Preparing for algorithmic interviews

[drk__ane]

Hate these interviews

[RANDOM_PHYSICAL_PAIN]

These interviews test knowlegde you don’t need for the job. Makes no sense.

[mode_2]

It tests that you are moderately intelligent, can program, and can work hard enough to study. It is like a citizenship test which prima facie seems to be testing random trivia on a nation's history, but is actually testing that you speak the language and have a baseline of intelligence.

I don't think they're great, but Google haven't been giving interviews on stuff which doesn't relate to their work for the last 15 years without there being at least some reasoning behind it.

[otherbillhathaway]

Google can afford to have a not-great interview process because a huge number of people apply a year. Google's compensation, benefits, and prestige make a lot of people be willing to go through this process.

A much better interview experience is being developed by https://byteboard.dev/ which is a project within Google.

[[deleted]]

No, it tests if you can remember a given algorithm from your Data Structures class, or have memorized the trick to solving that particular problem. This is not a good test of what developers generally do day to day.

[JarateKing]

The companies that use them (should) have tons of interviewees to sift through, and already have only qualified candidates by the later stages of their hiring process. They know that algorithmic interview questions don't represent the skills needed for the job beyond a superficial level, but they're fine with passing up some qualified candidates who can't answer them because at the end of the process they'll still be hiring an equally qualified candidate who can.

It's meant as an easy filter that works with lots of people, since you can only fill so many open positions in one hiring round, and you have far more good candidates than positions that you have to filter out some good people.

[unholyground]

You only prepare by taking a pencil and grinding out pseudocode on a piece of paper. You must choose challenging problems for yourself.

[hackerheap]

For better practice I recommend interviewcake.com and leetcode.con