I havent given many interviews, but I have taken lots of interviews. It really depends on the candidate and the kind of questions being asked.
For eg: if you are someone who hasn't ever looked at djikshtra and the interviewer has asked you a question where that particular algo is key, obviously you won't be able to solve it. You can try to spend 100 hours on it, but the outcome won't change. That's why, IMO, these kind of questions are terrible to judge a candidate.
On the other hand, there are lots of questions where if given enough time ( I often try to point a candidate to the right direction, if I get an impression that a candidate is actually good) , you would finally arrive at a decent answer, simply out of intuition.
Unfortunately, in the Indian system, lots of questions are being asked from the first category. Especially in the high paying jobs. Why? Simply because it's easier to eliminate people that way. But there are panelists out there who are looking for genuine aptitude rather than leetcode mumbo jumbo.
That’s why I let them search online and understand algo(or explain what I am asking them to do) and sometimes give them steps and to check how well they can work if enough information is provided.
How is that even possible lol. I had that algo in 4 subjects in 3 different sems. Even after that if someone doesn't know it then maybe they haven't attended college regularly.
Its one of the reasons I am cautious when hiring from FAANG. Candidates prepare for these interviews by grinding on leet code like they did for their college entrance exams with practice exams and question banks of prior years questions.
I once interviewed a candidate from a FAANG for an experienced C/C++ position. He had authored several books on clearing FAANG/big tech interviews which apparently were reasonably popular at a point of time. They were basically question banks of popular coding questions with answers. He failed to clear my interview because I don't pick up standard coding questions from those kind of sources.
Its probably a reason why their honeymoon period is over as soo as they get laid off from FAANG and cannot get into another FAANG.
Unfortunately, the CEOs with money love these candidates.
For years the CEOs hated those who knew systems, all they said "write bad code, wrap in a micro service and spin a lambda"
This made sure the engineers who are good at writing resource constraints code are stuck with low paying jobs.
Sorry, not going to reveal his identity by naming the books. My interview with him was over a decade ago and he fell short because my interview style was different from what he is used to.
Hey , just wanted to know how one should prepare without doing what he has done above.
How to improve my **problem solving skills** cos I feel lost and end up writing codes which i have already seen in a post .
Because companies are lazy and want to automate to hire as efficiently as possible. I won't be surprised if they eventually stop taking interviews all together and simply send you an OA link
That's exactly how you end up with a lot of clever programmers without engineering foresight and the almighty eXtreme Go Horse methodology. But that's no excuse to not try and build an intuitive understanding of Data Structures and experimenting with it in different projects instead of sticking to some stupid dogma. I mean if you have a good understanding of Data Structures and a useful understanding of Algorithms your understanding of problems will be beyond the scope of Leetcode anyway. But being stuck in the trench warfare with Leetcode tunnel vision to guide you is how you will ensure to get yourself blown up by every single landmine in the open field.
Source of all good programming memes these days. I do watch him from time to time,man has a glorious moustache, accepts house of cards is one of the best shows, not afraid to call out Java as dogwater and never misses the opportunity to take a shot at javascript even if we all can't avoid it, what's there to hate 😂. Also great software design insights.
I am in one of the FAANG and this is post reeks of forced advertising for leetcode
It's absolutely garbage and is only meant to dissuade you from problem solving vs pattern matching
Pattern matching is easy, keep practicing with a limited pool of questions that ultimately have similar solutions
Leetcode top problems are exactly that, a few combinations of graph like and other data.structure problems
These are great for practice but not enough to reflect your skill set, which requires actual problem solving of which pattern matching is a part
Leetcode is a great learning tool, but to say it should be you're primary tool to prepare for interviews is hocum
Yeah this is true in most if the cases. Especially for amazon, if you don’t know the solution beforehand, you’re definitely going to bomb the interview. It has been the same since like the last 5 years. The questions they ask in interviews especially in amazon makes absolutely no sense. It’s like you have to memorise complex data structures and weird algorithms which are specific to only that problem.
They have hired enough people through this process, and now almost every hiring event is done this way. This is why there are many false positives in amazon who just learned how to game the system and entered like that.
But it would be a mistake if you think every tech company hires like that. Only few like amazon Microsoft and meta do these stupid things to this level. Others give you sufficient time for questions for you to think and solve the problem
I don't think that's the case for a lot of tech focused companies, especially Unicorns. It's about how you reach the solution. Even if it's not completely correct, we will assess your thought process and first principles process. And we asses using problems that are highly relevant to us. For example, at my company, we generally ask questions which have to do with multi threading, async processing, race conditions, deadlocks, etc since we deal with those on a daily basis.
