Algorithms interviews: theory vs. practice https://danluu.com/algorithms-interviews/ …
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Replying to @danluu
Thoughtful post as always, but I don’t agree with the premise that “algorithms questions are important to big companies because *fancy algorithms* are important there”.
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Replying to @josephkaptur @danluu
It’s pretty easy to come up with “not bad” algorithms questions, which lets question banks be large, which means memorization matters less.
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Replying to @josephkaptur
I think algorithms filters can't be that good or Centaur couldn't have had the most productive engineers I've worked with while not having an algorithms filter at all. I would agree that algorithms questions can attempt to filter for useful qualities, but
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Replying to @danluu @josephkaptur
Dan Luu Retweeted Steve Canon
IMO they have a very high false positive and false negative rate and I think that there are more important things to filter for, e.g., what
@stephentyrone refers to herehttps://twitter.com/stephentyrone/status/1214194801496727553 …Dan Luu added,
Steve Canon @stephentyroneReplying to @stilescrisis @danluuThe cost of a bad hire (in the sense of algorithmic boneheadedness) is time spent by senior people on code reviews bringing them up to speed. The cost of a bad hire (in the toxic/abusive personality sense) is the complete destruction of the team.2 replies 0 retweets 1 like -
Replying to @danluu @stephentyrone
I definitely didn’t mean to imply that algorithms questions are “good”, period. I just wanted to give advantages other than “we need people to actually write fancy algorithms”.
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One of the advantages is that you can come up with a lot of different questions that are recognizably “algorithms questions”, which makes it hard to memorize them all. I think “have your friends told you our questions, and have you memorized the answers” is a bad criterion.
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I completely agree with that there are a ton of disadvantages/problems/biases, and, at best, should only be a component of a hiring process.
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Replying to @josephkaptur @stephentyrone
Again just IMO, but I think memorization isn't a huge problem for most non-FB/Google companies? I'm told Pivotal/CF has a single standard question for all phone screens (onsite is pair programming with someone on "actual" work), seems to work pretty well for them.
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Replying to @danluu @stephentyrone
If you wanted to write about (or link to) how a pair programming interview works in practice, I’d be SUPER interested. I have no experience at all in that sort of interview, so I don’t even know basic stuff like who types, how to pick fair tasks for different candidates, etc
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I don't know when I'd have time to fact check and edit a "real" post, let me send you a DM with some comments (since I think this will be too long to reasonably send as a series of tweets).
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