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wins32767 posted:I think a lot of the difference in opinion about how deep to know your tools comes from the different flavor of roles that exist for engineers. If you automate business processes and knowing how a trie works is vastly less important than having a deep understanding of the domain. Similarly, knowing your users and their needs in a product development type role is vastly more important than being an expert on how libraries get loaded in your language of choice. There are also roles where if you don't know all the details about how the query engine executes queries you're going to light tens of thousands of dollars on fire. That's not to say that all of those skills aren't useful in most roles, just that the balance of relative importance shifts. bob dobbs is dead posted:and a good portion of the completely merited complete lack of trust between employers and candidates is that this information and the nature of the role is very seldom given even close to honestly and even more seldom used to decide to apply to places or not But I’m a sucker for going deep on the domain knowledge so here I am. 
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Apr 17, 2021 05:18
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Jose Valasquez posted:All in all I like the question, it has the one hallmark I look for in good interview questions: I was able to solve it 
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Apr 17, 2021 06:58
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i saw talk of webcams a few pages back in the thread, what are you folks using for video interviews? saw the logitech c922 and the c920s seemed to have okay ratings on the canadian section of pcpartpicker but was interested in what my fellow goons used. i'm hoping to buy something that has a built in privacy cover but i'll probably just leave it unplugged most of the time so that's just a bonus. i'm also thinking it'd be best if it had some sort of tripod since my monitor has a pretty thin bezel and i'm afraid of damaging the screen. it'd also be great if it made me look less terrible too but that tech might not exist yet so i'm okay without. thoughts? thanks in advance!
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Apr 17, 2021 11:12
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Acer Pilot posted:i saw talk of webcams a few pages back in the thread, what are you folks using for video interviews? saw the logitech c922 and the c920s seemed to have okay ratings on the canadian section of pcpartpicker but was interested in what my fellow goons used. 'Real' camera + webcam drivers + tripod. Bonus - you can pick up photography as a hobby 
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Apr 17, 2021 12:33
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Acer Pilot posted:i saw talk of webcams a few pages back in the thread, what are you folks using for video interviews? saw the logitech c922 and the c920s seemed to have okay ratings on the canadian section of pcpartpicker but was interested in what my fellow goons used.
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Apr 17, 2021 17:10
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Acer Pilot posted:i saw talk of webcams a few pages back in the thread, what are you folks using for video interviews? saw the logitech c922 and the c920s seemed to have okay ratings on the canadian section of pcpartpicker but was interested in what my fellow goons used. It does not matter at all as long as you wear clothes and don't have nazi poo poo strewn about in the background when you're interviewing. "Hmm he was a solid candidate but the resolution on his webcam sucked, PASS"
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Apr 17, 2021 17:41
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Ugh I did a coderpad phone screen on Monday; they gave me a question and I assumed I had the whole hour to make it happen. So I go real methodically, planning out my solution so it's clear what I'm thinking rather than just blindly yeeting some code into the editor. Get to about :45 in and we're all satisfied, and while I'm warming up my response to "got any questions for me" he drops a new spin on the problem on top that I couldn't finish in time. Hoping that was just a "reach" question for leveling or something but the fact that I haven't heard back tells me probably not. I would so rather do a take-home than deal with this needlessly stressful poo poo.
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Apr 17, 2021 17:44
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New Yorp New Yorp posted:It does not matter at all as long as you wear clothes and don't have nazi poo poo strewn about in the background when you're interviewing. "Hmm he was a solid candidate but the resolution on his webcam sucked, PASS"
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Apr 17, 2021 17:49
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apseudonym posted:It's not super gotcha-y, but its easier if you have someone to keep you from going down the greedy solution route early (protip, if you get asked an algorithms question and you think the answer is greedy it almost certainly never is) and to nudge you toward those two key points. If I was giving this question I'd make sure to have an example ready where the greedy solution wouldn't work and have some probing questions ready if you got stuck. That's why I don't like leetcode interviews, sometimes we all brain fart or get stuck in a loop and need a nudge. Probably varies on a question to question basis, but how do you practice approaching questions like this in this context where the LeetCode hints are generally honestly kinda poo poo? In a broader sense, how do you practice "grinding" these programs in general effectively? Are there any sort of curated lists that cover a wide variety of problem areas? I've started to do shorter bursts where I spend 45 minutes on a Medium question and if I'm really stumped on the optimal solution, walk away and review the solution a few times. Sometimes I can write an algo that isn't at all nice and relies on special early termination cases but works and passes, though looks so terrible I wonder how to improve my overall approach.
