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Comment by vthallam | Hacker News Reader

Or you could do top 100 questions on leetcode or hackerrank and you would have solved the question in a minute. It's kinda sad that you could remember the top 100 solutions and clear interviews in almost all big tech companies.

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I recently interviewed at a big tech company (phone interview). I spent quite some time practicing on leetcode (completed at least 150 problems). During the interview, it took me a few minutes of thinking before completing the assignments with what I think was the expected solution. We discussed the complexity and a few possible variations. The interview sounded satisfied and I really had the feeling that I had nailed these assignments.

I wasn't rejected but I've been asked to retake a phone interview. Apparently, the interviewer had very good feelings about me, but found that I was "out of practice" as far as coding goes.

I wonder if my age is an issue (40+) or if they have a really high level of expectation. Are most other candidates super fast at solving these kinds of problems. I'm a bit disappointed because I'm not sure that I've got much room for improvement at that stage.

found that I was "out of practice" as far as coding goes.

They want 23 year olds who just did their finals. You know, real stallions.

And who don’t care that they’re going to get paid less than minimum wage, and work over 120 hours per week.

You know, real pegacorns.

As someone that does lots of coding phone interviews I can say that yes, time is a factor. But it's relative, ie I'm comparing you to the time it took other candidates to solve the same problem. After all, we have to evaluate you, over the phone, in the course of less than an hour. If 2 candidates arrive to the optimal solution, the one that did it much faster is the better candidate.

It sounds to me like you did pretty well so don't give up.

> the one that did it much faster is the better candidate.

From my perspective that is only about 3% of what I expect from a software engineer. Writing readable, easy to maintain code that is well tested, collaborating with product and other developers for how a feature should work, influencing technical designs, giving good feedback are things I value much higher than how quickly someone can write a snippet of code that works.

If 2 candidates arrive to the optimal solution, the one that did it much faster is the better candidate.

How did you arrive at that conclusion? Is it based on data or does it "feel" right based on an easily-measured metric?

> If 2 candidates arrive to the optimal solution, the one that did it much faster is the better candidate.

This is _a_ metric but I wouldn't bet too much on it. I know lots of people that come to optimal solutions to "algorithm type" _much_ faster than I do. I'm pretty slow at that type of stuff. But... its just such a small part of what makes someone a good programmer. Building out a medium to large application requires balancing a lot of trade offs and figuring out how to keep things simple. I know seasoned, quality algorithm solvers who honestly just repeatedly churn out garbage applications. And they can tank the productivity of an entire team of developers in their wake. I don't know how you test for that, but I can promise phone screening for problem solution time isn't it.

the one that did it much faster is the better candidate

Translated: "the one that did it much faster is a more recent graduate and exploitable for 100-hour weeks at below-par pay, hire that one".

Congratulations, now you know how to hire at a tech company!

I wonder if my age is an issue (40+)

The answer to that is almost always yes.

I really wonder how age is taken into account. If it were really an issue, they could have rejected my application from the start and not bother with an interview.

Maybe the interviewer was biased and led to think I was "out of practice" because he knew I was on the older side. But I'll give them the benefice of the doubt. I believe it's a competitive position and I simply wasn't in the right percentile to qualify.

Now, would my former self 20 years ago be more competitive for this kind of interviews? slightly faster perhaps, but I don't feel I'm at a disadvantage compared to younger candidates.

its kinda sad you think professionals should memorize useless tricks that dont generalize to the profession in order to be considered for a job.

The skill takes a long time to practice, and quickly evaporates once you stop doing it. Yet none of our work is anything like that. a more real world situation is reading documentation or SO for the function concat_ws that will turn an array column to a concatenated string.

however, the system that is, and one that you seem to think is ok, is one that discriminates people on many levels. Its a skill you do not get good at by working, so you must practice this in your free time. Now you just discriminated against men and women with families, people from less fortunate backgrounds, and others who otherwise do not have the time in the day to dedicate to a skill that is only useful to coding interviews.

as far as a comment above, I was a DBA for 10 years and can do pretty complicated queries off the top of my head, know how to optimize my indexes, worked with both structured and unstructured data in the multi tb size, ect ect, but I have no recollection on what ACID stands for. I dont really care. Sure, you may hire someone who memorizes useless crap, but then they have no idea why the IO has gone through the roof when inserting IDs out of order on a clustered index.

I don't read anything about OP's post as saying they think people should memorize or that this practice is okay, as evidenced by their final sentence that it's sad that you could do so and pass many technical interviews.

Exactly, I as well have been doing technical work for my whole life, and sitting here right now, I could more easily explain to you how to optimize the planner cache, and what hints are required to get a given result than I could explain to you which joins do what.

I just look up joins when I need them, and it's straight forward, but ask me in an interview and I sound like an idiot.

I didn't take the parent's post the same way. The situation is more that if you do leetcode or hackerrank then you pass the interview. So once again the interview process has failed; instead of identifying good candidates you identify candidates that do hackerrank in their free time.

thanks for the clarification, i read it as "its sad they cant do it, whats wrong with them?" kinda way, but what you said is probably what he/she meant

I would say that if you know the answers to 100 top coding questions (and understand them, a good interviewer will poke you to determine that) then you are a pretty good coder and you should be hired. Seems working as intended :)

For many tech companies where they get a lot more candidate applications than they have positions for, the goal of the interview process isn't to avoid losing good candidates, it's to not hire bad candidates.

That's like saying that if you can retype The Great Gatsby, then you're a great writer.

So much more goes into software engineering than "Can solve tiny example problems in an examination system"

Like I said, a good interviewer ensures you understand the solutions of those problems (the problem might even be formulated in a different form than the exact form you learned) not just typing out text verbatim. If you do understand the solutions of top 100 coding questions, I think you have a good start. Part of solving the problem in an interview will also be being able to code, so it's also testing your coding ability in a given programming language.

True that software engineering is more than that, but those other things largely depend on in-house company processes, tools and policies so you would learn them afterwards.

Yes, because nothing says top notch developer more than "I can memorize stuff and regurgitate it."

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