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by bitL 2972 days ago
Sure, that might be the case. But for those funny needs I have a "crazy algorithm course" from a top 10 university, ACM ICPC and Kaggle or other paid competitions I can attend. I am not going to go through such an interview doing simple silly things I did dozen times before at FB/Goog/etc., when I know I can use that time to work on something more interesting, or just for relaxing after a hard work/enjoying accomplishments. I would advise companies hiring to at least once read CV and click through GitHub code, and then just focus on the only important question - would they like to work with me as a person or not? That would save everyone time and lead to better results.

One self-driving car start-up in SV wanted me to solve a long-standing research problem (Deep Learning) as their week-long take home test. Thanks, but when I do, you can license my tech, I will gladly make it available to you for $.

3 comments

There's irony. Asking for GitHub is 10x worse than algorithmic questions. I just went through the interview process at big companies, with all the resources out there it's easy to get good at these types of questions.

During my professional time I write software to make money. During my free time I write software to make money. As an aging software engineer algorithmic questions just screen for how much time you're willing to put into an interviewing. GitHub screens for how much of a sucker you are.

Yeah, could be. Though if you provide a hiring company with a GitHub profile demonstrating your dominance, and then you are expected to waste another 6 hours on trivial algorithmic questions you probably did 100 times in the past 10 years, you'd probably just pass on that "opportunity". Those algorithmic questions were anyway originally meant to find the "best of the best", now they are used for entry-level positions. It's like asking an accomplished lawyer about what happened in 1758 and what was the effect on common law.
I have a sneaking suspicion that I’ve built a feature that was presented as a coding exercise, possibly more than once.
Imagine you get that very feature during some interview and the feedback you get is that you failed :DDD Reminds me when I created a few jokes as a kid that got nation-wide popularity; it was difficult to explain I made them from the scratch and the only thing those attempts gave me was to be marked as an "asshole" and "liar" :D
What was the problem they asked you to solve? Out of curiosity
I don't want to ruin their test...