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A comment on What's Wrong with Tech Hiring. Parent comment

Re:What's Wrong with Tech Hiring by dgb23 on Thursday September 16, 2021 @05:02AM (#28549534)
I agree with your general sentiment and I think algorithmic questions are fine. But it seems to me that the common type of questions are very non-typical for every day problem solving and programming.

For example I as a full stack web dev, never write sorting, very rarely search / string or scheduling and so on. However I happen to like puzzles and coding challenges, so I do them fairly regularly on a Sunday. Do people want to select based on hobbies?

Actually tricky stuff (tricky as in I have to think more deeply and do actual design) I have to do includes for example:

- caching and synchronization

- concurrency/asynchronicity issues

- deep SQL queries

- schema (DB/API/UI) design

- tree/graph traversal

- refactoring and code design

- breaking down (deeply coupled or complex) features into sensible tasks

- (declarative) state machines

- asking the right questions about an unfamiliar domain and deriving the right abstractions and data structures

- error handling, invariants, correctness...

Those apparently rarely come up in the types of questions that for example leetcode et al suggest. It's typically "A&D with a twist".

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Re:What's Wrong with Tech Hiring by marcus_holmes on Thursday September 16, 2021 @10:25AM (#28552226)
I've been working through HackerRank, LeetCode, etc - they have nothing to do with actual software development. And most of them rely on knowing some obscure algorithm or "trick" to solve, which you wouldn't do in real life - you'd Google the problem, possibly add a dependency, and be about your business.

But I've also been in technical interviews where the problem was used as a discussion point, rather than a challenge, and I get that use case - though "let's build a web server" might be a better problem to solve collaboratively.

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Re:What's Wrong with Tech Hiring by VirusNewbie on Thursday September 16, 2021 @04:27PM (#28557091)
Interesting, I'd say 80% of the 'easy' level questions are very relevant to understanding data structures one encounters on a day to day basis (maps, trees, lists, arrays) and basic ability to manipulate those with loops or recursion. I think those are very good interview questions.

I'd also say 90% of medium and hard questions are exactly what you said, relying on a relatively obscure algorithm.

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