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Is this really what technical interviews are like in Silicon Valley? I’ve never seen anything like it in the “real” world.
by irrational 4y ago
Is this really what technical interviews are like in Silicon Valley? I’ve never seen anything like it in the “real” world.
- tantalor 4y agoUm, which part?
- irrational 4y agoAsking about setting a Queen on a chess board. Unless I’m being hired at a company that programs chess sets, it is a nonsense question. If you want to test someone’s problem solving skills, test them with a problem that actually reflects the real work they will be doing at your company.
- tantalor 4y ago> N-Queens is a classic backtracking problem that gets asked a lot during interviews. https://fizzbuzzed.com/top-interview-questions-3/ https://fizzbuzzed.com/top-interview-questions-3/
- siriusfeynman 4y agoWhich is exactly the point, it's a leetcode question that tests whether you've memorised a bunch of leetcode interview questions
- bruce343434 4y agoyou're supposed to be able to come up with the solution by yourself
- wiseowise 4y ago> classic backtracking problem Literally in the parent post.
- hnbad 4y ago> Backtracking is extremely important in today’s software interviews and almost always comes up in some form. From TFA. Even the article struggles to explain how this is useful outside similar leetcode questions. Yes, backtracking is sometimes a useful approach for some real-life programming problems but leetcode questions neither test for the ability to recognize backtracking problems nor the general ability to solve them.
- dboreham 4y agoThe interview is to test for membership in a cult. There are other places you can be paid to code and design software that doesn't require (or even actively disrequires) being a cult member. ...or at least not a member of that particular cult.
- lozenge 4y agoOnly if you want to get hired.
- expertentipp 4y agoI never engage in such teasing and not getting hired, so you're likely correct.
- irrational 4y agoI’ve been hiring developers for decades at a Fortune 100 company and have never engaged in such nonsense. Unless you are hiring people to program chess sets, the question in the article is foolish. If you want to test their problem solving or coding skills, give them a problem from the actual work they will be doing at your company.
- LambdaComplex 4y agoI wish more companies thought that way. It seems like most of them are just cargo culting Google's hiring methods with the expectation that it will turn them into the next Google.
- wiseowise 4y ago> Unless you are hiring people to program chess sets, the question in the article is foolish. Ever heard about word “abstraction”?
- irrational 4y agoSure. But do you know how often I’ve had to do backtracking in 25 years of professional programming? Zero times. Maybe the person is interviewing for a position where this kind of leetcode question is applicable, but in my experience this question is not abstracting real normal day to day problems.
- lozenge 4y agoUsername isn't accurate - you should be called rational.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 4y agomore or less. i wasn't asked n queens specifically, but i was asked to move a knight from one square to another. but no, you're not supposed to solve it using the type system itself