[HN Gopher] Big Tech Coding Interview Framework - Pt 1. Inspect
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Big Tech Coding Interview Framework - Pt 1. Inspect
Author : ckcheng
Score : 71 points
Date : 2021-11-06 17:42 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fangprep.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (fangprep.substack.com)
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| What the author describes... is called drafting a spec.
|
| It's something that's taught to first year engineering students
| (map and understand all the constrains of a problem before
| attempting to solve it, or else pay the price later...).
| theshadowknows wrote:
| I was brought in to a project on Friday to help figure
| something out. The gist of the project is that we have a system
| which generates tons of event data. Basically interaction
| logging. And until recently the system sent those logs to some
| other systems via nightly files. But someone in the business
| decided it made more sense to do it "real time" and so some
| folks have been diligently coding away and have built their
| solution only to find there was a gigantic miss:
|
| The system is generating thousands, sometimes tens or hundreds
| of thousands of events per hour. And the api that is to receive
| this data can only receive 100 "records" (events) per request,
| and the system that generates the data can't do any sort of
| multi threading or multiple requests simultaneously...it can
| just fire off one request after another..
|
| I did the math and on our busiest day this process would take
| something like 827 years to send all of the event data...
|
| I say all of this to highlight your point that it's a
| foundational skill to gather requirements..and yet I'm working
| with sr engineers that created this mess...
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > and yet I'm working with sr engineers that created this
| mess...
|
| Engineers or "Engineers"? I'm asking because there's a trend
| in this industry to call everyone engineer (6 months bootcamp
| front-end engineer). But then you see things like that...
| voz_ wrote:
| I do not find this useful or correct. Furthermore, the author has
| another post that says to avoid Cracking the Coding Interview,
| which is actually a stellar book (even for those who are not
| interviewing).
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| I have generally avoided or balked at typical coding interview
| questions. They're very seldom representative of real work, and
| have more value for helping big companies avoid lawsuits than
| helping anyone else evaluate candidates or prospective jobs.
|
| That said... the article offers good advice for people going
| through the process. I'd add that it's not much different from
| type- and test-driven development. Which, conceptually, might
| help readers who are reading this advice and feeling overwhelmed
| by the idea of trying to gather the information discussed while
| "buying time to think of a solution".
|
| Which is to say, if that feels like a lot of cognitive load on
| top of trying to navigate "soft skills" and/or other challenges
| in an interview, you may find it more grounding if you map the
| advice to ways you already work.
|
| Another way to look at it that occurred to me: it doesn't feel
| very different from a _very short_ sprint (or new Kanban card or
| choose your working cycle abstraction).
|
| 1. Planning meeting to clarify user intent, acceptance criteria,
| whatever you need to get started.
|
| 2. Definition of smaller tasks and any feedback loop that might
| entail.
|
| 3. Implementation and its own feedback loop.
| m0zg wrote:
| I think it's ridiculous and dumb that otherwise smart people take
| months out of their busy lives to train these bullshit skills
| they'll never use outside these "interviews". FWIW, I never
| prepare for more than a couple of days, and my batting average is
| pretty good, albeit not perfect. And I'm not a genius by any
| means. I just line up the interviews from least to most desirable
| (so I get some "interview training" in), and go with the flow.
| jurassic wrote:
| I give a lot of FAANG interviews these days, and I'm stunned how
| many people skip this important step of understanding the
| problem, asking clarifying questions to surface important
| constraints, and making a plan before launching off into
| implementation. It's not rocket science.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| Because common expectations are two complex algorithmic
| problems finished coding up in 45 minutes? "Show me the
| incentives and I will show you the outcome." and "It's not
| rocket science."
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Common at fb maybe not at any sane place I've ever
| interviewed with
| ruraljuror wrote:
| > Asking questions like: "Can strings be multi-character?" can
| provide you with critical information to the problem.
|
| I don't understand this example, which immediately leads to
| imposter syndrome kicking in because this is supposed to be
| basic, right? But as I gain more experience I begin to expect
| this is just poorly written.
|
| So can anyone help me understand what is meant by this question?
| dialogbox wrote:
| I believe that means, even if it's a string not char, that is
| used to contain a single character only. So all length of the
| strings are 1.
| sharkbot wrote:
| I think the author is referring to characters in a Unicode
| string that are combined to form a composite glyph.
|
| For instance, a large number of emojis are formed by combining
| two Unicode characters with a zero width joiner character. Skin
| tones are a notable instance, along with gendered occupation
| glyphs (female doctor, say).
|
| It would be a simplifying (and usually correct) assumption to
| ignore such composite characters in a basic processing task.
| ruraljuror wrote:
| This is a great explanation and perhaps this is the author's
| intent. I think this example is so specific it is not a good
| way to start. It is better to start by eliminating broad
| categories and narrow in: can we assume ascii or do we allow
| unicode?
| ckcheng wrote:
| The series relates to recent
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28896343 which was just a
| Google spreadsheet
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(page generated 2021-11-06 23:00 UTC)