<story><title>How to pass a programming interview (2016)</title><url>https://triplebyte.com/blog/how-to-pass-a-programming-interview</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>elteto</author><text>Funny, I just went through a pre-screen assessment for one of the big ones and it was not one but _two_ DP problems. I could have probably come up with a slow solution using recursion and a bit more of time, but was given only 90 minutes. And I thought to myself, what exactly did they learn about _me_ after this exercise? Absolutely nothing, except that I can&amp;#x27;t solve DP problems on the spot. What a waste of time.&lt;p&gt;And the funny thing is, I work as an embedded developer and actually have to look up a topic or two from CLR at least once a year for work stuff (which is not very common). But DP? I&amp;#x27;ve never needed it or used it. Why the emphasis in it then?&lt;p&gt;It feels a lot like software interviewing is just a bunch of rain dances and cargo culting and those that know the dance get through the hoop. I guess I&amp;#x27;ll have to order Elements of Rain Dancing from Amazon and get to practicing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>donw</author><text>I have yet to find an interview process that works better than RPI (Rob&amp;#x27;s Pairing Interview)[1] plus a day-in-the-life[2].&lt;p&gt;It gives both the employer and the candidate a chance to evaluate each other in context.&lt;p&gt;As an employer, you get to see how the candidate performs on two different real-world tasks, as well as how they interact with existing employees.&lt;p&gt;As an employee, you get to see what the company is &lt;i&gt;really&lt;/i&gt; like to work with. No amount of whiteboarding can deliver that.&lt;p&gt;And at the end of the day, if that relationship feels good, both parties can choose to continue onwards towards full employment.&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, computer science trivia, by which I mean &amp;quot;implement Dijkstra or quicksort on a whiteboard&amp;quot;, is a very poor means indeed by which to test for the ability to do real-world work in a real-world context.&lt;p&gt;Sure, it&amp;#x27;s valuable to have a broad understanding of algorithms and data structures. But whiteboard interviews on those types of problems only tests how well you would do competing in an ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) challenge, not how well you can deal with &amp;quot;here is a totally new-to-you problem that lacks a precise solution, now work productively with a team to solve it under the constraints of an operating business&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;builttoadapt.io&amp;#x2F;the-developer-hiring-process-is-broken-672bf273c183&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;builttoadapt.io&amp;#x2F;the-developer-hiring-process-is-brok...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.jonrshar.pe&amp;#x2F;2016&amp;#x2F;Dec&amp;#x2F;05&amp;#x2F;pivotal-interviews.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.jonrshar.pe&amp;#x2F;2016&amp;#x2F;Dec&amp;#x2F;05&amp;#x2F;pivotal-interviews.html&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>How to pass a programming interview (2016)</title><url>https://triplebyte.com/blog/how-to-pass-a-programming-interview</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>elteto</author><text>Funny, I just went through a pre-screen assessment for one of the big ones and it was not one but _two_ DP problems. I could have probably come up with a slow solution using recursion and a bit more of time, but was given only 90 minutes. And I thought to myself, what exactly did they learn about _me_ after this exercise? Absolutely nothing, except that I can&amp;#x27;t solve DP problems on the spot. What a waste of time.&lt;p&gt;And the funny thing is, I work as an embedded developer and actually have to look up a topic or two from CLR at least once a year for work stuff (which is not very common). But DP? I&amp;#x27;ve never needed it or used it. Why the emphasis in it then?&lt;p&gt;It feels a lot like software interviewing is just a bunch of rain dances and cargo culting and those that know the dance get through the hoop. I guess I&amp;#x27;ll have to order Elements of Rain Dancing from Amazon and get to practicing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>glangdale</author><text>I feel your pain. I did exactly one dynamic programming algorithm (in the string matcher for Hyperscan) and was pretty inordinately pleased with myself for doing it, but we built dozens of algorithms in that project and that was the only case of DP that I recall.&lt;p&gt;But I expect to go into interviews and have people demand a &lt;i&gt;different&lt;/i&gt; rain dance, now that everyone is talking about DP. They like mugging people with &amp;#x27;so big it has to be out of core&amp;#x27; stuff, which is a good way of finding out who went to the right grad school algorithms course. :-)</text></comment>