[crimsonalucard]

Two things.

The google interview process was not made to filter you out. It was made to guarantee that they will not make a mistake on hiring you. People with the capability to do those interview problems have a high chance of being good programmers. There are many people like you who can't do those problems but are still very good programmers. Google doesn't need to hire you, the whole interview process is optimized for preventing a bad hire rather than finding people like you who are good hires but can't interview.

Second, traversing a tree in level order is a trivial problem from the interview question perspective. It is more than likely that this question will NOT be given by the interviewer because it is too easy. The interview questions FAANG tends to give are a bit more novel. In fact the method in which you use to solve this problem and the problem itself is often just taught directly in school depending on the class you're in, meaning you don't need to practice interview questions to solve it because it's a basic topic.

The solution is called tree traversal using BFS. If you didn't know this, despite working on and creating things like etcd you will appear stupid because the question is just too basic. When I interview I am 100% expecting questions way harder than this... even on phone interviews. Additionally when I'm the interviewer this type of question is the lowest bar, I will fail someone who can't answer this question.

This is not to comment on your abilities. Rather it is to give you a dose of truth. I truly believe that there are many people like you who can program an entire kernel but can't even solve fibonacci recursively on a white board. Despite this I can't stop judging you based off of the white board question nor do I know how to confirm that you can write a kernel despite lack of ability to solve very very basic programming questions.

[ideal0227]

Thanks for educating me about BFS.

I am major in computer science, and published paper in top conference. Tree traversal is trivial for me. So I guess I have decent CS background and knowledge?

Writing bug free and perfect code is not equal to simply solve the problem. If you have prepared coding interviews (especially for new grad and internship), you should understand it is less about knowledge but more about practicing and memorization for that specific purpose. The time spent on it is almost a waste in the future.

If the interview is knowledge based or problem solving oriented, I am all for it. Sadly, it is not today in many places. And that is exactly why website like Leetcode exists.

[crimsonalucard]

A published paper in a top conference only happens through political connections in undergrad it is not a marker for your IQ which is what a company like google tests for.

The interview is not just about writing bug free code it is 100% about solving a problem you haven't seen before. Google specifically tells their interviewers to avoid "canned" problems that are already all over the internet.

>If the interview is knowledge based or problem solving oriented, I am all for it. Sadly, it is not today in many places. And that is exactly why website like Leetcode exists.

The interview is about both. You are given a problem that they expect you have not seen before and you are expected to solve that problem using raw knowledge and problem solving skills.

Leetcode isn't about memorization. Leetcode is training data used to optimize your neural net to solve problems it hasn't seen before.

[ideal0227]

> Google specifically tells their interviewers to avoid "canned" problems that are already all over the internet.

They did a pretty poor job on this already. And it adds one more requirements, the ability to pretend that you have never practiced a similar question before :P.

> Leetcode isn't about memorization. Leetcode is training data used to optimize your neural net to solve problems it hasn't seen before.

Oh. Thanks. Glad that Human brain does not need that much data like today's neural net.

And there are millions of ways to improve problem solving than repeating BSF/DFS/DP templates on Leetcode questions.

[crimsonalucard]

>They did a pretty poor job on this already. And it adds one more requirements, the ability to pretend that you have never practiced a similar question before :P.

This is solved by throwing multiple interview questions at the person that are all novel and not derived from the internet. The probability of ALL questions being seened before is very low.

>And there are millions of ways to improve problem solving than repeating BSF/DFS/DP templates on Leetcode questions.

So? Doesn't change the effectiveness of leetcode in passing an interview and displaying your ability to learn and solve novel problems. If you have other ways of passing those interviews outside of leetcode, that's great. Use it.

[ideal0227]

> This is solved by throwing multiple interview questions at the person that are all novel and not derived from the internet. The probability of ALL questions being seened before is very low.

This is solved by adding more questions into Leetcode. 1000+ and counting.

> So? Doesn't change the effectiveness of leetcode in passing an interview and displaying your ability to learn and solve novel problems. If you have other ways of passing those interviews outside of leetcode, that's great. Use it.

You missed the point entirely. My argument is that many interviews are not designed for problem solving but practicing and memorization. And this is exactly why Leetcode ensures you to repeat these template 100 times effectively.

I do not plan to pass this kinds of interview, before, now or the future. So why do I bother?

Good luck on your job search anyway. I have no intention on discouraging you to do the practice. I cannot fix anything here.

[crimsonalucard]

>This is solved by adding more questions into Leetcode. 1000+ and counting.

I know people who did 500 LC problems and couldn't get in google and people who did 20 and got in. The problem set on LC is too large for memorization to work. Google will be giving you problems that aren't on LC and they are actively testing for raw intelligence.

>You missed the point entirely. My argument is that many interviews are not designed for problem solving but practicing and memorization. And this is exactly why Leetcode ensures you to repeat these template 100 times effectively.

No you missed my point. I've talked to those google interviewers, they are not testing your memorization skills that is not their intent. The amount of algorithm problems available in the universe far exceeds that which is available on Leetcode. When you interview at google the questions are designed so that you've never seen any of them before. Get it?

[anticensorship]

> 'A published paper in a top conference only happens through political connections in undergrad'

Which fact in and of itself ought to show just how rigged the whole system is--when people can get papers published in prestigious journals merely on the strength of "whom they know."

