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Good Will Hrunting posted:My question is, how do I find a job that affords me the ability to learn this breadth of information if they... ask about loving everything in interviews? Did you know that not every question in a decent interview with a sane company has to be answered perfectly to pass the process as a whole?
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Jun 15, 2018 15:18
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Munkeymon posted:Did you know that not every question in a decent interview with a sane company has to be answered perfectly to pass the process as a whole? Lots of interviews aren't decent, and lots of companies aren't sane.
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Jun 15, 2018 15:22
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Good Will Hrunting posted:Yeah that's exactly what he mentioned! He said to check out ElasticSearch if I was interested in learning more about it. In my opinion part of a good interview is looking for the breadth of your knowledge. Do you go deep in one thing only or do you go shallow in many things? (Are you the T person, the I person, or the - person?) And personality-wise how do you deal with the unknown? Do you bullshit and never admit that you don't know anything? Do you admit it and try to relate it to things in your experience? Do you get angry and shut down? Do you engage with the interviewer to try to work through it together? If you were the one conducting the interview do you see the value in trying to test for this and which reaction do you want to see in candidates?
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Jun 15, 2018 15:26
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prisoner of waffles posted:Dumb question: why is it called an inverted index? Over in database land there isn't such a concept, right? It's supposedly named like that to differentiate it from a forward index, which is a temporary data structure used to analyze a document so as to create an inverted index. The forward index is created by parsing a document to make a list of tuples of (word, page number), which is then sorted by word and collated to create the inverted index ("Aardvark: pages 7,9,25; Animal: pages 4,5; ..."), and you can then discard the forward index.
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Jun 15, 2018 16:13
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minato posted:An inverted index is like an index you find at the end of a book... what most people traditionally think of as an index. Same thing is also used in databases, to map rows to locations on disc. Thank you.
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Jun 15, 2018 16:15
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I feel like I need to get a data structures text book or whatever because I never took a formal data structures course in college. It was all just scattered across various computer science courses. The only smarts I've had for trying to answer interview questions has been that they probably want me to sort and then hash something to solve a problem. This breed of questions really isn't inspiring me in my job search. I have an Amazon one in the queue that I'm thinking of just burning up because I'm pretty sure it's just like this.
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Jun 15, 2018 16:28
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:I feel like I need to get a data structures text book or whatever because I never took a formal data structures course in college. It was all just scattered across various computer science courses. The only smarts I've had for trying to answer interview questions has been that they probably want me to sort and then hash something to solve a problem. This breed of questions really isn't inspiring me in my job search. I have an Amazon one in the queue that I'm thinking of just burning up because I'm pretty sure it's just like this. Funny, I feel like I need to do the same with system design and scaling. I'd rather be in your position! Topics I fumble on, not entirely but at some point: - Load balancing type questions and the overall "microservices" separation of things - Good "REST"y design - RDBMS - Handling high-level concurrency problems across multiple services Good Will Hrunting fucked around with this message at 16:51 on Jun 15, 2018 |
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Jun 15, 2018 16:46
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Good Will Hrunting posted:Funny, I feel like I need to do the same with system design and scaling. I'd rather be in your position! Here's your textbook for most of that https://www.amazon.com/dp/1449373321/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_Sk-iBb1WCSJN0
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Jun 15, 2018 17:14
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LOL I looked up tries in my old copy of Intro to Algorithms and it redirects to “radix trees” which are a single problem at the end of the binary search tree chapter.
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Jun 15, 2018 17:36
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(Adaptive) Radix trees are awesome.
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Jun 15, 2018 17:37
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Paolomania posted:LOL I looked up tries in my old copy of Intro to Algorithms and it redirects to “radix trees” which are a single problem at the end of the binary search tree chapter. Yep, this is CLRS which is commonly considered to be one of if not the best algorithms and data structures books I checked all three of my algorithms books (I don't know why I have 3), the one from my college algorithms course didn't mention tries at all, CLRS had the redirect to a single problem, the third actually has a really nice section on tries with some practice problems.
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Jun 15, 2018 18:32
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:I have an Amazon one in the queue that I'm thinking of just burning up because I'm pretty sure it's just like this. Their interviews seem more weighted toward behavioral questions, so you might as well go through with it. I had an onsite last year and it was a 60/40 split of behavioral/technical. The coding was mostly centered around BST's and wasn't terribly difficult. System design was tricky, but I did ok. Where I screwed up was the "leadership principles", which seemed like total BS and I didn't take seriously enough. Unfortunately I bombed the final interview with the team manager, as it was fully focused on these goofy principles.
