I’m divided. I can do what you ask, but not without googling it. I can produce performant and robust code, but not without double checking on google. I’m unable to deliver code that compiles in any language without checking the documentation. Pseudocode, yeah sure.
So, I wouldn’t pass these kind of interviews. In over a decade I’m never being asked these kind of questions though (I have done take home assignments and leetcode, but always with google opened)
An interview question I got (for a security role): "You type www.$company.com into the address bar and press enter. What happens?" After jokingly clarifying they were not interested in the membrane keyboard interactions, they were more than satisfied with an answer explaining recursive DNS resolution, TCP and TLS handshakes, the HTTP request itself, and I think from there we got sidetracked. They also asked about document file upload risks because that was a particular concern in their application. I didn't think of the specific answer they wanted to hear, but after giving me the keyword XXE, I could explain it in detail which was also sufficiently satisfactory so far as I could tell. Fun interview overall.
In interviews I've done, we only looked for culture fit because the technical part was a coding assignment they had already done. Honestly too big an assignment since it's uncompensated (not my decision), but to my surprise nobody turned it down -- and everyone got it wrong. Only n=3 or n=4 iirc but those applying for a coding position could not loop through a JSON-lines file too big to fit in RAM (each line was a ~1kb JSON object, but there's lots of lines) and sum some column from each JSON object into a total value. The solutions all worked to some degree, but they all chopped up the file, loaded the first chunk into RAM, and gave an answer for that partial dataset only.
pphysch|1 year ago
The amount of insane answers I've seen to that one alone...
Then if they pass, I test proficiency by having them loop over the dict and update each value in-place.
siquick|1 year ago
dakiol|1 year ago
So, I wouldn’t pass these kind of interviews. In over a decade I’m never being asked these kind of questions though (I have done take home assignments and leetcode, but always with google opened)
lucb1e|1 year ago
In interviews I've done, we only looked for culture fit because the technical part was a coding assignment they had already done. Honestly too big an assignment since it's uncompensated (not my decision), but to my surprise nobody turned it down -- and everyone got it wrong. Only n=3 or n=4 iirc but those applying for a coding position could not loop through a JSON-lines file too big to fit in RAM (each line was a ~1kb JSON object, but there's lots of lines) and sum some column from each JSON object into a total value. The solutions all worked to some degree, but they all chopped up the file, loaded the first chunk into RAM, and gave an answer for that partial dataset only.
TheHegemon|1 year ago