Re:Guido van Rossum joins Microsoft
by strulovich on Thursday November 12, 2020 @05:57PM
(#25076383)
Just for reference, my company does not ask anyone to implement a binary tree or any well known algorithms in coding interviews.
I see a bunch of comments that look to me as strawman, or really bad interview experience.
A good coding interview should:
- not be known by the interviewee if they spent even a few weeks on leetcode
- avoid requiring anything that isn’t covered in an average CS101 class
- draw its challenges from the need to process a new problem, and gradually uncover the edge cases in it and how to handle them gracefully.
I don’t do leetcode. But went now and tried the first hard question I found. It was “find the median of two sorted arrays”. I find this question to be a good example of very little background knowledge needed. (You’d need to know how to deal with arrays, and what’s a median - not everyone will know these, but it’s a pretty low bar)
This question already has plenty of room for mistakes, edge cases and problem solving. I’m going to take a wild guess from knowing talented veteran engineers I’ve seen that they can surely handle it in the interview structures I’ve experienced.
I see a bunch of comments that look to me as strawman, or really bad interview experience.
A good coding interview should: - not be known by the interviewee if they spent even a few weeks on leetcode - avoid requiring anything that isn’t covered in an average CS101 class - draw its challenges from the need to process a new problem, and gradually uncover the edge cases in it and how to handle them gracefully.
I don’t do leetcode. But went now and tried the first hard question I found. It was “find the median of two sorted arrays”. I find this question to be a good example of very little background knowledge needed. (You’d need to know how to deal with arrays, and what’s a median - not everyone will know these, but it’s a pretty low bar)
This question already has plenty of room for mistakes, edge cases and problem solving. I’m going to take a wild guess from knowing talented veteran engineers I’ve seen that they can surely handle it in the interview structures I’ve experienced.