4 ms·

From those questions, it sure seems like their interview process is aimed at choosing among recent grads whose resumes are all essentially the same "B.S. Comput

• AznHisoka 13y ago
  That's what they tell people too. It's great if you just graduated from a formal CS program because the algorithms stuff is fresh in your brain. Whereas working 5-10 years in a boring bigcorp, doing CRUD apps will kinda make you more "dumb"
  • Zimahl 13y ago
    Hah, I must be pretty dumb. After over 10 years working on anything from startup to BigCorp, I doubt I could answer a single one of those questions right now. I did learn that in my last round of interviewing (about a year ago) that to play the game you need to review the junk that you'll never need to keep in your brain, that you know but don't have at command. Sure, you'll most likely never use it at the position you apply for, but that's the rub.
    • druiid 13y ago
      I genuinely don't understand how it's useful to interview someone this way. It basically makes it a game of 'Show us what you remember from CS101/MAE101/etc'. Really why should interviews for people established in the industry be like that? Sure you should know how to do basic algorithms and optimization type questions, but having minute detail style programming questions that every engineer not fresh out of college will have forgotten since their core discipline classes is just silly.
      • chris_mahan 13y ago
        Maybe it's a subtle form of age discrimination?
        • druiid 13y ago
          Not sure how it could be considered age discrimination though. You tend to forget 'knowledge' like this fairly quickly. I know for my part at least I generally have to brush up on this kind of learning about every six months (or even less perhaps), if I wanted to retain it.
          • chris_mahan 13y ago
            That's why I said subtle. It would be like requiring you to recite all the marks you received on all your assignments in all your classes in your last semester of your senior year of college. I assume that if you had just graduated, this would be easy, but if you had graduated 10 years prior, this would be hard (feasible if you'd kept the paperwork--but hard).
      • Zimahl 13y ago
        Yeah, I don't know how it's useful. I think you could get just as many bad developers who are brilliant as good developers who are brilliant. I worked with a bad brilliant developer who just couldn't produce production code to save his life. We all saw where he was going with his code but he couldn't get there. We'd all end up cleaning up his code to get it into a better place. He would've aced interviews like at Google. In the end you need people who can deliver.
    • hox 13y ago
      I recently interviewed at a medium-sized tech company in Palo Alto that only had recent graduates on my interview schedule. I really don't know if I could have expected them to ask questions other than standard CS / data structures / algorithms questions. Why those employees would be put in a position to interview with such a short time frame of professional experience, let alone recruiting experience, is beyond me.
  • csmatt 13y ago
    I hate this so much. The interviewer must realize how strange this is when he/she has to brush up on questions they're about to ask a candidate for a similar position to their own.
  • lightcatcher 13y ago
    As someone still in school (in a very theoretical CS program), I still like to skim over a good part of CLRS before before an interview that I expect to be over algorithmic stuff.