[crimsonalucard]

It also shows how unrigged the whole google interview process is.

A whiteboard interview is a "Political connection agnostic" interview.

[amznthrowaway5]

When interviewing for places like Google and Amazon, your political connections and things like publications/degrees still matter a lot. Good performance on the interviews can be impactful but it's not the only factor. The incredibly biased committees review a lot more than that at google.

[crimsonalucard]

Maybe a better way to put it is, the whiteboard problem itself is a pass or fail question and therefore that aspect of the interview by itself is unbiased.

[anticensorship]

> 'I can't stop judging you based off of the white board question nor do I know how to confirm that you can write a kernel despite lack of ability to solve very very basic programming questions.'

You phrased this as two parts, but in reality these two things are intricately linked. It's because you don't know how to judge person on their true ability--i.e. that you lack this skill--that you resort to useless trivialities like this whiteboard bullshit.

Combine survivorship bias (you were subjected to it and made it, so that validates the process) with heavy hive mind group think (We're All Real Smart People, Much Smarter Than Them Masses(TM))--both of which are always in abundance in intelligence-owned front 'companies' like Google, and of course you end up in your present mindset: arrogantly and naively selecting for people exactly like yourself; people who think just enough into things to think you possess a clue, while in reality, being totally oblivious to larger thoughts and concepts.

There are many in this world who just can't stop judging you based on your shortcomings and limitations. For example: your owners.

[crimsonalucard]

>Combine survivorship bias (you were subjected to it and made it, so that validates the process)

Let me spell it out for you so that we are on the same page and my Bias is utterly clear:

I Do not have the intellectual ability to make it through the google interview process. I consider myself to be a an excellent coder but I cannot pass their process. I also believe that the majority of programmers at google are smarter than me.

There. This is the ultimate form of unbiased judgement, a judgement that marks yourself as inferior. Google creates interviews I cannot pass, do I use bias to disparage the interview process or do I take a neutral viewpoint even when the neutral viewpoint says something about my own abilities?

If you can't score 200 points on an IQ test, is there something wrong with the IQ test or is it you? Which form of judgement are you taking here and which form of judgment am I taking and who is MORE biased?

If anyone is biased here, it is You.

>You phrased this as two parts, but in reality these two things are intricately linked. It's because you don't know how to judge person on their true ability--i.e. that you lack this skill--that you resort to useless trivialities like this whiteboard bullshit.

You assume that if you wrote what I wrote it would be a form of survivorship bias. This is a common mistake. How you interpret other people is a reflection of your own qualities, weaknesses and biases. You would suffer from survivorship bias if you were in my (perceived) situation and you chose to project that quality onto me even though I am possibly one of the least biased people you could meet.

To be unbiased is to have the ability to swallow uncomfortable truths. You'll know if you're such a person because you'll generally be unhappy. Such an ability is rare. I believe I have it, but make no mistake. It is a curse. The world is a dog eat dog shitty place and most people get through it happily by painting illusions around themselves. To see the world in raw untouched form is to wade through a lake of shit everyday. Better to say the google interview process is dumb than to admit to yourself that you just aren't google material.

You inject many assumptions into what I am saying. What you don't realize that I am in complete agreement with your above statement. Nothing was said to the contrary.

I Don't know how to judge a person's true ability because I lack that skill. I admitted this in the original statement but your blindness completely masked this meaning from you. You aren't hearing what I am really saying:

I am saying that No one has the ability to perfectly judge another persons interview ability. We must use unbiased statistics, metrics and methods of measurement to arrive at a good outcome. There are tons of good programmers out there that can program that can't do whiteboards, but there are much much much much less programmers that can do whiteboards but can't program. Thus if you pass an unbiased coding test that means you have a much much higher chance of being a good coder and possessing genetics that make you more intelligent than the person who couldn't pass it.

This makes the whiteboard interview the Best most unbiased process we have to judge other people. Note that when I say "best" I just mean that it is the best we have despite the fact that it's just not a very accurate way of judging people. Whiteboard interviews aren't that great, it's just better than any other method we have.

Using a conversation or a Design discussion to pass a person in an interview is not a measurable metric. It is subject to all kinds of biases. For example, this very conversational thread you assume that I am a survivor of the google interview process. The conversational format and your biases made you blind. Guess what, if you gave me a whiteboard coding interview, you'd know for sure but you made an assumption and instead wrote a response that demonstrated how completely off base and biased such interview processes without whiteboarding can be.

The most unbiased measurable way to detect if someone can program is to do a whiteboard interview. Most other data in an interview gleaned via conversation is subject to bias

[amznthrowaway5]

"This makes the whiteboard interview the Best most unbiased process we have to judge other people."

Nonsense. You can just give an SAT style IQ style test loaded with algorithms questions. Far more fair and objective than the biased human interviews we have right now. From my experience on the interviewer side, a lot of good people are rejected due to bad interviewers and the arbitrariness of the process, and many incompetent people are accepted due to the biases of the interviewers. The average Googler isn't as smart as you think. Of course a written IQ test still wouldn't be perfect, but nothing is.

[crimsonalucard]

True but, there's a pass or fail element to the whiteboard interview.

I'm mostly arguing that some form of quantitative metric is better than a conversation.

The place with the most leakage is architectural interviews.