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Apr 17, 2021 18:23
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Vulture Culture posted:One of the many benefits society undeservedly confers on me for being born a white guy is that this doesn't matter for me at all, but that's not universally true But that's not related to the make and model of the webcam used for an interview. Can we not open this can of worms?
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Apr 17, 2021 18:28
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New Yorp New Yorp posted:It does not matter at all as long as you wear clothes and don't have nazi poo poo strewn about in the background when you're interviewing. "Hmm he was a solid candidate but the resolution on his webcam sucked, PASS" "we say that we are willing to accommodate you not having web camera, but if you don't have web camera we cannot proceed with the interview" real thing that happened to me during last round of interviewing
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Apr 17, 2021 19:37
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Good Will Hrunting posted:Probably varies on a question to question basis, but how do you practice approaching questions like this in this context where the LeetCode hints are generally honestly kinda poo poo? Have you read cracking the coding interview? The good thing about it is that it'll cover conceptual material before giving you questions related to that material. So it'll go over, say, trees, and then at the end of that section there will be questions on trees. It's a helpful approach because there are various techniques/data structures/strategies that can be pieced together to create an algorithm. Like a depth-first search is often used as part of an algorithm, or dynamic programming as a general strategy. So getting a good handle on the concepts will make writing algorithms much easier.
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Apr 17, 2021 19:46
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Yeah I didn't really find it useful to be honest. I don't think any amount of reading about data structures and algorithms will be as helpful as just drilling every possible way to look at a problem to derive a pattern into your brain via rigorous practice. The difficulty of question didn't feel on par to me with LeetCode mediums for a lot of problems also.
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Apr 17, 2021 19:55
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Good Will Hrunting posted:Probably varies on a question to question basis, but how do you practice approaching questions like this in this context where the LeetCode hints are generally honestly kinda poo poo? It also depends on your particular style, but I can give you what worked for me. I am not personally a fan of CTCI. I think its more important at first to be able to consistently solve the problems and then get fast, once you feel like you can solve the problems then I'd focused on doing it in 45 minutes. When its just you I would also walk away when you're stumped early and let it rattle around in your head a bit, this helps keep you from getting frustrated. For the problems themselves I take a very counter-example heavy approach to coming up with solutions, the first thing I do once I propose an idea is try and break it. It helps me spot mistakes early and generally I think its a very useful skill outside of interviews as I generally know what doesn't work and why, but that's very much my style of thinking and just because it works for me doesn't mean its how you should do it. My flow for that problem:
I didn't fully internalize that a choice doesn't eliminate your ability to chose the other value (until you run out of rounds anyways) it only stops you from being able to take one element (the element you could have gotten to if you picked the other side for all remaining rounds). Noticing that would also lead you to the same solution but down a slightly different road and is also the reason that a greedy solution does not work, e.g. -2 -2 -2 6 ... 1 3 2 1 with k=4 is better to take all from the right and none from the left even though that 6 is big. This is also a good example of why greedy is rarely the answer: The cost to get to a singular maximal node can be more than the benefit of the node itself. Looking at their examples they are kinda lacking, they do give an example where the middle values more than k away from the edges don't matter but they don't include one like the above that shows greedy doesn't work. apseudonym fucked around with this message at 20:13 on Apr 17, 2021 |
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Apr 17, 2021 20:08
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apseudonym posted:For the problems themselves I take a very counter-example heavy approach to coming up with solutions, the first thing I do once I propose an idea is try and break it. It helps me spot mistakes early and generally I think its a very useful skill outside of interviews as I generally know what doesn't work and why, but that's very much my style of thinking and just because it works for me doesn't mean its how you should do it. This is almost exactly how I approach the problems, but it's also almost exclusively because LeetCode feeds into this method of practice really well. I can run and compile and iterate through test cases, but almost all of my confidence and success comes from this iterative approach that's easy to bang out at my fingertips. I know you and others have stressed that it's all about the thought process, but this method of practice makes me feel really insecure because I feel like I'm only seeing things and seeing problems due to how I'm absolutely fed every possible edge case one after another, rapid fire. It takes me 15-20 tries (  ) to get a problem to pass all the cases sometimes, and I almost always get there, but it doesn't feel good that it takes this long. I'm concerned interviewers won't provide this kind of process, which is very different than the whiteboarding I'm used to. I still write things out on pen and paper first, but after pseudocode there, I get right to coding. I'm not sure if this is a bad habit to build.Another thing is: stepping through some of these algorithms takes a lot of time! Not being able to bridge gaps quicker with all these problem cases seems like it'd yield a lot of cases of going overtime without a working solution. Good Will Hrunting fucked around with this message at 21:15 on Apr 17, 2021 |
