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(Author of the post) Consider this: In any job you're going to do "normal" stuff the majority of the time. The other times, you have to pull out A-level work. I
by aristus 13y ago
(Author of the post) Consider this: In any job you're going to do "normal" stuff the majority of the time. The other times, you have to pull out A-level work. It's not 24x7, but when the time comes you have to be able to do it, eg writing a parser for an obscure query language that will get executed $X billion times per day, so it better be small, correct, and fast.
We ask people to prep because we want to know if you can do that level of work.
- ritchiea 13y agoThanks. That kind of answer is what I'm most curious about. What exactly is the A-level work that is not "normal stuff" that you want your candidates to be prepared for.
- rhizome 13y agoIt reads like a category error to me. My experience is that the coming times that require A-level work from memory are emergencies and the "$X billion times a day query parser" ones are not, allowing more iteration and collaboration.
- aristus 13y agoYou may be right, but all I know is my own experience. The query parser example is real; I had to do something like that recently in order to more deeply analyze some performance bugs.
- rhizome 13y agoThe process you describe in the essay is portrayed as one of policy and iterated improvement at Facebook, oriented around "How We Do It," with your GP example meant as support for that process as relates to "prep mode" approaches to interviewing at FB. It sounds like you're backing away from that, though. Was your query parser work done under the pressure and constraints of an interview environment? Would you have been able to write that parser in the same form at a white board during your actual interview?
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- jkrems 13y agoWell, that sounds just weird. Either you expect the people being interviewed as part of their prep to learn and remember forever everything they ever may need at Facebook and that could possibly be asked in the interview, or your argument doesn't make sense. If I hadn't any contact with parsers/compilers for a while I will need to look stuff up. When you have no frame of reference in my process when getting the information necessary to solve the problem - how can that possibly be a good indicator of me being able to solve an unforeseen problem? If there is a known solution and I already have the exact algorithm, the hard part is over and it's only about writing code. Which is exactly what people seem to complain here: The skill to reproduce a known algorithm is at best the lowest possible bar.
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