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Good Will Hrunting posted:I certainly remember things from my DS course and for some topics a light refresher is more than adequate. I'm not spending like 3 weeks hammering down linked lists or something, but I do need to do a little practice as a refresher if they were to come up. It's the harder problems that I'm spending the bulk of my time on. One I really struggled with last time was Towers of Hanoi. Regardless of being able to solve most of the other recursion problems I saw - that one still kicked my rear end to conceptualize. how often do you actually get rejected after tech interviews because you couldn't perform? i think you probably have different expectations than the people asking you these questions. most interviewers just want to see if you can recognize the problem and recall the broad outline of a solution. if people are expecting working solutions or perfect recall of algorithms or data structures you probably don't want to work with them
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Mar 21, 2018 01:31
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the talent deficit posted:how often do you actually get rejected after tech interviews because you couldn't perform? i think you probably have different expectations than the people asking you these questions. most interviewers just want to see if you can recognize the problem and recall the broad outline of a solution. if people are expecting working solutions or perfect recall of algorithms or data structures you probably don't want to work with them This is pretty much the polar opposite of what was expected on both sides in my experience in SV. If you don't have a working solution at the end of the interview, then you've failed that interview. Expectations in generally are that you solve the problem with a complexity that is reasonably close to optimal to be considered a great candidate. There is a large element of luck to all this as candidates are generally weak in one or more areas and you might get several questions in those areas or none.
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Mar 21, 2018 01:59
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Munkeymon posted:I bet this is why you're getting grilled about algorithms more than most of the posters ITT. They see your degree wasn't in CS so they crack their knuckles and think better make sure this isn't some dogshit imposter to the brotherhood
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Mar 21, 2018 02:41
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* because your prep work is nuts compared to what I'd realistically do, even for a big 5
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My experience with interviews is that the journey matters a lot more than the destination. This idea that someone who wasn't in the room could take a picture of the whiteboard and give a hard pass/fail purely based on edit distance to a perfect solution is wild. Seconding the talent deficit's question about how you "know" the results as well. I've received honest criticism specific to one interview exactly once in my life and it was devastating. Ruined my weekend. When giving feedback on candidates it's never been anything as narrow as "your solution was O(n2.5) when we required O(n2.1) or better for question (C)," it's much more broad.
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Mar 21, 2018 02:43
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I'd say 50/50. Some places wanted me to work with them on whatever that website is where your code needs to compile and run, while others were white-boarding. I actually only "failed" Google and one other one as far as the code part goes - I failed system design in the others! That was after pretty extensive prep though. Probably 50 hours.
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Mar 21, 2018 03:33
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Today is interview day for that medior java dev role, as a contractor. I did not finisch a java backend with js frontend and in memory database. I did write a few endpoints for data manipulation using h2 and spring boot so that is a thing I guess. The recruiter said to be a nice person that shows intelligence, motivation and an ability to learn. Nobody is expected to know everything and certainly not someone with less than 5 years of experience.
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Mar 21, 2018 10:39
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Keetron posted:in memory database Also good luck!
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Mar 21, 2018 13:48
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Paolomania posted:Staying current in tech is always an oldie concern and to that end the stackoverflow dev survey came out today: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#technology I suspect that JS is overrepresented on SO because of a combination of bad libraries that mainly have useful 'documentation' in the form of SO Q&A tagged with that library and a bunch of novices getting into JS because it's relatively cool and the barrier to entry is low. I can find good answers to many many C#/.Net questions on
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Mar 21, 2018 14:23
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Munkeymon posted:I suspect that JS is overrepresented on SO because of a combination of bad libraries that mainly have useful 'documentation' in the form of SO Q&A tagged with that library and a bunch of novices getting into JS because it's relatively cool and the barrier to entry is low. I can find good answers to many many C#/.Net questions on The quality of documentation for JS libraries pisses me the gently caress off. They seem to be universally written as "here's a bunch of tutorials on how to use this library in specific ways!" and nobody bothers to include a reference or an index. Half the time they don't even document what all the parameters to their functions do. And this is for big, widely-used libraries.
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Mar 21, 2018 16:06
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Been 4 years but jQuery documentation, the last I used it, was spectacular. Node's documentation was mediocre, at best, but has greatly improved. I just remember the first time I was figuring out how to use child process and how sparse that doc was but now it's fairly nice.
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Mar 21, 2018 16:11
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Star War Sex Parrot posted:I’m curious if they gave you any more direction on this aspect. Nope, that was it. I used H2 as per some tutorial I found and it works fine with SpringBoot. They use some local MongoDB instance for local testing. We never looked at the code, they were more interested in other stuff. I feel like I hosed up for admitting I have no clue about javascript but did emphasize I am super motivated and when landing the job would jump in the courses I have ready. edited a few hours after I wrote the above: didn't get the job, not enough experience in java.
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Mar 21, 2018 20:06
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Sounds like they were looking for someone very very specific.