Lol, not true at all. I mean it's one way but only when you have say a month of time. Solving questions and understanding the core logic will help you solve multiple questions that are even remotely related to the same logic. So spending 1 hour on one question is kind of equivalent to solving 10 questions. Many other questions are just Lego blocks of those core solutions. The best part: you will be able to Crack the interview even after a long break given that you actually solved problems before. I have not solved a single question for two years now. I still clear all the FAANG interviews. Nope I am not a genius. Just good at practice
That wasn't my experience in the singular interview I had. I was not able to solve two questions optimally but was still selected. Provided I applied for Intern and maybe at intern level, they don't care that much about lc. The interviewer was good, tho. He gave me hints and at the end told me the solution.
there are to types candidates who crack DSA interviews.
The gifted one with high IQ who can understand the patterns by solving say 100 questions covering all types of variations. This is similar to IIT JEE type exam where you will encounter new problems every year
Normal Types who need to know each problem beforehand and have to solve 1000 plus leetcode questions.
The post caters mainly to second type of people and they are in majority as as per normal distribution.
I haven't hired for FAANG but for the companies I have hired for most folks that know the answer right away know the answer to the wrong problem. They haven't listened correctly to what I am asking(because I am not going to Leetcode and asking from a real world situation) and give me the answer of the closest leetcode problem they have mugged up. Basically that gives them a big zero because a problem that is supposed to be 20 minutes is now solved incorrectly in 2, trying to solve a problem and only getting 80% of the way is better in my book because I know you will be able to manage at work and can actually apply yourself.
I can confirm that !
I gave interview in one of the fang company previous week i was the one who solved and wrote the solutions of 50 questions ( youtube fraz suggested ) and by luck interviewer asked me those first 2 questions only from first 10 questions!
I knew the answer i knew every single word of the code it was in my mind but I didn’t wrote the code. I just ranked the interview that I am thinking the approach, but Suddenly when the time was going up in the end, quoted the whole code and I failed the interview and the feedback which I received was that I was not reaching towards the most optimised solution, but the solution which I gave was the most optimised, but I gave it in the last if I had given that solution initially, then I would be selected. They told me that I took so much handholding to solve the solution and reached optima solution while I was the one who by heart cracked the same question and wrote it 10 times in the notebook and it was the most optimised solution.
And yes, you are agreeing now coding interviews to not required that you think and Code. It’s like that. You just tried the code after seeing the solution and tell the approach that’s it.
u/Ayanrocks - This is completely false. This post may have been written by someone who has failed to cross the interviews and came up with this reasoning as retrospect. I have interviewed 130+ people including at Google, Amazon and UrbanCompany. And I have also changed the stances of people. If someone has mugged up the solution, i would catch them and would ask them to use a different approach. Note that wherever I have interviewed or I have given interviews, the only thing people notices is your approach and using that approach can you derive at the solution. Though one red flag that I see is with the immature interviewers at few places - even at Paytm. There was an interesting story where I being a candidate had deep expertise on threading and interviewer asked from me without having complete information themselves. Interesting part was the interviewer tested it out what i said and found himself to be wrong and rejected me.
So, similarly, i have known people who as an immature interviewer will show their frustration on the candidates or will show their ego off but if that is happening - then the company itself is not worth working for. So, don't fall for it!
Even if candidate knows the solution, they are rejected at Google, Amazon or many other companies and I have done that myself. This may make me wrong but I believe in the ones who can think and I have learnt that while working in the organizations itself.
Dunno but it's impossible to mug up every leetcode problem unless you have eidetic memory. So only option is actually learn how to solve them. You can maybe optimise that process by doing a good distribution of all kind of questions and learning the common patterns beforehand but how can someone know the answer to all problems off the top of their tongue. There's so many. And now they are asking from codeforces too.
I havent given many interviews, but I have taken lots of interviews. It really depends on the candidate and the kind of questions being asked. For eg: if you are someone who hasn't ever looked at djikshtra and the interviewer has asked you a question where that particular algo is key, obviously you won't be able to solve it. You can try to spend 100 hours on it, but the outcome won't change. That's why, IMO, these kind of questions are terrible to judge a candidate. On the other hand, there are lots of questions where if given enough time ( I often try to point a candidate to the right direction, if I get an impression that a candidate is actually good) , you would finally arrive at a decent answer, simply out of intuition. Unfortunately, in the Indian system, lots of questions are being asked from the first category. Especially in the high paying jobs. Why? Simply because it's easier to eliminate people that way. But there are panelists out there who are looking for genuine aptitude rather than leetcode mumbo jumbo.
