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twodot posted:I've never heard of inverting a binary tree. If they mean "put all the nodes on the left on the right, and the nodes on the right on the left" that's a weird exercise, but you really should be able to do that. A tree like this guy? Turn it upside down? Or invert it left to right? 1 / \ 2 3 / \ /\ 4 5 6 7
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Sep 21, 2016 23:02
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twodot posted:That's plausible, I would call attempting to implement heapify from scratch on a whiteboard unreasonable. (edit: And possibly the interviewers are aware it's unreasonable, and are trying to see how they react to an unreasonable situation? This isn't a defense of the question, I'm seeking answers why someone would ask that) Without violating an NDA - if you think "make heap" is unreasonable then lol don't try and get a job at google.
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Sep 21, 2016 23:04
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blah_blah posted:I mean, there's also lots of software engineers that do their jobs at a living and are bad at them as well. Nothing you've written here gives me any confidence that you aren't the analogous thing in your field. Have you also considered disrupting the educational system? Think of all those 3 hour, end-of-semester exams that could easily be replaced with an affidavit that the student indeed read their textbook or attended all of their classes. You're a loving moron. Everything you've said for the past few pages has been rooted in you getting so defensive that your worldview was being criticized that your whole body locked up and you can't even process what I and others are saying. This is not the behavior of someone who's as smart as you obviously desperately need to think you are. You're trying to pretend I've been arguing something about the time it takes to convey information, when I've very clearly, with specific examples, been talking about how corporate recruiting has broken priorities that are geared towards making recruiting easier or bolstering the company's self-image, rather than identifying good hires. But you're the kind of fatuous rear end in a top hat whose mind fills up with screaming whenever you feel a slimy tickle in the back of your brain suggesting you might be wrong about something, so it's safer to just sneer and scare-quote and if that fails, just make up entirely fictional arguments to declare yourself the winner of. Anything to keep from learning anything new, right Smart Guy?
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Sep 21, 2016 23:06
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peter banana posted:In the last software company I worked for the CEO insisted on meeting every person who'd gotten through the first three interviews and aptitude test to "give his personal approval."
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Sep 21, 2016 23:10
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Also lol forever that Mr. King Genius Recruiter couldn't possibly look at a person's actual work product, their portfolio, and asses their work quality from that. Too Smart to Learn Things: The Tragic Tale of blah_blah
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Sep 21, 2016 23:12
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:Re-reading this made me finally realize what the fantasy is and why it's so compelling that nerds keep building it into their company frameworks to their detriment. It's the fantasy of the middle-out sequence in Silicon Valley - that being nerdy and riff-y with your friends means you're secretly a genius and inspiration is destined to strike. There's also the dangerous idea that intelligence is a very general thing which predicts your performance on a wide range of tasks, rather than a more specialized thing often born of many, many hours of study and practice. It leads companies to think that their job is to recruit the smartest person in some abstract sense, rather than the person who's shown the most aptitude for whatever it is they're hiring for.
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Sep 21, 2016 23:12
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:You're a loving moron. Everything you've said for the past few pages has been rooted in you getting so defensive that your worldview was being criticized that your whole body locked up and you can't even process what I and others are saying. This is not the behavior of someone who's as smart as you obviously desperately need to think you are. You're trying to pretend I've been arguing something about the time it takes to convey information, when I've very clearly, with specific examples, been talking about how corporate recruiting has broken priorities that are geared towards making recruiting easier or bolstering the company's self-image, rather than identifying good hires. from my anecdotal experience in software recruiting i can confirm that blah_blah is spot on and i dont know why you think this post would convince anyone that your argument is correct
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Sep 21, 2016 23:12
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Baby Babbeh posted:There's also the dangerous idea that intelligence is a very general thing which predicts your performance on a wide range of tasks, rather than a more specialized thing often born of many, many hours of study and practice. It leads companies to think that their job is to recruit the smartest person in some abstract sense, rather than the person who's shown the most aptitude for whatever it is they're hiring for. Yes, that is absolutely toxic, and it's ingrained so deep in our culture. It's why doctors make such great targets for pyramid schemes.
