Comment by gnfargbl
14 hours ago
You're right, but that just shows how fundamentally silly this interview approach is.
In any real engineering situation I can solve 100% of these problems. That's because I can get a cup of coffee, read some papers, look in a textbook, go for a walk somewhere green and think hard about it... and yes, use tooling like a constraint solver. Or an LLM, which knows all these algorithms off by heart!
In an interview, I could solve 0% of these problems, because my brain just doesn't work that way. Or at least, that's my expectation: I've never actually considered working somewhere that does leetcode interviews.
I was told to use ANY language in an interview. I asked them if they were sure, so I solved it with J. They were not too pleased and asked me if I could use another language, so I did prolog and we moved on to the next question. Then the idiot had the audacity to say I should not use "J and Prolog" but any common known language. I asked if assembly was fine, and they said no. Perhaps python or javascript. I did the rest in python, needless to say I didn't get the job. :-)
You're a hero!
Reminds me of https://aphyr.com/posts/340-reversing-the-technical-intervie... (and the follow-ups to it)
We had a programming language class at college and wrote the same program in everything from Java to Lisp. The lisp was way nicer.
I find it hilarious when people brag about stupid shit like that. Congrats on sabotaging your own interview process I guess??
If the candidate asks if you're sure you want them to use any language and you say "yes", and then get pissy when they do, the candidate isn't the one who sabotaged anything and they're dodging a bullet if they "fail".
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Interviews go both ways ... I don't think they lost out on anything they wanted.
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Use the right tool for the job. Thats engineering.
Instead you insist we should solve a nieche problem with a ill suited tool, while inventing a costume solution when a standard solution exist.
They dodged a bullet. It would have been hell working there.
Why would you ever want to work somewhere that clearly employs such unqualified individuals? And not only that, but allows those individuals to be the face of their company to prospective hires?
A company's interview process tells you a lot about how the company thinks and operates. This was was surely a dumpster fire.
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What's the point of doing well if you already determined you wouldn't even look at their offer?
Sabotaging? The candidate learned that their interviewers, and probably the company as a whole, isn't curious about languages or stuff that is outside of their wheelhouse.
What if the interviewers decided to ask the candidate about their language choice and trade-offs between different languages? Wouldn't that actually give them more signals into the skill of the engineer, rather than just blindly following their script?
I haven't been asked leetcode questions in a while and when I was asked, it was an easy level problem. I don't know where they ask hard leetcode problems, I also never solved a hard leetcode problem on my own.
The purpose of coding questions should be a problem that you can solve in about 20 minutes, then they ask another, and then you get 20 minutes to either finish or talk about other things. If you ask questions where either someone knows the trick and they pass, or they don't and fail you don't learn much. You need to watch the person write code to see if they are reasonable about it.
I interviewed at an investment bank in London and they asked me pretty hard questions. One was to implement some multithreaded producer consumer thing in C++. I can't remember the details but it was... well you know how writing multithreaded C++ is. I was allowed to look up references at least. Took me maybe 20 minutes and the whole time the interviewer was just sitting on his phone while I wrote it.
Weird experience. Didn't get that job (probably for the best tbf).
If you wrote an MPSC queue (standard question) with multithreaded demo in 20 minutes in C++ you’re pretty hot shit, mate. Their loss. It’s not that it’s hard. But that speed without error is just really good. C++ is particularly unforgiving too.
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I was once asked fizz buzz in an interview and it made me sad that some people don't pass it.
I guess when you're brand new you don't know about the mod operator?
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I'm routinely asked LC Hard questions in interviews. Sometimes more than one in one 45 minute interview.
That said, I interview in silicon valley and I'm a mixed race American. (extremely rare here) I think a lot of people just don't want me to pass the interview and will put up the highest bar they can. Mind you, I often still give optimal solutions to everything within good time constraints. But I've practiced 1000+ problems and done several hundred interviews.
This is not how it works. The interviewer knows 1-2 problems and there is no time for profiling since they are rushing through their day, probably focused on their day to day work. You are the least of their concern, believe me.
Source: we am a hiring manager.
Do you interview at startups?
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Depends on your experience and what you’re interviewing for. At a high enough level, the questions are pulled from the easier side, and the interviewer doesn’t want you to fail.
More exactly, you can't invent algorithms on a spot which took who knows how many years for others to invent. I.e. the question ends up being more if you know about a specific algorithm, which results in "invent it if you don't know about it". It's absolutely silly to test for ability to invent one on the spot, so it's a pretty pointless interview question really.
You can for simple algorithms. It's just really easy for interviewers to overestimate how simple an algorithm is when they have been told the answer.
Yeah, that's exactly the point. These kind of algorithms are far from easy to invent even if they look simple once they are known.
I hate when it asks for a memorized specific problem, but most of the hard ones I found needs a clever twist of a well-known algorithm, and I still struggle at that too for hard LC.