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Apr 17, 2021 21:12
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Good Will Hrunting posted:This is almost exactly how I approach the problems, but it's also almost exclusively because LeetCode feeds into this method of practice really well. I can run and compile and iterate through test cases, but almost all of my confidence and success comes from this iterative approach that's easy to bang out at my fingertips. I know you and others have stressed that it's all about the thought process, but this method of practice makes me feel really insecure because I feel like I'm only seeing things and seeing problems due to how I'm absolutely fed every possible edge case one after another, rapid fire. It takes me 15-20 tries ( 15-20 feels high, and the kind of issues coding are very different than the kind of issues designing (you can't take a rapid fire iterative approach to design or algorithms). Code on the whiteboard doesn't have to be perfect (no one cares about missing semicolons, slightly wrong method names, whatever), but logical errors shouldn't take more than an example or two to spot.
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Apr 17, 2021 21:52
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New Yorp New Yorp posted:But that's not related to the make and model of the webcam used for an interview. Can we not open this can of worms? Good lighting probably matters more in these situations, but I have it on good authority from a healthy spread of dark-skinned folks that they prefer not to look like washed-out blobs onscreen. Leveling/color balance matters. Focus matters. They're both frequently poo poo if you're browner than a paper bag. https://twitter.com/eshanthirana/status/1371339175773884416?s=19 https://twitter.com/baraqat_h/status/1346799113388646401?s=19 https://twitter.com/SterSchuyler/status/1331208721058369539?s=19 If this doesn't matter for you because you're established in industry, and you can show up to the interview half-slept in a wrinkled t-shirt and get an offer, that's great for you, but there's a pile of people out there for whom this matters
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Apr 18, 2021 01:00
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From the remote interviewing side I have never once cared what anyone looks like on the camera. Not that I can speak for other interviewers or anything. OTOH if someone's mic is terrible that definitely affects the interview as a whole, so do your best to get that on lock. Thankfully even the built-in laptop mics these days can generally be made reasonable as long as you've got a quiet space set up and use earphones to avoid loopback.
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Apr 18, 2021 12:55
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Jabor posted:From the remote interviewing side I have never once cared what anyone looks like on the camera. Not that I can speak for other interviewers or anything. I think this is unconscious bias, luckily not the terrible kind. The microphone and webcam quality are proven to make a difference in interviews, whether you realize it or not. Here's a recent article about audio specifically: https://tips.ariyh.com/p/good-sound-quality-smarter
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Apr 18, 2021 14:25
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There's also the McGurk effect, which is used to explain the subconscious ways in which the speech we "hear" is influenced by the mouth movements we observe. At my last job, I couldn't understand my boss on the phone for about six months through his heavy French accent, but would do fine on video chat. This is surprisingly common for accented speech, but also impacts more typical accents and speech patterns if you have an interviewer who's at all hard of hearing.
Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 15:16 on Apr 19, 2021 |
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Apr 18, 2021 17:31
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Good Will Hrunting posted:This is almost exactly how I approach the problems, but it's also almost exclusively because LeetCode feeds into this method of practice really well. I can run and compile and iterate through test cases, but almost all of my confidence and success comes from this iterative approach that's easy to bang out at my fingertips. I know you and others have stressed that it's all about the thought process, but this method of practice makes me feel really insecure because I feel like I'm only seeing things and seeing problems due to how I'm absolutely fed every possible edge case one after another, rapid fire. It takes me 15-20 tries ( When I was practicing for whiteboarding interviews I spent a good amount of time doing leetcode problems entirely on the whiteboard. I wrote out all the code and talked through my through process as I did it just like I was planning to do in the actual interview. I wrote out all the code and walked through test cases manually without touching my keyboard. After I was done and satisfied I typed it into leetcode to see how I did. I quickly began to notice the places where I would commonly make mistakes and developed a checklist to go through for each problem.
