Comment by stale2002 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stale2002 | Hacker News Reader

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The PhD and MS stuff is not being asked in interviews. Yes, that stuff is hard.

Tech interviews are 40 minutes max. There is only so much stuff that can be asked and programmed in such a short amount of time.

The stuff being asked in tech interviews is "traverse a tree in this interesting way". There are only so many ways to traverse a tree.

And no, I am not talking about crud interviews, I am talking about Google interviews, and similar. (Although Google hits the very high end of difficulty, most interviews are much easier).

Perhaps there really is a way to do the mythical, problem solving, IQ test of a whiteboard programming interview. But that is NOT the way the industry does things currently.

The way that the industry currently works is that literally half of interview questions are almost word for word listed in cracking the code interview (I counted!). And the ones that aren't are still quite common.

When I did tech interviews with a dozen or so companies just recently, a full 90%! of interview questions were ones that I had been asked or studied before. Interviewers are lazy, and whiteboard algorithms as things are CURRENTLY is just about who can cram the most.

Tech interviews are 40 minutes max? Where are you interviewing?

I have seen far more 6+ hour interview loops that 40 minute ones.

Maybe each session within the full loop accounts for 40 minutes.

That being said, people have their pet questions they use to sort the wheat from the chaff--if you can't fizzbuzz your way out of a wet paper bag, I am not hiring you. The best questions are more about process than the final answer. Solve an easyish problem, add some features, add some more features. What other ways could you have solved that problem? Why did you choose this way? When would you use a different approach? How does your solution scale?

The worst questions are gotcha questions with a right and wrong answer, `what does the C99 standard indicate is the correct size of a stack frame?`

40 minutes as in 40 minutes of coding for a single interview question.

Usually 20 minutes out of a given hour long interview is just BS resume and chit chat.

And yes, there are often 5-6 interviews in a row. But that still leaves the fact that there is only so much that can be covered in an interview with 1 person in the 40 minutes you are given to code a problem.

And those 40 minute coding problems are all taken straight out of cracking the code interview, most of the time. Even at Google.

Process questions are good, and conversational interviews are also good. I wish people would do more of them. But unfortunately it is mostly just algo questions that you have to cram for.

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