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by enjo
6155 days ago
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I would fail if this was a 'live' screening. It's rare that I write SQL by hand, and remembering the syntax for a JOIN is something I pretty much always look up. I just don't do it by hand very anymore. I'm a very good developer (my track record would suggest as such), but I would fail at least one part of this test due to the simple inability to remember elementary SQL syntax. The interesting thing about this statement is that it shows one way out of potentially being asked to code on a whiteboard/over the phone. If you have a PhD' from MIT and/or have a strong track record of writing Open Source software, creating and selling a startup, build robots (and electric unicylces ) for fun etc, in other words, if you can show , well before the interview, that you are as good or better than the job demands, you are very unlikely to face the "find the longest subsequence in a string" or "write a join" type questions. But then if you could do all that why would you look for a job? That's just not true, particularly at the larger companies out there. Amazon, for instance, has a rigorous process that you can't (more or less) circumvent. It involves a lot of saying algorithms over the phone. It was one of the most challenging interviews I've done in my life. Not because of the content, but because of the method. |
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"more or less" is key. If someone at the level of PG or RTM (or Linus or Hejlsberg, say) were to apply to Amazon (or Google or Yahoo), I am sure they aren't going to be asked to code "subsequence of a string" on the phone! They'd no doubt get a good interview but i highly doubt thatthis kind of "ask trivial questions" interview would occur. The purpose of such phone interviews is to eliminate clueless people who have the knack of writing good resumes , the "all hat and no cattle" types.
I was specifically responding to this sentence "PG, RTM, and TLB would probably fail your test". I doubt that somehow!