michael_mroczka

8 ms·

1.
by michael_mroczka 1y ago
Hot take from the author: This is a commonly repeated claim, but it’s probably not accurate. It’s FAR easier for companies to stick with the interview process they’ve used for decades—just mandate in-person interviews again—than to reinvent
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by michael_mroczka 2y ago
Ok friend. :)
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by michael_mroczka 2y ago
I can see how you’d get to that conclusion, but I don’t agree with this take. “No value” is particularly strong wording. This is a fairly simple, cheap, and fast process for screening people at scale (think “hundreds per week”), I agree tha
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by michael_mroczka 2y ago
Hey, thanks for the support. You can always reach out to me directly on Discord if you need anything. Nil and I wrote all of the technical content for the book, so we are happy to help in any way we can and do our best to stay available—esp
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by michael_mroczka 2y ago
Nah, I totally understand where you're coming from and didn't feel attacked. I responded to your reply! :)
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by michael_mroczka 2y ago
I love this comment, and as an author of this book, I don't disagree with a word of it. A common misconception is that Gayle's original book put forth the "right" way to do interviews. Gayle neither invented or encourage
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by michael_mroczka 2y ago
I added my response in this thread! :)
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by michael_mroczka 2y ago
Hey, thanks for the thoughtful question! You’re absolutely right to point out something that a lot of coding interview experts don’t like to admit: interviews aren’t always predictable. In fact, one of the first sections in the book has eac
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by michael_mroczka 2y ago
> Asking this question will show an eye for detail and a solid foundation in computer science. My friend, you've clearly got the wrong book. I think there might be some confusion here. That exact sentence (as you've written it)
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by michael_mroczka 2y ago
If it helps, we (the authors) didn't even post this to HN (or ask someone else to). We definitely will answer questions as they come up though. And we were giving away free chapters from the book before today and are just linking to it
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by michael_mroczka 2y ago
Oooh, I'm a BCtCI author, but I admit Sedgewick is the algo expert! His book is more about data structures and algorithms than about coding interviews (related but very different). If you needed to completely learn data structures and
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by michael_mroczka 2y ago
Happy to help. :) The book also has a discord server (link in the free PDF!), so if you have other questions, feel free to ping me there with them! We are about to start the weekly leetcode contest, and there will be a write-up after it fin
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by michael_mroczka 2y ago
If it helps, I (Mike) don't know who @stmw is. I can at least say they aren't one of the four authors of this book. That said, I don't think the reasonable conclusion to come to when someone is supportive of a product is that
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by michael_mroczka 2y ago
Hey friend, totally okay if we don’t see eye to eye on this. No big deal. But just to share my perspective—if you ask ChatGPT to break down a genuinely hard, new problem (not something that’s been around forever with tons of tutorials and b
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by michael_mroczka 2y ago
Hey, I know Shaun personally, and I think his book is excellent. Our books, despite seeming similar, are very different. His is about recognizing preset patterns, and that is about the extent of it. No outreach advice, negotiation strategie
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by michael_mroczka 2y ago
Hey there, I'm the Mike (an author of BCtCI). I totally get where you’re coming from—there are a lot of flaws in the interview process, no doubt about it. When Cracking the Coding Interview was originally written, the intention wasn’t
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by michael_mroczka 2y ago
Appreciate the comment, and you're completely right. Our whole thesis is that doing what everybody else is doing will get you the same results that everybody else is getting. :)
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by michael_mroczka 2y ago
You got me! Hahaha :)
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by michael_mroczka 2y ago
AI can absolutely help you. A lot of the benefits of the book come from the reasoning, though, which AI cannot do. For instance, you might try a question, and the optimal answer uses a heap, but how did we intuit that? What repeatable rea
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by michael_mroczka 2y ago
> In addition, the book doesn't seem to cover systems design which is an extremely critical part of the interview process for L4 and above. It's called Cracking the *Coding* Interview for a reason. We don't talk about data
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by michael_mroczka 2y ago
Agreed. The book talks about niche topics in more depth than most resources online. In addition to all the topics in the book, we're actively releasing free online chapters each month covering more niche topics found in interviews.
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by michael_mroczka 2y ago
Hey, I'm one of the main authors of the book. Feel free to ask any questions if you have them. :) There are many great resources that have come out since the original CtCI, but we waited to release this until we had substantially new a
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by michael_mroczka 3y ago
You're 100% right, but I think your experience is different than recent job seekers. I think this is mostly semantics. You're asking simple problems and are amazed at the number of people that can't do them. In the current jo
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by michael_mroczka 3y ago
The implied assumption here is that if you can figure out the number of anagrams that can be made from a given string in just 30 minutes, you probably are smart enough to set up a web server in a couple of days with documentation and ChatGP
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by michael_mroczka 3y ago
Your thought is a good one, and I think it is a valid approach. The barrier that comes up when doing this is still going to be cheating. How do you separate the people who are cheating on these at-home tests? Salesforce had a good interview
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by michael_mroczka 3y ago
Let's keep it civil, my friend. I totally get the frustration with leetcode-style questions and acknowledge that they aren't perfect. They can indeed overlook the diverse strengths that experienced engineers bring to the table. My
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by michael_mroczka 3y ago
> We may need to design new kinds of interview questions and methods for humans augmented by AI. Exactly. That's all a Custom question really is. Questions that are resistant to AI
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by michael_mroczka 3y ago
I can't imagine many companies going back to this. The savings are too shiny to resist
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by michael_mroczka 3y ago
So true!
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by michael_mroczka 3y ago
It's a good question. In short, yes, I believe it is reasonable to assume custom questions will generally perform better than verbatim or modified leetcode questions. In general, while ChatGPT could handle modified questions well enoug

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