Fattestmoron

5 lat temudiscuss

My role isn't to assess if you're competent or not. My role is to assess if I want you on my team or not. There's a difference.

Pretty much sums up how the hiring process is a gamble. So if you don't like somebody and they could be an asset to the company you would not hire them?

Fattestmoron

5 lat temudiscuss

FAANG just wants immediate, perfect solutions. The OA is also now exclusively hards. People on Blind talking about giving interviews and only accepting perfect, canned solutions. No talking through, no hints, or you fail.

Fattestmoron

5 lat temudiscuss

   I was given problems that I hadn't encountered before, but I was able to solve them by deduction/critical thinking and applying the appropriate algorithms/patterns. Often the easy solution and the optimal solution weren't even that different, and just involved using a hashtable.

Yeah, no.

Fattestmoron

5 lat temudiscuss

If you're talking FAANG you're talking hard level. If you're talking a company that fancies itself FAANG, you're talking medium-hard while being treated like a human septic tank, which could happen at FAANG as well.

I think most candidates could give a solution, just not while they are being treated like sardines and prodded with a stick.

It has made me ask myself: do I really want a job at FAANG, or any high level company? I mean if it's pumping out leetcode while simultaneously dealing with office politics and sadistic managers, I think I'll just go back to selling cocaine.

Fattestmoron

5 lat temudiscuss

  The more experience I have the harder they are for me to solve, as engineering problems tend to have very different mental models to reach the solution.

That is what I think the true purpose of it is. It's poorly hidden age discrimination.

Fattestmoron

5 lat temudiscuss

Funny thing is I had an interview some years ago and he asked me about cycle detection, so I gave the basic set approach, then added the tortoise and hare as a memory free solution.

It immediately made him uncomfortable and I didn't get the job, because he didn't like the tortoise and hare solution not being as "tractable" as the set solution.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Fattestmoron

5 lat temudiscuss

Dude, that will not carry you through a hard problem.

You need the pocket Dijkstra, Kruskals, Union-find, Bellman-Ford, KMP, Kadanes (sliding window), LCS, DP (1-n dimensional), Topological Sorting, NP-hard heuristics (usually DP), BFS, DFS, Backtracking, Memoization (basically DP, but usually used in DFS), Prefix sums (DP as well), that weird palindrome-specific algorithm I can't remember, binary search, bisection (numerical anaylsis ftw!)

You also need tries, heaps, red-black trees, B-trees, DAGs, priority queues (heaps)

But wait.. there's more!

Euclidean algorithm, Josephus Problem, Sieve of Erastosthenes and all the number theory bullshit I can't remember and refuse to, because it has fuck all to do with daily engineering.

Fattestmoron

5 lat temudiscuss

Going to call bullshit on that, since in recent interviews most people have been getting hard problems and not "trapped rainwater" prefix sum hard problems, but the kind where the optimal solution has nearly 100 lines of code involving multiple steps (topological sort combined with dp and other garbage at one go).

Easy problems literally mean jack and I don't even think 50 medium problems could span all of the possible topics.

Sounds like you got in when it was easier.

Fattestmoron

5 lat temudiscuss

Can be anywhere from 1 minute to hours, depends on the problem. The whole classification thing is kind of ridiculous, because some hard problems are easy and some mediums are hard.

Fattestmoron

5 lat temudiscuss

Not in the US it doesn't. The turnover rate if anything is a symptom of the problems in the industry.

Fattestmoron

5 lat temudiscuss

So if I asked you a complex architectural question, or an algorithmic question and you froze, would it mean that you are an incompetent manager?

Clearly thinking on your feet in front of people is what it means to be good at ones profession.

Fattestmoron

5 lat temudiscuss

No, it won't. Leetcode is currently the enforced path to the 6 figure salary.

Fattestmoron

5 lat temudiscuss

I actually like puzzles where I see that it involves analytical thinking, or creativity. Open-ended stuff where I am allowed to let my mind take over and not worry about a time limit or some artificial constraints.

I also find it unbearable to "solve" something I see the solution to, or can describe how to solve it. In fact, if I see the solution, I find myself unable to go through the steps to actually do it, especially if there is a time constraint involved.

The trick you have described was my way to do the problems in my spare time back when I hadn't seen them before, but the whole problem is that leetcode problems are designed for an incredibly narrow range of solutions.

Analytical solutions that have poor worst case run times, but incredibly good average case run times are not allowed and a lot of mathematical approaches involving matrices and exploiting vectorization aren't allowed either.

Leetcode-style problems force you to put your mind in a very narrow box and I simply can't do that. I've always had a very great need of orthogonalization in how I think and operate; i.e. if something doesn't stimulate me enough, I need another concurrent activity that is completely different to keep me motivated.

Fattestmoron

5 lat temudiscuss

Sure, thanks, I'd appreciate it, or at least it would be interesting to see what is being done in that area.

Fattestmoron

5 lat temudiscuss

Rekt... exactly what a lot of us have been predicting and why it's so hard to force oneself to "git gud" at solving these problems

Fattestmoron

5 lat temudiscuss

Fattestmoron

5 lat temudiscuss

The math behind leetcode is induction and number theory, courses I took some 20 years ago along with DSA that I haven't used in productive engineering since.

Fattestmoron

5 lat temudiscuss

You are dead on. I am burnt out from my previous position and jumping through hoops for people who don't know what they are doing.

The science degree was useful for when I did advanced math, before the finance industry figured it would just abandon complex math in favor of statistical learning.

Fattestmoron

Submissions

Leetcode has taught me that I'm a bad engineer

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