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Not every company is FANG.
Last time, pre covid, I had an on site coding interview with BigCo.
Interviewer asked to write an algorithm to find the biggest rectangle you can make from a list of lines.
I immediately stood up, and went to a drawing board in the conference room we were sitting. He was baffled, and asked me back to the desk to the computer.
I told him my initial thoughts on the algorithm and started sketching the algorithm in vs code that was presented on the laptop.
He quickly jumped in, removed my `for` loops and pointed at the first line of the file, import lodash, and told me to use it.
I said I'm not familiar with the libarary, but I'm happy to continue with the solution. We talked about it for a while, and I explained my approach at length, while not being able to reach the keyboard.
After that, he started typing his solution on my computer using `function programming` and lodash.
After we agreed that the general idea is pretty much the same I asked him what is the computational complexity of his solution, pointing out that using a lot of map/reduce/list may not be the optimal approach.
He looked at me, at the code at it was obvious that he genuinly had no clue.
We finished the interview few minutes later and to my surprise I was moved one notch up the ladder to the next interview. I have 25yoe and conducted close to thousand interviews. My secret sauce is to ask broad questions and let the candidate draw the map of areas where he pictures himself as competent, and then drill down, with a series of questions.
As an employer, team leader or engmgr I don't need a compiler or savant, I need a teamplayer that is confident within his domain and not afraid to say he doesn't know.
I've been on both side of the fence, so I know it's not easy to say you don't know during the interviewm, but the bottom line is that most of the time if you don't know something you can easily look it up on the internet or even ask your teammates during a coffee break. What I fear the most is the guy who fears to say he doesn't know and tries to keep his face. EDIT: part of where it comes from is my first serious day job, a big international startup (still running) which opened a small office in my hometown. We had a guy who, for three weeks, was coming to the office, sitting in front of his computer, looking busy, staring at the code, clapping at the keyboard, making some noise, and... after three weeks it turned out he didn't even started his task, because he didn't knew how to open a connection to the database.
Not a corp, just a small 6 body shop, but he played his role perfectly. |