Sabo

I suck at DSA, realized its okay.

I could solve general problems from arrays, trees, sorting and all. I would fail miserably when the interview goes in the direction of DP problems. After a point I realised it actually doesn’t matter, you will find enough places where you are valued for your skills.

Been a person who was on the both sides of the table, more on the side taking interviews. I realised one thing how many of us end up writing those fancy TSP code or backtracking etc day in day out. Almost most of the code we write is in some form a version of CRUD and its a reality. Someone getting hired in google is not going to be assigned to improve their search algorithm. I know a lot of ppl who joined and left google because they were not getting to work on meaningful stuff.

I ask real life programming stuff and I try to judge based on that, I want to see given a real scenario how the candidate thinks rather then knowing how good the person is in solving some DP problem.

Some ppl can write real good code without realising that they are actually using the best practices and design patterns and not remembering the patterns name, it sometimes just comes naturally

16mo ago
FunnyBones
FunnyBones
Plivo16mo

Those who grind leetcode alrdy and got job through it, are surely going to continue the trend. Or at least major companies in India will keep that as a filtering tool given the amount of applications. Just sad reality.

Sabo
Sabo
Stealth16mo

But it will not make a difference at least for the team I am responsible for hiring, they would think what a waste solving so many DSA stuff 😂 when at the end its going to be writing sometimes basic code and few scenarios based problems

FunnyBones
FunnyBones
Plivo16mo

Ya man, hope there’s more like you… at least such interviews let me walk away with good points to increase my knowledge over which can actually help me in job. While other feels like just a belittling/memory contest

AITookMyJob
AITookMyJob
Startup16mo

My company has seriously reduced focus on DSA a lot. At best 1 coding question in entire process. The rest of the process focusses on core software engineering concepts, LLD and HLD or architecture questions.

For that 1 coding question too, we try to keep it application oriented and not a generic coding puzzle to solve. For instance, we can ask them to write a piece of code that can calculate overlapping times between given meetings. This requires a clever algorithm if we want the most optimal approach. But the candidate can also get through by writing a naive algorithm with neat, maintainable and extensible code and then brainstorming on possible approaches to optimise it (like using hashing?).

This has worked well for us and we have hired a team of actually good engineers that can solve our scaling problems.

Sabo
Sabo
Stealth16mo

I think grapevine should have feature to let ppl have chat conversation maintaining anonymity but again, its a solved problem but costly thing to implement and giving it for free when we are the product and the company doesn’t have clear cut road map to making revenues too much to ask.

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