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Comment by mountainriver | Hacker News Reader

Yeah this is the super unfortunate state of engineering today. I literally cannot bring myself to study puzzles when I could spend my time pursuing some interesting open source work.

Consequently, I have a lot of successful open source work, but most companies still don’t care and fail me for lack of fake puzzle quiz skills.

It’s utterly baffling to me that companies don’t want creative employees that build successful products out in front of everyone. Where you have a clear view of all their interactions and code.

I’ve tried to change this thinking at my current company and the consensus was it would be biased. Biased?! Code quizzes are highly biased! I’m producing useful functionality to the world!

I believe this and transparency are the new remote work. Some companies will get it early and for others it will take a major upheaval to get them to a place of reasonableness.

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I actually enjoy those puzzles, but agree that they are irrelevant to the work. In fact, the very few times they are relevant is something of a special occasion! "Hey look, I have to design a slightly novel algorithm!" Most of the job is, of course, figuring out why things went wrong, based on imperfect evidence, which requires a good mental model of the entire system plus the ability to make changes to test and eliminate hypotheses. Very few, if any, technical interviews capture the essence of this act.

Even more rare "Hey look, I have to design a slightly novel algorithm in 30 minutes while babbling the whole time!"

For someone who can't even get an interview, but loves working on oss, this is highly discouraging...

I already have to be so focused with what little time I have in my life, and sacrifice a lot, to just make the things I want to make, I just can't imagine finding all the time to do this meta work/training.

Every day I grow more comfortable with the idea that my love of software dev and oss will forever be avocational. Perhaps though, financial instability aside, I'll be happier this way anyway

I'm not sure why you aren't getting interviews, but I've had multiple coding jobs in the past where the interviews had little to no technical quizzing at all. Don't get too discouraged, there's probably a match out there for you, maybe just not at a FAANG or one of those super competitive companies (which, quite honestly, I wouldn't want to work for anyway--but it's personal preference).

You can always move onto a more competitive company later once your resume has some solid experience on it, if that's your cup of tea.

I am not sure either, but its been a few years at this point. I have no desire to work for a FAANG company, or to make even relatively good money, I do try to apply to the smaller places. No need to recite all the hiring tips though, I know them all! Think it's just a combination of bad luck and lack of relevant education (I have an MA, but it's in humanities).

That is encouraging though that not all interviews are like this! I have projected so much into the fantasy of getting a tech interview without ever having one, its easy for me to be swayed one way or another.

I have over 20 years experience, and I've worked for some major companies. I went through a year of interviews with those stupid quizzes.

Needless to say, I got nothing from it. A couple places I was perfect for the job, but I couldn't spit out elegant quiz code on demand from memory. Sorry folks, head injuries f with your memory. I'll always look shit up so I get it right.

I think the big relevation would be that these are not “puzzles”… there’s about 10 algorithms that if you learn you can solve the problems pretty easily. Make sure you keep reviewing the 10ish main algorithms.

Example:

Breadth first search

Recursion

Binary Tree

Etc.

Then it’s more a classification problem.

if you ever did an interview a at one of (Facebook,Apple,Google, Microsoft..) you know this is not true.

They definitely are asking puzzle question that an university teacher teaching algorithm would fail. And the only way to is practice stupid question on leetcode

He's partially right. There's a lot of pattern matching involved. Like he describes, there are several broad patterns. But then there are sub-patterns upon sub-patterns. You need to be able to recognize these when the interviewer throws a problem at you.

You grind leetcode problems over and over so that you can better recognize these patterns and know when to apply their associated solutions.

The most idealistic scenario is you get a problem you've recently practiced verbatim. Then you just put on an act like you've never seen it before in your life.

But if you get a problem that you can match to a pattern you've practiced, then you're still mostly in a good place.

I work at FAANG - my take is, all questions can be solved based on these 10-15 data structures / algorithms. They are just gift wrapped with a lot of fluff, but underlying each of them is one or a combination of one of these data structures / algos.

As an aside, to everyone who has asked me how to get into FAANG - I always say you should be able to code DFS/BFS in your sleep like your life depends on it. 1/5 questions is surely going to be a tree/graph search.

How many people are in your company?

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