[o10449366]

> If you've seen the question/answer before just say so! I will totally appreciate the honesty and it goes a long way.

Why? You're testing their ability to produce the right answer to a given problem - not their problem solving ability. To that end it shouldn't matter if they've seen the problem or not.

I always find it hilarious when recruiters say that "getting the optimal solution isn't everything." I've failed numerous interview rounds where due to time constraints or implementation details I'm not able to completely code the optimal solution, but I am able to talk/walk through each step of it in pseudocode with the interviewer. By your own criteria, being able to clearly explain the solution and demonstrate an understanding of the different tradeoffs should count for much more than just being able to copy/paste the solution from memory, but I've never advanced in any round that finished without a "working" piece of code.

Honestly, the one thing I appreciated about FB/Meta's recruiters is that they were always honest about the process and what was expected - 2-3 Leetcode mediums/hards in 45 minutes and they only care about optimal solutions. I much prefer that to disingenuous sentiments of "getting the right answer is important, but we also want to see your thought process and how you might work with another engineer on the team."

[jokethrowaway]

> "getting the right answer is important, but we also want to see your thought process and how you might work with another engineer on the team."

That's how it works in all the companies I've hired in.

It doesn't matter if you don't get to the end of the problem, I just need to see you can think and that you know how to code. Do you think your daily job will require you more than that?

And believes me, this is enough to filter out plenty of bad apples.

Poor performance in my experience was never about not being able to solve a technical problem, it was always personal issues / not having motivation / hating the environment.

[tomtung]

> the one thing I appreciated about FB/Meta's recruiters is that they were always honest about the process and what was expected - 2-3 Leetcode mediums/hards in 45 minutes and they only care about optimal solutions

A counter data point: I recently passed Google's interview a few months ago. In one round, I was asked to solve a certain kind of bipartite graph matching problem; not being a fresh new grad with ACM medals, I obviously couldn't solve it in polynomial time and just implemented a brute-force solution in the end. In another round, I came up with a solution the interviewer said they've never seen before, although it could be slightly slower than the "optimal" solution he had in mind depending on the input size.

As an interviewer in my last company, I always made sure the solutions were well motivated, and have rejected candidates who could write down the perfect solution but couldn't explain why. If I were to be asked by the candidate for the specific runtime I was looking for, I would probably just reply with "don't worry about it, just try your best" or "let's focus on correctness first and worry about efficiency and other trade-offs later".

Testing for problem solving ability is hard, but that's still one of the key signals we wish to extract whenever possible.

[vineyardmike]

> Why? You're testing their ability to produce the right answer to a given problem - not their problem solving ability. To that end it shouldn't matter if they've seen the problem or not.

Pretty sure most people want to test problem solving ability, and hopefully your problem solving ability solves the problem correctly. If you method to solve the problem is to find the answer online and repeat it... that may not be how the company wants you to solve their problems.

[o10449366]

Really? In my position as a senior member on my team, one of the biggest mentoring costs is just teaching junior members how to search and find answers for themselves.

Yes, day to day I'm not copy and pasting huge blocks of code from Stack Overflow, but when I need an answer and I don't immediately know it my first move is always to search internally or externally for others who may have already shared it.

Why is being able to effectively search for for answers not considered good problem solving?

[MauranKilom]

> Why is being able to effectively search for for answers not considered good problem solving?

Memorizing interview questions is decidedly not "effectively searching for answers".

Effectively searching for answers requires breaking the problem down into separate pieces that you can actually search for. This is one of the skills that can actually be demonstrated during the interview. And then showing that you can also come up with the solution (or be guided towards it in discussion with the interviewer) is the natural way to round it out, instead of "ok, now google for this sub-problem while I'm watching you".

[vineyardmike]

Yes really.

Go ask your manager if you should copy and paste something you found on a chinese forum as 100% of the output you generate. Nothing original, no actual thoughts for yourself, JUST copy paste.

Search and find answers for themselves is not the same as blindly copy/pasting, which is basically what the scripted forum answers are.