Re:On Secretly Terrible Engineers
by x0x0 on Monday March 09, 2015 @05:09PM
(#9174082)
Come on -- you're on of the commenters I make a point to read on HN. You can't possibly have missed that a huge chunk of valley interviews are, exactly, a fucking smart person pissing contest.
A previous employer loved them some graph problems for interviews. I got in an argument with one of the senior engineers, and demanded I be shown where in our codebase we used graph algorithms. The answer: nowhere. But you had to know your way around them to get hired there.
Now when I interview, I refuse to study them. I think this serves me well in helping me avoid jobs I wouldn't enjoy anyway.
An interviewer once essentially demanded I invent morris traversal on the whiteboard in front of him. I'm not sure how that related to my ability to be an ml engineer.
Re:On Secretly Terrible Engineers
by wpietri on Tuesday March 10, 2015 @02:29PM
(#9179613)
Heh. Thanks for the compliment. I have actually never sat for a valley interview, so I didn't want to judge based on second-hand data. But I'd believe it entirely.
A previous employer loved them some graph problems for interviews. I got in an argument with one of the senior engineers, and demanded I be shown where in our codebase we used graph algorithms. The answer: nowhere. But you had to know your way around them to get hired there.
Now when I interview, I refuse to study them. I think this serves me well in helping me avoid jobs I wouldn't enjoy anyway.
An interviewer once essentially demanded I invent morris traversal on the whiteboard in front of him. I'm not sure how that related to my ability to be an ml engineer.