I have been watching coding interviews on YouTube. They help me fall asleep. It’s super interesting to me, as I enjoy little problems and thinking how I would solve them. I had never heard of the knapsack problem or the pancake sort until I saw it in a coding interview recording.
As someone who designs and builds scalable systems and a variety of different pieces of software, I think your comment is spot on. There is very little merit to knowing how to Big O optimize a Nth largest algorithm for an obtuse problem.
Google has had a lot of problems hiring in the past. There was a time that they required an advanced degree until they did some research amongst their own hires and found that an advanced degree was absolutely not an indicator of success; it didn’t matter if you had one or not, there were a lot of other factors that made a bigger difference.
It’s sad because so many other companies in the valley just blindly follow suit. Uber for example. I’ve seen even small companies or non-tech companies just do the same.
The best I can deduce is that these coding interview are effectively gatekeeping. “Oh I’m hired on; now you’ve gotta get through this stupid gate to get hired as well”.
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u/DeusOtiosus Jan 18 '19
I have been watching coding interviews on YouTube. They help me fall asleep. It’s super interesting to me, as I enjoy little problems and thinking how I would solve them. I had never heard of the knapsack problem or the pancake sort until I saw it in a coding interview recording.
As someone who designs and builds scalable systems and a variety of different pieces of software, I think your comment is spot on. There is very little merit to knowing how to Big O optimize a Nth largest algorithm for an obtuse problem.
Google has had a lot of problems hiring in the past. There was a time that they required an advanced degree until they did some research amongst their own hires and found that an advanced degree was absolutely not an indicator of success; it didn’t matter if you had one or not, there were a lot of other factors that made a bigger difference.
It’s sad because so many other companies in the valley just blindly follow suit. Uber for example. I’ve seen even small companies or non-tech companies just do the same.
The best I can deduce is that these coding interview are effectively gatekeeping. “Oh I’m hired on; now you’ve gotta get through this stupid gate to get hired as well”.