[HN Gopher] Algorithms Interviews: Theory vs. Practice
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       Algorithms Interviews: Theory vs. Practice
        
       Author : program247365
       Score  : 40 points
       Date   : 2021-10-12 12:16 UTC (10 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (danluu.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (danluu.com)
        
       | 908B64B197 wrote:
       | What's even more interesting is the new meta-game around
       | interviews.
       | 
       | Algorithmic questions started with Microsoft, who wanted to make
       | sure engineering hires could... program!
       | 
       | The point was to make it as language agnostic as possible and
       | friendly to college hires (since everyone who did a serious CS
       | program did algorithms, there was a common vocabulary). You
       | weren't even meant to study intensively for these, just brush up
       | on your algo class.
       | 
       | But now I keep seeing guides on the internet about "hacking the
       | coding interview" and special "prep material" pushed by
       | influencers (???) on YouTube that claim to be ex FAANG (hard to
       | check). Apparently there's even classes taught at tier two
       | colleges (Waterlo if I recall) that specifically focus on
       | algorithm interviews. Not algorithms, just algorithms interviews.
       | They get interview questions from students and the class is just
       | memorizing as many of them as possible.
        
         | sjtindell wrote:
         | Yeah it is a skill set in and of itself. To pass a modern
         | interview in my experience you need to take a week or two on
         | Leetcode to brush up and do a run through Cracking the Coding
         | Interview for concepts/terminology. In my opinion this is
         | fueled by an abundance of excellent sheep (a good book) among
         | hires at tech companies. If you're trained for years and years
         | (middle, high school, and college in the US) to study for SAT
         | style tests (cracking the coding interview is full of test
         | taking tactics) then when you're asked to design interviews
         | this is stuff you gravitate to because it's easy to reproduce
         | and understand. An excellent sheep appears to be a high
         | achiever but only knows how to be given hurdles and jump them,
         | not how to identify creativity or get nuance out of an
         | interview process that is already woefully shallow. So it's all
         | people who spent lots of time studying for algos and data
         | structures class asking each other those same questions. Asking
         | "Are you one of us?"
        
           | strikelaserclaw wrote:
           | some leetcode is good, too much is pretty much useless. There
           | are people who study all solutions to hundreds of leetcode
           | problems to crack the interview, while this hard work is
           | admirable, i feel like they wasted so much time studying that
           | than something that actually makes them a better engineer.
           | For example, i studied Floyd's hare and tortoise algorithm
           | for cycle detection in a linked list a couple months ago, its
           | a beautiful algorithm but i doubt it made me even a little
           | better as a software engineer, that is just one instance of
           | my leetcode adventure, which after a certain point i felt
           | like "man i learned a solution to this random problem which
           | does not extend in a general way to increasing my knowledge
           | and i will most likely forget the solution in a couple months
           | anyway"
        
           | 908B64B197 wrote:
           | > So it's all people who spent lots of time studying for
           | algos and data structures class asking each other those same
           | questions. Asking "Are you one of us?"
           | 
           | In my experience, there's a point where it becomes 100%
           | cargo-culting/rote.
           | 
           | The best approach is to keep the coding (it's essential to be
           | able to write code on the whiteboard, period) and have some
           | elements of algorithmic reasoning but focus on using those to
           | solve a real problem.
        
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       (page generated 2021-10-12 23:02 UTC)