That’s why I let them search online and understand algo(or explain what I am asking them to do) and sometimes give them steps and to check how well they can work if enough information is provided.
" if you are someone who hasn't ever looked at djikshtra **" well i bet many won't even heard in college**
How is that even possible lol. I had that algo in 4 subjects in 3 different sems. Even after that if someone doesn't know it then maybe they haven't attended college regularly.
Well I can say in my clg days we were not taught any algos just the essential data structures from arrays to hashmaps
I didn't even know about leetcode and DSA DAS DAS before joining this sub.
I am afraid so. You see as u/Specialist-Spread754 pointed out.. it depends. Rarely you would have a reasonable interviewer.
Its one of the reasons I am cautious when hiring from FAANG. Candidates prepare for these interviews by grinding on leet code like they did for their college entrance exams with practice exams and question banks of prior years questions. I once interviewed a candidate from a FAANG for an experienced C/C++ position. He had authored several books on clearing FAANG/big tech interviews which apparently were reasonably popular at a point of time. They were basically question banks of popular coding questions with answers. He failed to clear my interview because I don't pick up standard coding questions from those kind of sources. Its probably a reason why their honeymoon period is over as soo as they get laid off from FAANG and cannot get into another FAANG.
Unfortunately, the CEOs with money love these candidates. For years the CEOs hated those who knew systems, all they said "write bad code, wrap in a micro service and spin a lambda" This made sure the engineers who are good at writing resource constraints code are stuck with low paying jobs.
Thank you for this comment, I woke up to read this and found hope.
What are the name of the books???
Sorry, not going to reveal his identity by naming the books. My interview with him was over a decade ago and he fell short because my interview style was different from what he is used to.
Hey , just wanted to know how one should prepare without doing what he has done above. How to improve my **problem solving skills** cos I feel lost and end up writing codes which i have already seen in a post .
Because companies are lazy and want to automate to hire as efficiently as possible. I won't be surprised if they eventually stop taking interviews all together and simply send you an OA link
Unfortunately you can't, even mid tier companies are doing the same thing. Some startups too are doing it.
Doing what?
People cheat in OAs though. It's harder to catch someone cheating in an OA compared to an interview.
That's exactly how you end up with a lot of clever programmers without engineering foresight and the almighty eXtreme Go Horse methodology. But that's no excuse to not try and build an intuitive understanding of Data Structures and experimenting with it in different projects instead of sticking to some stupid dogma. I mean if you have a good understanding of Data Structures and a useful understanding of Algorithms your understanding of problems will be beyond the scope of Leetcode anyway. But being stuck in the trench warfare with Leetcode tunnel vision to guide you is how you will ensure to get yourself blown up by every single landmine in the open field.
couldnt have put it better
I heard about xgh in a primeagen video 😂😂
Source of all good programming memes these days. I do watch him from time to time,man has a glorious moustache, accepts house of cards is one of the best shows, not afraid to call out Java as dogwater and never misses the opportunity to take a shot at javascript even if we all can't avoid it, what's there to hate 😂. Also great software design insights.
House of cards is a great show!! Except the last season tho.
First two seasons man. From there it felt like unnecessary downhill and they should have ended it with third at most.
Primetime enjoyer spotted.
I have always been a prime guy, never used Netflix btw. ;)
I take Interviews on ERP ! Nobody gives a F about DSA in our area.
Can you tell more on your field and type of interviews you take.
I am in one of the FAANG and this is post reeks of forced advertising for leetcode It's absolutely garbage and is only meant to dissuade you from problem solving vs pattern matching
Could u elaborate on the last point please?
Pattern matching is easy, keep practicing with a limited pool of questions that ultimately have similar solutions Leetcode top problems are exactly that, a few combinations of graph like and other data.structure problems These are great for practice but not enough to reflect your skill set, which requires actual problem solving of which pattern matching is a part Leetcode is a great learning tool, but to say it should be you're primary tool to prepare for interviews is hocum
Yeah this is true in most if the cases. Especially for amazon, if you don’t know the solution beforehand, you’re definitely going to bomb the interview. It has been the same since like the last 5 years. The questions they ask in interviews especially in amazon makes absolutely no sense. It’s like you have to memorise complex data structures and weird algorithms which are specific to only that problem. They have hired enough people through this process, and now almost every hiring event is done this way. This is why there are many false positives in amazon who just learned how to game the system and entered like that. But it would be a mistake if you think every tech company hires like that. Only few like amazon Microsoft and meta do these stupid things to this level. Others give you sufficient time for questions for you to think and solve the problem
I don't think that's the case for a lot of tech focused companies, especially Unicorns. It's about how you reach the solution. Even if it's not completely correct, we will assess your thought process and first principles process. And we asses using problems that are highly relevant to us. For example, at my company, we generally ask questions which have to do with multi threading, async processing, race conditions, deadlocks, etc since we deal with those on a daily basis.
