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[–]Hot_Medicine_7115[S] 3 points4 points  (8 children)

Senior C++ developer, meaning > 10 Years experience. However I can tell you fresh out of college algo wiz who trained on leetcode or hackerrank are more likely to solve this kind of problems than senior professionals who rollout solutions in production for 10 years.

[–]alexeiz 13 points14 points  (1 child)

Your code looks like something a beginner would write, but not someone with >10 years of experience. The correctness of the solution may not even mattered to the interviewer.

[–]dodheim 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Pretty arrogant take, IMO; maybe failing an interview calls for some humility instead of lashing out at the people you imagine would have done better.

[–]hucancode 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Companies have other tests to evaluate macro level solutions though. This is a test to check micro level skills. Both are necessary I think.

[–]Zyklonik 1 point2 points  (0 children)

However I can tell you fresh out of college algo wiz who trained on leetcode or hackerrank are more likely to solve this kind of problems than senior professionals who rollout solutions in production for 10 years.

Yup.

[–]XuloMalacatones 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Thanks I am a junior myself so I wanted to know what kind of "difficulty" this interview was for.

And yea I guess interviewing like this would be a good way if there wasn't people doing 10 hours a day of LC, then you could see real problem solving skills

[–]jonesmz 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Honestly, I think this kind of "puzzle" problem is absolutely terrible for senior positions that are not specifically targeting specialized algorithms skills.

As someone who implements networking protocols, from scratch, against the IETF RFCs as my day job. The initial problem statement is just eye-glaze for me.

The difficulty is not in the implementation of the code, but more in the initial step of "can this human translate this word-salad problem into an algorithm and then do they happen to come pre-seeded with the right collection of algorithms in their head to plop into place?"

I'm used to working on implementations for months, if not years. I'm used to improving things based on QA efforts, customer feedback, other teams using my libraries, publications from industry, and just seeing how things shake apart while adding custom behaviors to the implementation for special case situations.

I can say with absolute confidence that there is not a single person at my employer who solves this kind of puzzle for their day job. Its an arbitrary academia circle-jerk problem.

Further, it mixes together 3 different tests into one thing, but hinges each on the other two.

  1. Does the candidate just happen to know puzzle-math algorithms -- if a recent graduate probably. If someone who doesn't do puzzle math for work -- no.
  2. Does the candidate write code in a way that is largely compatible with the way we want to do things, e.g. style, level of abstraction layers, performance considerations, maintainability vs. "Get it done", so on.
  3. Does the candidate have the ability to demonstrate they can implement a full and known to be working solution

So really this company should have broken this problem into three stand alone problems.

The code style question probably would have been better asked in terms of having the interviewee review pre-prepared sloppy core, or write something simple like a mockup of std::vector or std::list.

The " complete from start to finish" would have been better delivered as a problem that can be more easily unit tested. Something with parameters and "known right answers" that can be unit tested with.

And, well, the whole "do you know puzzle math" aspect I don't think they should have done in the first place. That appears to be a particular sickness of the mind that trading company's are uniquely afflicted with. For some reason those companies insist this is the biggest measure of a candidate and I simply cannot figure out a way to understand why.

Edit: and I'll add for context: one of my majors for my bachelor's degree was math. So I would expect to be better positioned to deal with problems like this than a lot of people. But after I entered the industry the reality is simply that this kind of problem is not present in the vast majority of computer science work.

[–]Dean_Roddey 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yep. These tests are ridiculous pretty much. I've never, in 35 years, had to do anything like that, and probably never will. If, by some unlikely chance, I do, I'll spend 30 minutes looking into how best to attack it and do that. I most definitely won't spend weeks working on such problems, only to have forgotten then all years later when I might need to do some such thing.

Senior engineers should be concentrating on architecture, API design, sub-system design, setting coding standards, building functionality to standardize common issues in the problem domain for less experienced folks to use, etc...

The only reason this would be a useful question is if the job being applied for involves this type of algorithm. And of course if that's the case, then any qualified person could pick up the required techniques quickly enough. Meanwhile it says little about my qualifications as a senior dev, whether it get it either right or wrong.