it doesn’t matter that you can solve them, you need to be able to solve them in under a minute while your interviewer is constantly distracting you. so basically, it has nothing to do with being able to build software.
I have been writing code for more than 25 years now and graduated top of my class in CS. I also have a degree from a US ivy league school on top of my CS degree from europe. I developed and launched 4 succesful products. I won awards for my work and I’m a semi celebrity in my niche.
I recently went through several FAANG loops and did not pass their retarded leetcode questions. each time i had the feeling it had to do with not being FAST enough or not producing the EXACT solution the interviewer wanted.
what is funny is that I got one interview where the guy asks me to solve a problem that gayle mcdowell (cracking the code interview) spent ONE HOUR solving in a video provided as “training material” to candidates, YET they wanted me to do it in a few minutes WHILE EXPLAINING what i was doing.
the above is why I no longer participate in coding interviews.
for all those who think people who pass these interviews are “better” engineers: this particular FAANG has shipped broken SaaS products for years, despite having the “smartest” engineers on the payroll.
it doesn’t matter that you can solve them, you need to be able to solve them in under a minute while your interviewer is constantly distracting you. so basically, it has nothing to do with being able to build software.
I realized that my issue with this style of interview are not the questions, but this exactly. I can solve lots of Leetcode problems, some just take me longer than others.
It’s even worse when the interviewers behave like you described. Most I’ve met, luckily, were cool and just followed what I was doing eventually asking some questions and sometimes giving me pointers; the worse I’ve found would not accept any solution I proposed and would keep asking “how about not using extra space or how about solving in O(1) or how about you solve this in 5 seconds”. So freaking annoying.
exactly, I had one interviewer who wanted me to write a function to divide x by y without using / or %. I proposed the obvious solution with a loop, which he quickly dismissed. I then proposed to try to do something with bit masks and shifts which he dismissed as well: "I don't think we'll be able to do that in the time we have, I never saw someone do that before in the time we have, etc". He then wanted me to guess that I should use a binary search for this. The resulting code was convoluted and hard to understand and made no sense to me. He had to drag me through it. The experience had nothing to do with how I develop software and write code on a day to day basis.
I have been writing code for more than 25 years now and graduated top of my class in CS. I also have a degree from a US ivy league school on top of my CS degree from europe. I developed and launched 4 succesful products. I won awards for my work and I’m a semi celebrity in my niche.
I recently went through several FAANG loops and did not pass their retarded leetcode questions. each time i had the feeling it had to do with not being FAST enough or not producing the EXACT solution the interviewer wanted.
what is funny is that I got one interview where the guy asks me to solve a problem that gayle mcdowell (cracking the code interview) spent ONE HOUR solving in a video provided as “training material” to candidates, YET they wanted me to do it in a few minutes WHILE EXPLAINING what i was doing.
the above is why I no longer participate in coding interviews.
for all those who think people who pass these interviews are “better” engineers: this particular FAANG has shipped broken SaaS products for years, despite having the “smartest” engineers on the payroll.