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Mar 21, 2018 21:34
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Good Will Hrunting posted:There was someone in this thread that had a similar experience to me interviewing here who ended up saying gently caress it and just going to Google. Maybe mrmcd? You mean whiteboard style, 4-5 hour interviews? Yeah they are pretty common now (or were two years ago when I was last looking), though not an iron clad rule. Once you do a couple of them you get the hang of it, and know what to study. Google also literally sends you a list of things to review and study beforehand. Like, we can sit here and bikeshed all day on whether this is or is not an effective way to interview people, but if a job you want has that kind of interview, just treat it like a professional examination and prepare ahead of time for it. If they *surprise* you with that, then that's kinda lovely yeah, but otherwise stop acting like it's some major human rights violation when you're asked to provide evidence of competency and skill in a job interview. By far my weirdest interview was some lovely startup connected to Jared Kushner. They had a big room where a bunch of people were all crammed into random desks, they asked me a bunch of random questions about how equity clearing worked, one of their devs proclaimed that no one could possibly be using Maria DB in production, and then asked me to leave. Their head of engineering had this creepy Russian used car salesman vibe going on too.
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Mar 22, 2018 02:39
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They're so common now you should never be blindsided and I think they're about the same as take-homes, that is to say a gigantic crap-shoot.
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Mar 22, 2018 03:03
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Other places I interviewed that did long whiteboard style were... Two Sigma, Bloomberg, Shutterstock, KCG.. kinda. Shutterstock people were actually pretty cool and another goon referred me, and I only ended up passing on their offer because the money wasn't quite good enough to walk away from a big stock vesting tranche six months early. Those six months suuuucked but that's a whole other story. The worst part tbh is just that it takes a whole day, so you end up burning lots of vacation time or inventing increasingly elaborate medical problems if you're doing a scattershot approach to interviews. Also Two Sigma won't buy you lunch unless you do good enough on the morning interviews, and they tell you this at the start lol. Glad I was competent enough to warrant a passable pad thai.
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Mar 22, 2018 03:30
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MLBAM, Squarespace, and Betterment were my longer white-boardy ones here. On top of Google phone screen and a few other phone screens that were.. Collaberpad and Coderalitedit At the end of the day, whiteboarding is just a minor nuisance I don't enjoy preparing for where my biggest concern this time around is how I explain my team has accomplished basically nothing that went into prod or stuck around (or much of anything, really) in the 12 months I've been there. This should be fun. Good Will Hrunting fucked around with this message at 03:59 on Mar 22, 2018 |
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Mar 22, 2018 03:55
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mrmcd posted:Other places I interviewed that did long whiteboard style were... Two Sigma, Bloomberg, Shutterstock, KCG.. kinda. Shutterstock people were actually pretty cool and another goon referred me, and I only ended up passing on their offer because the money wasn't quite good enough to walk away from a big stock vesting tranche six months early. Those six months suuuucked but that's a whole other story. One of the perks of coming in at 0500 is leaving at 1300. Thus, interview times aren’t an issue.
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Mar 22, 2018 04:06
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ratbert90 posted:One of the perks of coming in at 0500 is leaving at 1300. Thus, interview times aren’t an issue. Interviewing after a full day's work seems like not such a great idea.
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Mar 22, 2018 06:30
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redleader posted:Interviewing after a full day's work seems like not such a great idea. When I interviewed at Stripe it was a full day of whiteboarding the day after a transatlantic flight.
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Mar 22, 2018 09:11
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I just got my increase letter. I thought it was a typo, but I got a whopping 3% increase after 19 months of working here (and almost dying in the process due to 60 hour workweeks). I managed to put myself in a team that doesn't work itself to the bone, but I'm still in shock. This is totally not normal, isn't it? My last job did like 15% increase per year, and I was an above average performer. (I also live in the Philippines for context) EDIT: We also get a bonus which is like a 14th month pay at the minimum. The company did well so I got paid twice my monthly salary (But it's taxed). Lily Catts fucked around with this message at 09:39 on Mar 22, 2018 |
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Mar 22, 2018 09:20
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Schneider Heim posted:I just got my increase letter. I thought it was a typo, but I got a whopping 3% increase after 19 months of working here (and almost dying in the process due to 60 hour workweeks). I managed to put myself in a team that doesn't work itself to the bone, but I'm still in shock. COL raises are the norm. This is one of the reasons it’s advantageous to jump ship every 1-3 years. There are disadvantages to keeping this loop very short.
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Mar 22, 2018 10:00
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leper khan posted:COL raises are the norm. This is one of the reasons it’s advantageous to jump ship every 1-3 years. There are disadvantages to keeping this loop very short. It's supposed to be an annual performance increase, though?
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Mar 22, 2018 10:14
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The only question I've struggled with so far is reverse a linked list with recursion. I'm a meme. For real though, I find linked list questions typically very easy and breezed through the ones that were "more complicated" (add two numbers represented by linked lists, etc), have no problem with most other recursion problems, but when it's something like this.. while I can reason around the problem, coming up with the algo is especially difficult to me???
