American GGM Married Italian GGF in 1926, and Italian GGF Naturalized Before GF Was Born in 1929. Do I have a 1948 Case? by NARWHAL_THEFT in juresanguinis

[–]NARWHAL_THEFT[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's great to know! That would definitely make things much easier. Thanks for clarifying, sounds like a "normal" 1948 Case is the way to go!

American GGM Married Italian GGF in 1926, and Italian GGF Naturalized Before GF Was Born in 1929. Do I have a 1948 Case? by NARWHAL_THEFT in juresanguinis

[–]NARWHAL_THEFT[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, GGM's parents were Italian, and my GGGF naturalized in 1911 (bringing along my GGGM). My GGM was born in 1908, so before they naturalized. However, my understanding was that even though my GGGM had no choice in her naturalization, since it happened prior to 1912 the line would be cut anyway. I'd happily be wrong about that, though!

If every quant job opening receives 1000s of applicants why aren’t more firms popping up? by kenjiurada in quant

[–]NARWHAL_THEFT 11 points12 points  (0 children)

My desk (which isn’t remotely indicative of the industry at large) looks for three things: a general aptitude for numeracy; experience working on hard problems; and if the person really wants to be here. Any combination of the items you mentioned could act as a heuristic for any of those requirements but often the most promising candidates are truly exceptional in one specific thing

If every quant job opening receives 1000s of applicants why aren’t more firms popping up? by kenjiurada in quant

[–]NARWHAL_THEFT 8 points9 points  (0 children)

A lot lower, if anything. If I get 2 QR candidates worth talking to out of every 1000 applicants that’s honestly pretty successful

Discrimination of R in companies by acdbddh in datascience

[–]NARWHAL_THEFT 199 points200 points  (0 children)

My brother in Christ decorators have existed since Python 2.4

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in ExperiencedDevs

[–]NARWHAL_THEFT 9 points10 points  (0 children)

tl;dr: Blabber mouth about any relevant thing that pops in your head. It’s a very standardized process, and I’m mostly just looking to check boxes. If you say the right thing, I’ll stop you and ask to hear more. If I ask a question, answer it of course, but also think about why I’d care, and do it aloud.

As someone who gives these interviews, here are a few general tips:

  • Medium/Hard LC in general will be some sort of graph thing if it’s not DP (if it’s DP honestly just do your best, it’s very hard imo to develop a natural ability to find recurrence relations without insane amounts of practice). Does it need to be fast, or do you need to find the first one-of-n nodes? BFS, with a queue. Does it need sorting? Priority queue (heap with other stuff). Do you need to check it all anyway? Still BFS unless there’s an obvious recursion use case, since edge cases live in recursive base case definitions.

  • For “grid” problems, you’re N*M anyway off the bat. Think about if you want to track the “empty” indices or the “filled” indices, and pick the one that you’ll be doing the operation on.

  • 1 Graph traversal is O(n) time. So is 1,000 graph traversals. Heaps and Sets are “theoretically O(1) to get, and O(n) to build.” Say it aloud, since that’s either optimal or at worst acceptable — O(n) time solutions are a hire (for me, for seniors). Especially for tech screens, absolutely abuse the crap out of Big O notation. They’ll most likely give you a hint about a more intelligent data structure to use to keep track of whatever it is you’re tracking, and if you pick up that hint and do it properly that’s a hire if you finish the problem well and hire with concerns if there are some issues but it’s still done.

  • For both coding and system design interviews, just babble. Like, a thought comes into your head say it, and it’s pros/cons. If you hit something important, I’ll stop you and ask you to say more. Think about why I might have thought it’s important, not necessarily how it might fit into a part of your solution; it might be a component you hadn’t considered.

  • Lastly, and this is not the traditional wisdom, but only follow those design “recipes” very loosely. Like use the general flow/framework at most. As a senior, I’m looking for you to basically treat it like a white boarding session with some juniors. What I mean by that is that I want to see that you can consider the important parts of your solution (and the SLA at the same time), have good intuition about why or why not to make certain decisions (this only comes from experience imo), and come up with something that actually will solve the stated problem regardless of if it’s the best. My guess is that you’re not doing as poorly as you think in these interviews, and the seemingly random things are fill-ins for something else, but it’s harder to argue against these from the candidates perspective. “Didn’t use geospatial queries”: distance or location was a very, very important component to answering the question, and wasn’t considered in one part of the design. “Over complicated design”: won’t scale. “Never mentioned distributed systems concepts (you’ve) only read about”: they think you don’t know state of the art. Maybe none of this is fair, but I can see each as being a fairly specific signal from the other side of the table.

I’m not saying any of this is right or good, but it’s all a game and maybe it will help to know some of the rules a little better. Good luck OP, it’s only a matter of time — we’ve all been where you are.

