms·

This is what happened at my Oxford interviews. They asked me stuff that I knew the answer to, thinking it would be one of those see-how-he-thinks things. Bigge

This is what happened at my Oxford interviews. They asked me stuff that I knew the answer to, thinking it would be one of those see-how-he-thinks things. Biggest problem was acting like I didn't know and getting it really fast. Total lottery, they could have asked any number of things that I didn't understand.

seanmcdirmid 4y ago
Ya, this is hard. I bombed an Amazon interview because the interviewer asked me Alien Dictionary, a well known LeetCode problem that I already worked out while practicing. I told her outright that this was a problem everyone practiced, but she still dinged me for already knowing the answer and not going through the “figure this out flow” (admittedly, I could have handled that better, but it is actually difficult to work through something that you know the answer to but forgot how you got the answer). At least it was for a job I probably wouldn’t have taken.
- darkerside 4y ago
  > it is actually difficult to work through something that you I am the answer to but forgot how you got the answer Well, yeah. That's a big part of the point of the question. Anybody can Google the answer. Do you understand it well enough to explain it, and if you don't, can you walk through your thought process as you figure it out.
  - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
    I failed to practice answering questions that I already knew the answer to. I also think the interviewers style had something to do with putting me off balance (it became adversarial after I pointed out this was just alien dictionary, I probably would have had a better result pretending not to have seen the problem before). Or maybe that’s just how things are at Amazon? My Google and Facebook interviews went much better in comparison. None of their questions were top ten LeetCode ones.
    - albedoa 4y ago
      > I failed to practice answering questions that I already knew the answer to. You failed for the same reason you would have failed if you had never heard the problem before. Knowing the answer has nothing to do with why you were dinged.
      - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
        The interviewer turned really adversarial when I told her this was a common LeetCode problem. I guess you really had to have been there. Alien dictionary isn’t that hard otherwise, if I were allowed to work through it rather than explaining how it worked, things would have gone much better.
- twodave 4y ago
  Is the answer to convert the letters to integers, then compare that list of integer strings before/after alphabetizing it? I haven’t studied leetcode (never needed to), but this is the first thing that occurred to me…
  - anchochilis 4y ago
    The solution I know for this one involves topo sort and a trie, once you have brushed up on those concepts it's not so bad.

seanmcdirmid 4y ago

Ya, this is hard. I bombed an Amazon interview because the interviewer asked me Alien Dictionary, a well known LeetCode problem that I already worked out while practicing. I told her outright that this was a problem everyone practiced, but she still dinged me for already knowing the answer and not going through the “figure this out flow” (admittedly, I could have handled that better, but it is actually difficult to work through something that you know the answer to but forgot how you got the answer). At least it was for a job I probably wouldn’t have taken.

darkerside 4y ago
> it is actually difficult to work through something that you I am the answer to but forgot how you got the answer Well, yeah. That's a big part of the point of the question. Anybody can Google the answer. Do you understand it well enough to explain it, and if you don't, can you walk through your thought process as you figure it out.
- seanmcdirmid 4y ago
  I failed to practice answering questions that I already knew the answer to. I also think the interviewers style had something to do with putting me off balance (it became adversarial after I pointed out this was just alien dictionary, I probably would have had a better result pretending not to have seen the problem before). Or maybe that’s just how things are at Amazon? My Google and Facebook interviews went much better in comparison. None of their questions were top ten LeetCode ones.
  - albedoa 4y ago
    > I failed to practice answering questions that I already knew the answer to. You failed for the same reason you would have failed if you had never heard the problem before. Knowing the answer has nothing to do with why you were dinged.
    - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
      The interviewer turned really adversarial when I told her this was a common LeetCode problem. I guess you really had to have been there. Alien dictionary isn’t that hard otherwise, if I were allowed to work through it rather than explaining how it worked, things would have gone much better.
twodave 4y ago
Is the answer to convert the letters to integers, then compare that list of integer strings before/after alphabetizing it? I haven’t studied leetcode (never needed to), but this is the first thing that occurred to me…
- anchochilis 4y ago
  The solution I know for this one involves topo sort and a trie, once you have brushed up on those concepts it's not so bad.