Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacamera | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to know what dynamic programming exercises you're asking interviewees to complete in the timespan of an interview that wouldn't show up on LeetCode.

View on HN

I think they meant it in the literal sense; "programming requirements that are dynamic", not dynamic programming algorithms you'd use for the knapsack problem :)

"Ad hoc" probably being a less ambiguous wording

It involves a lot of preparation on my part. The ask for the candidate is usually a small service that does some trivial thing in our business domain. The interview problem is usually making a script to manipulate the data, or serve an API endpoint that calls my API and transform the data to match a certain output shape.

Interesting. So is actually executing the script, server, or API call without errors part of the interview? Is that what makes them "practical" or is it because the data structures and algorithms are related to your business domain?

Not trying to nitpick, your comment just piqued my curiosity because you made the point of distinguishing your exercises from leetcode and also stated that those who chose F# were generally poor performers.

It is, but I’m very forgiving of scripts/services that don’t run right the first time if it’s clear the logic is on the right track. If your logic is sound and you’re stuck on an esoteric error, I usually count that the same as completing the exercise. (There have been cases where the person shows no debugging ability at all, which I do treat as a problem. But if you’re reading the error and there’s just not enough time for a fix, eh you were close enough.)

jacamera is on point. Perhaps it's not "leetcode" but it's a seemingly one-dimensional, time-constrained quiz on a specific skill, parsing messy JSON (your words), with you as the sole judge. Personally from experience, when I approach a new API, I recognize it's likely to take a few iterations, based on how that API's data integrates with the rest of my program, to determine the best way to deserialize the API's responses into objects. If I've only got 45 minutes, yea, I'm just going to map it quick and dirty and it's going to look ugly.

Your observation about F# may be valid, but this does appear to be a test of one specific use case for a language, not how productive people are when building entire applications with them.

Why did you take from my comment that parsing messy JSON is the only part of the exercise? It’s just the part that we seem to get stuck on with F# candidates, not the only thing I ask about.

because you mentioned it 3 times

Reply on news.ycombinator.com