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Mar 22, 2018 14:42
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Schneider Heim posted:It's supposed to be an annual performance increase, though? Every job I've had prior to big G did this, with annual bonus more of a performance reward and significant pay bumps only coming on promotion.
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Mar 22, 2018 14:53
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Good Will Hrunting posted:The only question I've struggled with so far is reverse a linked list with recursion. I'm a meme. For real though, I find linked list questions typically very easy and breezed through the ones that were "more complicated" (add two numbers represented by linked lists, etc), have no problem with most other recursion problems, but when it's something like this.. while I can reason around the problem, coming up with the algo is especially difficult to me??? Wouldn't it just be something like code:
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Mar 22, 2018 14:54
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Yeah it's not complicated, but I really struggle to think like that and conceptualize certain things recursively (honestly, reverse a linked list even iteratively in-place the first few times I saw it made my head spin) and I'm not sure how to increase my comfort there. I actually don't struggle with most problems that lend themselves to recursion anymore, it's just certain problems like this.
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Mar 22, 2018 15:01
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It might be easier to think of it in head/tail terms, each recursive call conses one more item onto the accumulator:code:
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Mar 22, 2018 15:05
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Spend some time learning Haskell or OCaml. You'll get a lot of practice writing recursive functions, and that will translate into an easier time doing imperative programs.
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Mar 22, 2018 15:05
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Jose Valasquez posted:Wouldn't it just be something like The base case can be zero!  code:Forums hates emoji I guess 💩
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Mar 22, 2018 15:06
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Good Will Hrunting posted:Yeah it's not complicated, but I really struggle to think like that and conceptualize certain things recursively (honestly, reverse a linked list even iteratively in-place the first few times I saw it made my head spin) and I'm not sure how to increase my comfort there. I actually don't struggle with most problems that lend themselves to recursion anymore, it's just certain problems like this. I find that the best way to think about the problem recursively is to start at the end and work my way back. What happens if I pass in a list with 1 entry? I just return it because a reversed 1 entry list is the same list. What if I pass in a list with 2 entries? I take the first entry and move it to the end of the list. 3 entries? Remove first entry, remove second entry, put second entry at end of the list, put first entry at the end of the list. Now the recursive nature is more obvious, excluding the base case I remove the first entry, reverse the rest of the list, then put the first entry at the end of the list.
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Mar 22, 2018 15:11
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leper khan posted:The base case can be zero! 
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Mar 22, 2018 15:12
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ultrafilter posted:Spend some time learning Haskell or OCaml. You'll get a lot of practice writing recursive functions, and that will translate into an easier time doing imperative programs.
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Mar 22, 2018 15:16
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"What recursion? Just swap the head and tail pointers" - pre-coffee thoughts 
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Mar 22, 2018 16:35
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The real solution is to use a doubly-linked list, and just go through and swap all the "next" and "prev" pointers for each element of the list in a simple for loop. O(n) runtime, O(1) space (for the reversal algorithm, not the list itself), no risk of blowing out your stack or worrying about whether your language does tail recursion properly.
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Mar 22, 2018 17:19
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Or just call list.reverse() and assume it works well.
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Mar 22, 2018 17:21
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:The real solution is to use a doubly-linked list, and just go through and swap all the "next" and "prev" pointers for each element of the list in a simple for loop. O(n) runtime, O(1) space (for the reversal algorithm, not the list itself), no risk of blowing out your stack or worrying about whether your language does tail recursion properly. Store a reversed flag in your structure and do it in O(1) time
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Mar 22, 2018 23:18
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Paolomania posted:Every job I've had prior to big G did this, with annual bonus more of a performance reward and significant pay bumps only coming on promotion. Yeah I'm going to jump ship. The problem is that I've just started a pivot to DevOps so I'd need to amass skills in order to be desirable in the market. So I'll spend some of my free time doing that, and work on getting AWS-certified. I guess I got really spoiled by my previous company. Lasted 6 years there, probably a lot more than I should have, but I liked the culture and nature of work there.
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Mar 23, 2018 01:34
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ultrafilter posted:Spend some time learning Haskell or OCaml. You'll get a lot of practice writing recursive functions, and that will translate into an easier time doing imperative programs. Genuinely think I should dive deeper into a functional language. I work with Scala at work but only really in the capacity of using it like a wrapper for Java, we have so much interop with Java that it prohibits certain things. E; http://learnyouahaskell.com/ this is... something Good Will Hrunting fucked around with this message at 02:34 on Mar 23, 2018 |
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Mar 23, 2018 02:30
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Good Will Hrunting posted:Genuinely think I should dive deeper into a functional language. I work with Scala at work but only really in the capacity of using it like a wrapper for Java, we have so much interop with Java that it prohibits certain things.
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Mar 23, 2018 03:22
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Good Will Hrunting posted:E; http://learnyouahaskell.com/ this is... something
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Mar 23, 2018 03:42
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