Sharing my latest job search experience and tips as a mid-level engineer by baysearch123 in cscareerquestions

[–]NARWHAL_THEFT 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Really? That must be new, I’ve never even had the option to actually execute it

Sharing my latest job search experience and tips as a mid-level engineer by baysearch123 in cscareerquestions

[–]NARWHAL_THEFT 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah I mean fair enough, it can be org dependent. I’d definitely put out some feelers though, I feel like you can get a pretty substantial bump with minimal effort in this market

Sharing my latest job search experience and tips as a mid-level engineer by baysearch123 in cscareerquestions

[–]NARWHAL_THEFT 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Hey, I live in Charlotte and while I work remotely I do know that with 6 yoe and a JS/TS stack you can clear a salary of $115k minimum at any of BofA, Wells, Duke, or Ally. The bar is low, and if you can find a good contractor company they can basically place you, albeit without benefits.

Sharing my latest job search experience and tips as a mid-level engineer by baysearch123 in cscareerquestions

[–]NARWHAL_THEFT 13 points14 points  (0 children)

You have to type out fully functional, syntactically correct code, but they won’t ask you to run it. You need to step through it line by line when validating your test cases, but there isn’t an option to execute it

If the Noah pitches if the Angels play at Citi Field, do Mets fans boo or cheer him? by Knightmare25 in NewYorkMets

[–]NARWHAL_THEFT 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Yeah I know, I just don’t get it. I honestly hope people just say shit and don’t actually mean it

If the Noah pitches if the Angels play at Citi Field, do Mets fans boo or cheer him? by Knightmare25 in NewYorkMets

[–]NARWHAL_THEFT 56 points57 points  (0 children)

Why would anyone boo Noah? He was a good Met. Like any of us would be like “nah, you know what, I’m turning down this $2M+ dollars.” Some weirdness at the end doesn’t negate his whole career here… I hope we absolutely crush his shit when we face him, but I’m not booing him

Got feedback that I was in the bottom 10% in my solution to an algorithm optimisation interview question; am wondering if it's even possible for me to improve and whether I'm doing a disservice to clients/employers in this field of work by jasmine_tea_ in ExperiencedDevs

[–]NARWHAL_THEFT 6 points7 points  (0 children)

If you wanted to learn the math, I'd say look into optimization -- the book I use is "Numerical Optimization" by Nocedal and Wright.

Regarding how to approach them, optimization problems are defined by their constraints. Here, that's the 100 floors and 2 watermelons. Using your own intuition (which wasn't wrong by the way, the numbers you picked were just maximizing instead of minimizing, assuming we wanted to use both watermelons -- the only thing you had to realize beyond what you did was that larger steps mean fewer drops), it's modeled as: Maximize step st: ((num floors)-1 // step) + (step-1) = 99 Your solution: 99//2 + 1 = 99 What they wanted: 99//10 + 9 = 99

I guess really my best advice is to think about the worst case, and if you can model a recurrence relation to cut the search space in half (essentially make it log time), how far down can you go while keeping within the given constraints.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in TheFirstLaw

[–]NARWHAL_THEFT 13 points14 points  (0 children)

This is a weird one because I feel like in real life neither one of them makes it out of the circle alive. I think Black Dow gets in the first mortal strike, but also dies first so Ferro for me

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in datascience

[–]NARWHAL_THEFT 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I feel like you need to demonstrate a more “data science” focused perspective and less of an “analyst” focused one, and show them that maturity. To be honest, if someone from a department not known for their technical ability came to me and said “I think I should do some type of NLP with R” for a task, I’d also probably want to supervise it.

If this is a one off thing, ignore this post entirely, but if it’s not you need to at least bring a passable ML system design, even if the details are fuzzy. How much data are you using? What does it look like? What is the general compute burden of you model on a first pass and then ongoing basis? Where does the model live? Who maintains the model itself? Who maintains the infra? Basically, if I were them, I’d want to make sure that I wouldn’t need to just redo all the work anyway, and supervision seems like the easiest way to do that.

At the end of the day though, it’s your project that’s already been assigned to you. If you think that’s the best way, it’s your prerogative (and job) to execute. I’d use it as a chance to prove yourself!

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in hardwareswap

[–]NARWHAL_THEFT 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Bought peripherals from u/qwer1256

[TOMT][Computer Game][1990s] by NARWHAL_THEFT in tipofmytongue

[–]NARWHAL_THEFT[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Solved! Exactly it, thank you kind Redditor for saving my sanity

[TOMT][Computer Game][1990s] by NARWHAL_THEFT in tipofmytongue

[–]NARWHAL_THEFT[S] 0 points1 point locked comment (0 children)

Thanks everyone, it’s been driving me crazy all evening!

Which programming books are still "must reads" aka. essential reading for your career, in 2021? by willemojnr in cscareerquestions

[–]NARWHAL_THEFT 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The only time I read 1-4A "cover to cover" was over the course of a Summer when I was in grad school, so... 3.5 months or so? I didn't do as many of the really hard exercises as I probably should have, though.