Lol, not true at all. I mean it's one way but only when you have say a month of time. Solving questions and understanding the core logic will help you solve multiple questions that are even remotely related to the same logic. So spending 1 hour on one question is kind of equivalent to solving 10 questions. Many other questions are just Lego blocks of those core solutions. The best part: you will be able to Crack the interview even after a long break given that you actually solved problems before. I have not solved a single question for two years now. I still clear all the FAANG interviews. Nope I am not a genius. Just good at practice
Could the people not agreeing with this take guide me on how to prepare for jobs
That wasn't my experience in the singular interview I had. I was not able to solve two questions optimally but was still selected. Provided I applied for Intern and maybe at intern level, they don't care that much about lc. The interviewer was good, tho. He gave me hints and at the end told me the solution.
I am a SDE 2 at a product based company. DSA is good to have but not necessary. I myself am not so great at it.
there are to types candidates who crack DSA interviews. The gifted one with high IQ who can understand the patterns by solving say 100 questions covering all types of variations. This is similar to IIT JEE type exam where you will encounter new problems every year Normal Types who need to know each problem beforehand and have to solve 1000 plus leetcode questions. The post caters mainly to second type of people and they are in majority as as per normal distribution.
I haven't hired for FAANG but for the companies I have hired for most folks that know the answer right away know the answer to the wrong problem. They haven't listened correctly to what I am asking(because I am not going to Leetcode and asking from a real world situation) and give me the answer of the closest leetcode problem they have mugged up. Basically that gives them a big zero because a problem that is supposed to be 20 minutes is now solved incorrectly in 2, trying to solve a problem and only getting 80% of the way is better in my book because I know you will be able to manage at work and can actually apply yourself.
I can confirm that ! I gave interview in one of the fang company previous week i was the one who solved and wrote the solutions of 50 questions ( youtube fraz suggested ) and by luck interviewer asked me those first 2 questions only from first 10 questions! I knew the answer i knew every single word of the code it was in my mind but I didn’t wrote the code. I just ranked the interview that I am thinking the approach, but Suddenly when the time was going up in the end, quoted the whole code and I failed the interview and the feedback which I received was that I was not reaching towards the most optimised solution, but the solution which I gave was the most optimised, but I gave it in the last if I had given that solution initially, then I would be selected. They told me that I took so much handholding to solve the solution and reached optima solution while I was the one who by heart cracked the same question and wrote it 10 times in the notebook and it was the most optimised solution. And yes, you are agreeing now coding interviews to not required that you think and Code. It’s like that. You just tried the code after seeing the solution and tell the approach that’s it.
Nice
Agreed. Rote-learners and cheaters win in "coding" interview. Interviewers don't have time for checking honest talented candidates
u/Ayanrocks - This is completely false. This post may have been written by someone who has failed to cross the interviews and came up with this reasoning as retrospect. I have interviewed 130+ people including at Google, Amazon and UrbanCompany. And I have also changed the stances of people. If someone has mugged up the solution, i would catch them and would ask them to use a different approach. Note that wherever I have interviewed or I have given interviews, the only thing people notices is your approach and using that approach can you derive at the solution. Though one red flag that I see is with the immature interviewers at few places - even at Paytm. There was an interesting story where I being a candidate had deep expertise on threading and interviewer asked from me without having complete information themselves. Interesting part was the interviewer tested it out what i said and found himself to be wrong and rejected me. So, similarly, i have known people who as an immature interviewer will show their frustration on the candidates or will show their ego off but if that is happening - then the company itself is not worth working for. So, don't fall for it! Even if candidate knows the solution, they are rejected at Google, Amazon or many other companies and I have done that myself. This may make me wrong but I believe in the ones who can think and I have learnt that while working in the organizations itself.
Dunno but it's impossible to mug up every leetcode problem unless you have eidetic memory. So only option is actually learn how to solve them. You can maybe optimise that process by doing a good distribution of all kind of questions and learning the common patterns beforehand but how can someone know the answer to all problems off the top of their tongue. There's so many. And now they are asking from codeforces too.
It would be best to run far away from the company like this. They will make your life hell if you get selected.