6 ms·

> why do you say you can't solve puzzle problems? How many have you tried? Frankly speaking, they do not interest me.I would rather collaborate with friends an

by MrDHat 13y ago

> why do you say you can't solve puzzle problems? How many have you tried? Frankly speaking, they do not interest me.I would rather collaborate with friends and work on a project than solve competitive problems or puzzles.

eshvk 13y ago
Couple of questions (again following up on OP's hypothetical stream). 1. How is a small team of programmers to know that you will be able to collaborate with them effectively within the space of an interview ? 2. What exactly do you mean by "competitive problems" or "puzzles"? What is off-limits? I am asking 2. to identify what you mean by a puzzle. For example, let me take the substring matching problem. There are a ton of ways of doing those which for me traverse the realm of being both puzzles and also in some ways important computer science questions [1]. You could do brute force. You could have a moving hash window and use that to check if the substring is present. (Sort of Rabin Karp). You could build a trie called a suffix tree. Now the way intuition works (at least for me) is that you either know how to solve it, and then you sort of recollect the details in a few minutes. Or you have no idea of how to do it and probably don't know how to create a solution like that unless it was super critical that you go figure this out. And the problem is that the real world never throws things straightforward at you. Curveballs at least in the engineering world require transforming previous solutions into something new. So unless you grok trees, how will I know if you really will be able to spot that a random problem is just a tree problem with some modifications and then go ahead and implement it, instead of say spending a few weeks refreshing graphs. [1] http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/19759/core-algorithms-deployed/19764#19764 http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/19759/core-algor...
- MrDHat 13y ago
  > How is a small team of programmers to know that you will be able to collaborate with them effectively within the space of an interview ? Isn't my github profile enough proof to show that I can collaborate with people? Also, as I pointed out in my recent comment: Eran Hammer, (creator of OAuth and Hawk) presents a new way to hire engineers. He suggests the concept of a 'Homework' wherein prospective employees are presented with a problem/bug that they are actually facing in their product. One of my acquaintance from Mozilla also pointed out that he was hired in a similar way. > 2. What exactly do you mean by "competitive problems" or "puzzles"? What is off-limits? For me, competitive problems are the kind problems for which interviewstreet/codechef etc are known for. At times, they involve the kind of problems which a developer is not likely to face during his time at the company. For example, being a web developer, I don't think that there will be a time when I need to write a string matching program from scratch. Wouldn't questions related to scalability/databases/some selected data structures make more sense for such a profile? Don't take me wrong, I am not against questions involving string matching/sorting/kernel concepts, all I am saying is that they should be asked from those who are really going to face such problems while working. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6828411 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6828411
  - eshvk 13y ago
    > Isn't my github profile enough proof to show that I can collaborate with people? It doesn't show if you can collaborate with these people. Which is one of the things that I look for when I interview folks or interview at companies. > For me, ... while working. So I have this opinion that most jobs don't require even a C.S. degree or even knowing more about programming than cobbling together a few libraries and getting something out. Now, most companies don't agree. You said you learn fast right? This is a lesson you should start learning then. Most companies look for some mythical beast called a "10x" developer. They have no idea how they can solve it. Sure, they can test you on the problems they are working on right now. However, they have no idea what problems they may face in the future. So they test you on a bunch of random "hard shit". You jump enough hoops, you get hired. /cynic

by MrDHat 13y ago

eshvk 13y ago

Couple of questions (again following up on OP's hypothetical stream). 1. How is a small team of programmers to know that you will be able to collaborate with them effectively within the space of an interview ? 2. What exactly do you mean by "competitive problems" or "puzzles"? What is off-limits? I am asking 2. to identify what you mean by a puzzle. For example, let me take the substring matching problem. There are a ton of ways of doing those which for me traverse the realm of being both puzzles and also in some ways important computer science questions [1]. You could do brute force. You could have a moving hash window and use that to check if the substring is present. (Sort of Rabin Karp). You could build a trie called a suffix tree. Now the way intuition works (at least for me) is that you either know how to solve it, and then you sort of recollect the details in a few minutes. Or you have no idea of how to do it and probably don't know how to create a solution like that unless it was super critical that you go figure this out. And the problem is that the real world never throws things straightforward at you. Curveballs at least in the engineering world require transforming previous solutions into something new. So unless you grok trees, how will I know if you really will be able to spot that a random problem is just a tree problem with some modifications and then go ahead and implement it, instead of say spending a few weeks refreshing graphs. [1] http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/19759/core-algorithms-deployed/19764#19764 http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/19759/core-algor...

MrDHat 13y ago
> How is a small team of programmers to know that you will be able to collaborate with them effectively within the space of an interview ? Isn't my github profile enough proof to show that I can collaborate with people? Also, as I pointed out in my recent comment: Eran Hammer, (creator of OAuth and Hawk) presents a new way to hire engineers. He suggests the concept of a 'Homework' wherein prospective employees are presented with a problem/bug that they are actually facing in their product. One of my acquaintance from Mozilla also pointed out that he was hired in a similar way. > 2. What exactly do you mean by "competitive problems" or "puzzles"? What is off-limits? For me, competitive problems are the kind problems for which interviewstreet/codechef etc are known for. At times, they involve the kind of problems which a developer is not likely to face during his time at the company. For example, being a web developer, I don't think that there will be a time when I need to write a string matching program from scratch. Wouldn't questions related to scalability/databases/some selected data structures make more sense for such a profile? Don't take me wrong, I am not against questions involving string matching/sorting/kernel concepts, all I am saying is that they should be asked from those who are really going to face such problems while working. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6828411 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6828411
- eshvk 13y ago
  > Isn't my github profile enough proof to show that I can collaborate with people? It doesn't show if you can collaborate with these people. Which is one of the things that I look for when I interview folks or interview at companies. > For me, ... while working. So I have this opinion that most jobs don't require even a C.S. degree or even knowing more about programming than cobbling together a few libraries and getting something out. Now, most companies don't agree. You said you learn fast right? This is a lesson you should start learning then. Most companies look for some mythical beast called a "10x" developer. They have no idea how they can solve it. Sure, they can test you on the problems they are working on right now. However, they have no idea what problems they may face in the future. So they test you on a bunch of random "hard shit". You jump enough hoops, you get hired. /cynic