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Jun 15, 2018 19:24
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Good Will Hrunting posted:I'd like some genuine help with how to answer these types of questions: Initial feedback was "neutral" which, between that and the interview process which I thought was weird as hell (see questions above) - I'm not sure how I feel? Cool company and some of the people seemed cool but this process felt odd. Algos and data structures really are my strength so it's no surprise I did poorly in a design-focused interview.
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Jun 15, 2018 19:57
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So what exactly does that mean? Are you supposed to guess whether you're hired or not?
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Jun 15, 2018 20:11
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Final decision next week Mon or Tue. (This is through a recruiter so they're being pushy as gently caress and like "we can go to bat for you" and I'm thinking about whether I even want to work somewhere that feels this way about it)
Good Will Hrunting fucked around with this message at 20:17 on Jun 15, 2018 |
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Jun 15, 2018 20:12
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ForrestPUMP69 posted:So what exactly does that mean? Are you supposed to guess whether you're hired or not? We don't tell candidates that they're hired. The real candidates will pick up on vague clues and solve this gigantic cryptopuzzle to learn when their start date is.
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Jun 15, 2018 20:23
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:We don't tell candidates that they're hired. The real candidates will pick up on vague clues and solve this gigantic cryptopuzzle to learn when their start date is. Yeah, also helps to label folks who drop out of this process and/or don't see our inscrutable ARG clues strewn about their social media feeds as "bad communicators" and avoid taking any blame on ourselves or potentially question the process.
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Jun 15, 2018 20:25
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:We don't tell candidates that they're hired. The real candidates will pick up on vague clues and solve this gigantic cryptopuzzle to learn when their start date is. I had an actual place ask me to suggest a start date, I did, and then a few days after it they emailed me asking why I didn't show up. "Sorry if you were waiting for confirmation from me" Yeah motherfucker usually I wait for confirmation on starting a new job before I just walk in the front door. They'd already told the team.
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Jun 15, 2018 20:40
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At my current job they hadn't told me what building to report to the day before so I checked the website to make sure the address was the same as where I had interviewed 6 weeks prior. It was not!
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Jun 15, 2018 21:37
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ultrafilter posted:You're supposed to pick it up on your own because you're so dedicated to programming that you study everything no matter how unrelated to your current job it is. Strong Positive Signal™️
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Jun 16, 2018 02:24
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ForrestPUMP69 posted:Their interviews seem more weighted toward behavioral questions, so you might as well go through with it. I had an onsite last year and it was a 60/40 split of behavioral/technical. The coding was mostly centered around BST's and wasn't terribly difficult. System design was tricky, but I did ok. Where I screwed up was the "leadership principles", which seemed like total BS and I didn't take seriously enough. Unfortunately I bombed the final interview with the team manager, as it was fully focused on these goofy principles. It's all started with phone screen stuff for me. This would be the third team trying to interview me at Amazon over the past few years. The first one had me do an interactive coding exercise to find how many different combinations of elements in a list sum to a certain number and like hell in 30 minutes or so could I figure out how to do it in faster than n-squared. The second one wasn't a big problem IMO. I had been a "system engineer" for something like a year-and-a-half. My job was solving integration problems between different software internally. The rest of the planet apparently believes it means "super-duper sysadmin" and you get a ton of really obscure Linux trivia questions. I had that problem at another place too. I just took that off my resume. Granted, I'm stuck in a Windows shop and I use Windows at home mostly because of Unity 3d, so my Linux skills have degraded, but they were interested in a lot inode fuckery and such.
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Jun 16, 2018 15:01
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I just did Amazon's 90 minute take-home assessment. It was fine. I got probably close to the most optimized solutions to both problems, missed an edge case on the second one though. They were fairly long to test and solve in the timeframe and when I got to the literal final piece of one question, the compiler started bugging out and wouldn't recompile my changes so I had to submit with the second one compiling but failing the test cases. Oh well, it was good practice at least and had I been giving a compiler and debugger I would have finished in like, a fraction of the time instead of having to manually type out all the inputs in my own IDE. E: I just plugged my code and some sample test cases into my IDE and figured out the tiny thing I overlooked in the span of like, 2 seconds. Ugh. E2: Literal only thing preventing the base cases from passing was that I missed a `+1` calculating a string split index. 
Good Will Hrunting fucked around with this message at 17:16 on Jun 16, 2018 |
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Jun 16, 2018 16:44
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 Passed the Amazon assessment Next round is a 1 hour "more technical" phone screen with some paired coding sessions plus more behavioral stuff.
