Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
-
🤦♂️
Sure - You can ask someone that, and it is ok for a junior position.
But for a senior? manager? makes very little sense.
Also - when in the last 5 years have you implemented a novel sorting algorithem? or even wrote code to sort an array? also, which is better, write your own code, or use a well tested, and trusted, library function?
Stop being lazy, and ask your candidates the right questions, not ones that show them you are lazy, and arrogant, and sometimes - really stupid. -
There’s nothing wrong in asking any question but the person asking should know both the reason why is asking and the answer (and the fact that there may be multiple answers). But it is wrong to evaluate an engineer by the fact that he knows a book by heart. An engineer must know what he needs to apply, not necessarily all details about implementation. The fact that there are courses about passing white board interviews is the proof they check skills not related to everyday job.
-
If I'm not going to work with complex projects I don't think that it is a good way to evaluate me, I simply forget almost every "complex' algorithm that I've implemented, but just reading a little I could implement it again.
I did some interviews in the last weeks, one of them, just one, I needed to make a project, the others were just questions about some concepts. One of them I took one hour in the interview, for me was OK, cause it was a PL/Mid position.
In various blogs I've read about publish ours projects on GitHub, why no one ask about the git, why they don't see the code there? Mine projects there are terrible hehe, but if the companies really ask about it I could improve them. -
@magicMirror I wrote an algo to determine the location of an object using radius to determine intersections, determined largest groupings of intersections, filtered intersections out of bounds, used previous value weighting to determine which intersection groupings are more likely to be correct (yes, it can drift). This was to fix an existing tracking system that didn't throw out bad data and couldn't intuit a position fix when less than four sensors were working correctly. In the process of converting the algo to c++ from python.
The only algos I didn't come up with for this was the combinations algo. I am using the python built-in and the c++ built-in functions. -
@Demolishun
nice!
Have you tried reducing the problem? Seems like you are trying to reinvent clustering algorithems....
There's nothing wrong with asking algorithm and data structure questions in an interview if the employer calls for it.
If you're hiring a junior and/or you desperately need workers, then you can lower the bar, but if you want to be picky, then asking them leetcode-tier coding questions is fine.
THERE'S NOTHING WRONG WITH ASKING A SOFTWARE ENGINEER CANDIDATE DATA STRUCTURES AND ALGORITHM QUESTIONS
If they complain that asking ds&a questions is unfair for a position where all they're going to do is shit-tier frontend work, then blacklist them for 10 years.
If people argue that Doctors don't get asked chemistry and biology questions for interviews, tell them it's because medicine is much more regulated than software and that doctors are vetted technically even before they're allowed to go job hunting. Since software doesn't have the same regulations medicine does, employers have to do the technical vetting themselves.
If you think it's unfair to ask software engineering questions to a candidate applying for a software engineering job, then find a different career.
devrant