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by baron_harkonnen
2414 days ago
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People complain about algorithm heavy interviews a lot but I honestly think they're pretty useful for several reasons (some are beneficial to the person interviewing as well). Even though we many software engineers aren't doing challenging enough work to require algorithms work daily (though, wouldn't you want to be doing this kind of work?) algorithms problems have a lot you have to do. Even if you don't use a linked list every day, designing a linked list and searching it isn't really different than designing a User class. The difference is it will take a few features of iterating on a User class before you bump into design issues where these will pop up right away. And even though people complain about not being able to code without an IDE, frankly this is a red flag. I've seen candidates white board weird code (lots of semicolons, or no returns in python) that makes it pretty clear they don't write a lot of code. Finally, white boarding algorithms questions are nice for interviewees because you can study one topic that will apply equally for multiple companies. Take home projects are great, but you have to do a unique one for each company. You can practice leetcode every night and you're preparing for a wide range of places all at once. |
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Muscle memory is real. Plus as a polyglot I find the context helpful for jogging my memory for how to do something in a particular language.
I had to google how to declare a variable in Go the other day, but I've written 10ks of lines. I'd had a break and was confused with Python. Oh well. I'd have failed on several of your whiteboard red flags.
Bar none, what I most want to see as an interviewer is someone's own code on GitHub. But I can count on one hand the number of times I've ever seen that after 10 years of hiring :-(