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Jun 18, 2018 18:35
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Good Will Hrunting posted:more behavioral stuff. Repeat this mantra: "Bezos is lord and master of my life and soul, I commit my existence unto him" three times and you'll be fine. Speaking of Bezos, it seems like everywhere I look in tech, there's always an inordinate number of bald guys in leadership positions... Is that a trend anyone else is noticing? I wonder what the deal with that is.
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Jun 18, 2018 18:53
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BurntCornMuffin posted:Repeat this mantra: "Bezos is lord and master of my life and soul, I commit my existence unto him" three times and you'll be fine. In football they're known as "the bald frauds".   In tech ... it fits in tech as well.
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Jun 18, 2018 19:26
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I'm not sure what to expect from round 2. If the coding exercise is any more difficult than the two takehome problems I won't finish it in an hour. Not that the exercises were hard, just lengthy and code-girthy.
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Jun 18, 2018 19:48
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Good Will Hrunting posted:I'm not sure what to expect from round 2. If the coding exercise is any more difficult than the two takehome problems I won't finish it in an hour. Not that the exercises were hard, just lengthy and code-girthy. Don't worry about finishing, just make sure you say everything you are thinking, so they know what you plan to do.
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Jun 18, 2018 19:59
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BurntCornMuffin posted:Speaking of Bezos, it seems like everywhere I look in tech, there's always an inordinate number of bald guys in leadership positions... Is that a trend anyone else is noticing? I wonder what the deal with that is. Something about Lex Luther and/or Brainiac.
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Jun 18, 2018 19:59
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BurntCornMuffin posted:Don't worry about finishing, just make sure you say everything you are thinking, so they know what you plan to do. :whink: I've gotten good at explaining thoroughly first. Thought pattern is typically "Ok brute force is this but its not ideal -> will {sorting, hash table} make things faster? -> can we do any subset, function, or step in less passes than initially jump out?
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Jun 18, 2018 20:04
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BurntCornMuffin posted:Speaking of Bezos, it seems like everywhere I look in tech, there's always an inordinate number of bald guys in leadership positions... Is that a trend anyone else is noticing? I wonder what the deal with that is.
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Jun 18, 2018 21:06
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BurntCornMuffin posted:Repeat this mantra: "Bezos is lord and master of my life and soul, I commit my existence unto him" three times and you'll be fine. The majority of men old enough to have enough experience to be in leadership roles are probably going to have enough hair loss that current beauty standard would dictate they finish off with a clean shave. The majority of people in leadership are men because The Patriarchy.
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Jun 18, 2018 21:18
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It's because, for men, once you start balding, you really should just shave it. It's now your best look
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Jun 18, 2018 22:40
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There's also ageism in play where you might be better off shaving your head than having gray hair.
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Jun 19, 2018 03:44
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Engineers should be paid a hefty signing bonus for putting up wit the bullshit of finding a new job. Every recruiter is loving awful and the process as a whole is pulling teeth. After two interviews with the recruiting specialist and a dev on the team, I'm still trying to get a better idea of a role I'm taking 3 hours out of my day to interview for on Thursday. I don't want to work on supporting your lovely Rails MVP, if I'm not interviewing to work on the new architecture for at least 75% of the time I'm not interested.
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Jun 19, 2018 18:44
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Munkeymon posted:Have the people who've never heard of a Trie heard of a directed acyclic word graph? A DAG yes. A directed acyclic word graph, no. This is a great example of what a generalized concept vs. a specific application looks like in practice though. Graphs are in most/probably all CS curriculum. Every single application of their use are not.
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Jun 19, 2018 19:10
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Good Will Hrunting posted:I don't want to work on supporting your lovely Rails MVP, if I'm not interviewing to work on the new architecture for at least 75% of the time I'm not interested. All code is legacy code. What you really want to know is just how legacy it is. How well does your interviewer understand the product, how narrow is their area of expertise, what's their team's bus factor, what kind of documentation is there and is it up to date?
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Jun 19, 2018 19:27
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:All code is legacy code. What you really want to know is just how legacy it is. How well does your interviewer understand the product, how narrow is their area of expertise, what's their team's bus factor, what kind of documentation is there and is it up to date? Oh for sure, I think I'm just biased towards Rails  Is that fair?
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Jun 19, 2018 19:37
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I realised today that I’ve been prejudiced against a new colleague because he looks *a lot* like someone on my blacklist. Think I’m getting old and grouchy
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Jun 19, 2018 19:45
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Jaded Burnout posted:Think I’m getting old and grouchy You mean jaded and burned out? But seriously, props for you that you realise your bias.
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Jun 20, 2018 05:54
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Yeah better than "I am an engineer! I only care about facts and am oblivious to natural logical biases and fallacies!"
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Jun 20, 2018 07:15
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