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Apr 19, 2021 01:59
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xtal posted:I think this is unconscious bias, luckily not the terrible kind. The microphone and webcam quality are proven to make a difference in interviews, whether you realize it or not. I don't think I've ever turned my webcam on even once at work in my many years of remote work, but I definitely put in effort on looking good for interviews because I know that even if you're a good person who thinks you are above judging people by their looks, you will judge people by their looks. It's human nature, we can't help it. I often find myself annoyed at coworkers with potato quality microphones. If I can barely hear a candidate because they're using Amazon basics tier gear, I know it'll have an effect on their evaluation, even if I don't want to admit it.
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Apr 19, 2021 04:07
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your work should pay for good quality headsets
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Apr 19, 2021 05:34
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In my experience wireless headsets of all price tiers have all sorts of weird drop out issues We have a weekly meeting with an aws "solutions architect" and her audio drops out pretty regularly. Other engineers with bose headsets also have issues. On pretty modern macbook pros. I don't know why. I do 99.5% of all my calls on the built in laptop microphone, never had an issue
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Apr 19, 2021 07:41
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Jose Valasquez posted:When I was practicing for whiteboarding interviews I spent a good amount of time doing leetcode problems entirely on the whiteboard. I wrote out all the code and talked through my through process as I did it just like I was planning to do in the actual interview. I wrote out all the code and walked through test cases manually without touching my keyboard. After I was done and satisfied I typed it into leetcode to see how I did. I quickly began to notice the places where I would commonly make mistakes and developed a checklist to go through for each problem. After a few days of practice I've slightly altered my approach to be something more in line with yours. Basically now I try to: 1.) Write out on pen and paper the simplest case (empty array, null tree, etc) 2.) Build the smallest happy-path case on top of that 3.) Identify "edge" cases - cases that are valid input but challenge my original assumptions on an algo OR cases I immediately see presenting an "issue" (requiring changes in logic, altering control flow etc) 4.) Start to think about control flow for processing the smallest happy case input 5.) Add the "logic" for the empty case(s) 6.) Add logic for the most obvious happy path case 7.) Run through that to make sure it works 8.) Identify whether the issues I called out in 3 are real issues with my implementation 9.) Tackle those with code changes 10.) Repeat until I have something I think tackles all of the cases I've identified Changing my process up a bit has lead to a bit more "comfort" but also I feel as if tackling the full depth of 8 and 9 for some of these Mediums is going to be very hard in a limited window.
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Apr 19, 2021 16:19
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Still making $107k in DC area with 14 years at it and wanting more money but being real happy with my job otherwise. Scrubbed out on an interview at Capitol One which was I guess was FAANG style. Never got any constructive criticism on that one just a rejection which was annoying. Kind of like the financial sphere for where to work next. Just got a bite from a Facebook recruiter. Any specific advice there? The high compensation they offer and ability to use my PHP skills some seems like a positive. If it gets down to it just ask for $150k? I think that's what they pay senior devs. I used my wife's mac laptop with the built in camera for the Capitol One interview. I think I may do the webcam thing. It was annoying not being on my familiar computer doing the hacker rank coding challenges. Annoyed most of the job board postings don't put salary ranges up. Comb Your Beard fucked around with this message at 19:40 on Apr 19, 2021 |
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Apr 19, 2021 19:32
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Comb Your Beard posted:Still making $107k in DC area with 14 years at it and wanting more money but being real happy with my job otherwise. Scrubbed out on an interview at Capitol One which was I guess was FAANG style. Never got any constructive criticism on that one just a rejection which was annoying. Kind of like the financial sphere for where to work next. Just got a bite from a Facebook recruiter. Any specific advice there? The high compensation they offer and ability to use my PHP skills some seems like a positive. If it gets down to it just ask for $150k? I think that's what they pay senior devs. levels.fyi
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Apr 19, 2021 19:46
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idk if you're trolling, but facebook pays way more than 150k. check levels.fyi
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Apr 19, 2021 19:48
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150k is a reasonable cash portion of the compensation. and then 100-200k is a reasonable rsu portion of the compensation lol
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Apr 19, 2021 19:49
