Having to hold interviews was the worst part of the job, by far… Brings about a certain kind of guilt, to sit there and try to sell battery acid as ice-cold lemonade.
Yeah I need to find a new job soon, like things are going Bad at the company and it’s not looking good for anyone.
I’ve wanted to find a new job for well over 6 months, but I just don’t have it in me to study after work or on the weekends.
Its like I’ve got burn out handcuffs or something.
I feel that…
Do they ask to implement quick sort to people with job experience? I thought they only did that to juniors.
Im at 3.5YoE, and have gotten LC for all of my interviews
Leetcode is a plague with a sales team
Maybe it’s like teaching kids the quadratic equation; where it’s less about learning the thing and more about understanding how to problem solve and use logic.
In this case maybe the point is to show an understanding of algorithms and that you can explain them out loud.
If it’s about problem solving and using logic, why do we need to memorize quicksort? That’s not an example of using logic or problem solving
it’s actually about testing your ability and willingness to jump through hoops that serve no discernible purpose, one of the most vital skills for working within 99% of human organizations
I meant that as 2 separate thoughts. The quick sort is about understanding algorithms and ability to communicate them.
“how to problem solve” and “use logic” are, I believe, myths. When you teach someone to implement quicksort, all you’ve done is taught them to implement quicksort. Classroom based lectures and rote memorization do not impart any kind of broader “problem-solving” ability. This is an ex post rationalization by the perpetrators of the education system to justify their own existence. I place the value of what they do very low
If it were a question about the tradeoffs of different sort algorithms and how they might apply to a given problem, I would agree. That’s not what these interview questions are about.
Maybe it’s about being able to communicate an algorithm verbally. Unless these are written interviews, then yeah, probably pointless.
Also, I do think being able to understand how an algorithm works is probably important on its own.
Then give them some code and tell them to explain it. Having testees regurgitate algorithm implementations from memory is just testing rote memory.
I thought we had all lived through terrible public schools that just tested memory, and resolved to do better.
Yeah, it’s a solved problem. I’m going to call the library’s default sort and move on. If it somehow is a problem, I’ll revisit later.
Now, optimizing database calls, fixing (and avoiding!) security holes, writing tests that don’t take forever to run, writing functions so they can be easily re-used later, and not duplicating code. Now there are some skills!
“It’s faster if we make a duplicate of this function and change this section, then we can move onto other things”
“No it’s much slower, because your code review just came back telling you to throw that idea in the garbage and do it right”
There’s a lot of ways to test communication skills. This doesn’t seem like a very good one.
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We don’t ask this sort of shit during our interviews.
You ask other, equally inane shit?
Precisely!
Been coding for 10 years. Wouldnt know how without looking up the rules for quicksort. Guess they want programmers fresh out of college or highschool then and I dodged a bullet?
Honestly when I was doing interview I always tried to ask simple questions about data structures or technologies from CV like what’s the difference between array / list and set, or set and map, I got 90% people failing those answers, sometimes it was stress and you could feel it, so I even helped them with answers and always tried to encourage them so they get rid of stress and start thinking. All of people I hired turned out to be good workers and still work in those companies. I think we just slowly forget how to talk with each other. With all the technology around us, we’re losing empathy.
Hell ask me what is the difference between a class and an interface and it would be hard for me to put into theory as well. The only reason I remember the correct answer is because I remember being confused.
If I do strictly my point of view, I am so bad with theory, and I usually don’t think about how to write shit - I just do. I don’t know how the ORM works inside, I just know how to use it, and most caveats are just hard coded in my brain.
So I failed the theoretical interviews in most companies, but those who hired me never kicked me out themselves (as I am a contractor me and rest of the team was part of yearly layoffs, in three companies, but it was purely because money / mergers / conversion to employees).
I don’t think good job interview is about answering right or wrong questions. It’s more about talking with human you could work with and if that human is able to think his way out because it’s engineering job after all.
I am contractor as well I only did job interviews as a side quest and I also frequently fail my job interviews, there is nothing bad there.
Personally I didn’t like 90% of job interviews and there were plenty of them. Most of those people tried to convince me they are smarter and better then me and I am lucky I am speaking with them. But unfortunatelly that’s how it looks like.
Most people that excpect right or wrong answers are just morons in my opinion because programming is about being wrong 90% of the time.
Good Luck
For the most part it’s best to use system provided sorting implementations, but somebody has to write those implementations, so every once in a while somebody needs to do it (in practice by looking up a reference implementation of course).
But also it’s good to understand things like big O scaling and why we use quicksort rather than a naive insertion sort and when to use quick sort vs merge sort or some other form of stable sort.
Glibc’s qsort will default to either insertion sort mergesort or heapsort. Quicksort itself is used when it cannot allocate extra memory for mergesort or heapsort. Insertion sort is still used in the quicksort code, when there is a final 4 items that need to be sorted.
Normally it is simply mergesort or heapsort. Why I know this? Because there was a recent CVE for quicksort and to reproduce the bug I had to force memory to be unable to be allocated with a max size item. It was interesting reading the source code.
That is if you are not on a recent version of qsort which simply removed quicksort altogether for the mergesort + heapsort
Older version still had quicksort and even some had insertion sort. Its interesting to look at all the different versions of qsort.