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lol thats true
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Apr 19, 2021 19:51
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Comb Your Beard posted:Still making $107k in DC area with 14 years at it and wanting more money but being real happy with my job otherwise. Scrubbed out on an interview at Capitol One which was I guess was FAANG style. Never got any constructive criticism on that one just a rejection which was annoying. Kind of like the financial sphere for where to work next. Just got a bite from a Facebook recruiter. Any specific advice there? The high compensation they offer and ability to use my PHP skills some seems like a positive. If it gets down to it just ask for $150k? I think that's what they pay senior devs. Did you pass the Capital One take home? I did an interview with them last cycle and the process was take home that was like 2 LeetCode Medium/Hards (not Googleable) in a 24 hour span, then 1 coding, 1 design, 1 behavioral, 1 "case study" (this was loving awful tbh) in the in-person. Got bounced because of the "case study". It was basically debugging some poorly written Java on a pen and paper. They pay fairly well, there are some cool teams there (almost my whole old team went there) but I wouldn't be too upset, it's nothing groundbreaking.
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Apr 19, 2021 19:54
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Comb Your Beard posted:Still making $107k in DC area with 14 years at it and wanting more money but being real happy with my job otherwise. Scrubbed out on an interview at Capitol One which was I guess was FAANG style. Never got any constructive criticism on that one just a rejection which was annoying. Kind of like the financial sphere for where to work next. Just got a bite from a Facebook recruiter. Any specific advice there? The high compensation they offer and ability to use my PHP skills some seems like a positive. If it gets down to it just ask for $150k? I think that's what they pay senior devs. Hmm maybe broaden your search a bit and consider tear gas manufacturers or whalers.
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Apr 20, 2021 06:35
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Good Will Hrunting posted:Did you pass the Capital One take home? Yea Capital One initial code test by myself 2 problems was fine. The live coding one with the person I passed in the time period with some hints. They never told me which one if any of the interview sections contributed to the rejection. It's all good. In regards to Facebook and the 150k I honestly wasn't trolling. Comb Your Beard fucked around with this message at 18:06 on Apr 20, 2021 |
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Apr 20, 2021 18:04
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Comb Your Beard posted:Yea Capital One initial code test by myself 2 problems was fine. The live coding one with the person I passed in the time period with some hints. They never told me which one if any of the interview sections contributed to the rejection. It's all good. well now you know the best course of action if you are in doubt or dont know is to shut the gently caress up about salary until they give an offer (if they ask just say "competitive" like a magic shield) and then ask for 25% more
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Apr 20, 2021 18:26
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Salesforce had a pretty large office in Herndon, not sure if it survived. Would definitely be a pay increase though.
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Apr 20, 2021 18:32
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Also go read the negotiation thread in BFC
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Apr 20, 2021 18:32
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leper khan posted:Also go read the negotiation thread in BFC
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Apr 20, 2021 19:44
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tortilla_chip posted:Salesforce had a pretty large office in Herndon, not sure if it survived. Would definitely be a pay increase though. Same with Amazon.
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Apr 20, 2021 22:02
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Hey all, brief details from a faang adjacent (microsoft subsidiary) position I interviewed. All of the thread advice about being very verbal during the pair programming session was spot-on. There was no algo stuff to solve, just fairly straight forward development problems. I ended up getting bogged down in some setup and side issues/minutia (partly of my own creation due to trying to add a 3rd party library to solve an issue which someone said upthread to explicitly not do!). That took too much time, and ultimately I got rejected. In hindsight, I wasn't prepared due to lack of experience in the setting, and I wish this was about interview #3 for me. I think at that point, I would have been better ready. It always takes one or two interviews for me to get the mindset right. I've got another try coming up with another company soon, and I might be dragging these out to allow some higher level opportunities to open up.
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Apr 20, 2021 22:26
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bob dobbs is dead posted:doubly acyclic weighted graph Hold on, what? Amusingly, if I try to google this, it assumes I mean "directed acyclic"
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Apr 22, 2021 16:27
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