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Sep 21, 2016 23:13
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:Also lol forever that Mr. King Genius Recruiter couldn't possibly look at a person's actual work product, their portfolio, and asses their work quality from that. Too Smart to Learn Things: The Tragic Tale of blah_blah The contracts for most developers actually precludes them from having a meaningful portfolio.
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Sep 21, 2016 23:13
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hobbesmaster posted:The contracts for most developers actually precludes them from having a meaningful portfolio.
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Sep 21, 2016 23:14
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That would be the property of the company they currently work for and a violation of their terms of employment to share that with another company.
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Sep 21, 2016 23:16
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hobbesmaster posted:That would be the property of the company they currently work for and a violation of their terms of employment to share that with another company.
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Sep 21, 2016 23:18
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:Also lol forever that Mr. King Genius Recruiter couldn't possibly look at a person's actual work product, their portfolio, and asses their work quality from that. Too Smart to Learn Things: The Tragic Tale of blah_blah As you may be aware, most people are unable to share the work they do for their previous employers in any significant way. Even if they were able to, it's very difficult to tell how much of the work is theirs, given collaboration and all that. For example, with Kaggle competitions, top competitors share enough of their basic work on each problem that you can probably get to top 25% or maybe even top 10% on the leaderboard just by copying that basic work and submitting it as your own. So it's meaningless as a quality metric. In rare cases candidates have very high quality public facing work (on their blog or GitHub or elsewhere). If I was interviewing the guy who wrote this I'd hire him on the spot, but alas this is not the norm (nor do I want it to become the norm that everyone has to produce unpaid analytical work on their own time on public datasets to get data science jobs in the future).
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Sep 21, 2016 23:19
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hobbesmaster posted:That would be the property of the company they currently work for and a violation of their terms of employment to share that with another company.
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Sep 21, 2016 23:19
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One of the problems with tech interviews is that sometimes the time frame you're expected to do things in is bug gently caress insane. One interview set from a company I was trying to get a job at threw me some pretty nasty things and expected me to write them in a language I just plain didn't know. It wasn't on my resume. I forget all the details but it was "process this stuff, find these things, order it this way. You have 20 minutes." Some of the questions you get asked are more stupid programmer trivia than anything; the algorithm might not come to you within an hour but if your professor went over it in that one class and you remember it then you can solve it in five minutes. It's also probably something you will never, ever actually use in real life. The requirements on even entry-level people are just absolutely onerous sometimes. Some of the interviews I had felt like they wanted somebody they could just slot into the team on day 1 and not even have to show them around the code base. It's like hey guys, I just graduated college and I am not an expert with deep knowledge of dozens of technologies. My fundamentals are strong but I'm going to ask stupid beginner questions because I'm a beginner.
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Sep 21, 2016 23:19
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Nessus posted:I mean in their free time. Or do most of these companies say that even your "side hustle" (gag, choke) belongs to them? My employment agreement has this in it at least.
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Sep 21, 2016 23:20
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ToxicSlurpee posted:The requirements on even entry-level people are just absolutely onerous sometimes. Some of the interviews I had felt like they wanted somebody they could just slot into the team on day 1 and not even have to show them around the code base. It's like hey guys, I just graduated college and I am not an expert with deep knowledge of dozens of technologies. My fundamentals are strong but I'm going to ask stupid beginner questions because I'm a beginner.
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Sep 21, 2016 23:21
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hobbesmaster posted:The contracts for most developers actually precludes them from having a meaningful portfolio. I deal with NDAs too, it's hardly an insurmountable obstacle. This is part of why I keep saying you need to come to the candidates, be a part of the world they work in, know who they work with. If it's a high-priority role and the first time you learn about the candidate is when they're sitting across the desk from you of course recruiting's going to seem hard. Again, one of the biggest problems with recruiting in all industries is that companies refuse to be honest with themselves about what an entry-level position is. If you have a thousand post-screen applicants, your job needs aren't specific enough and you need to unclench and admit you'll be doing some training no matter who you hire, and throwing interviewer after interviewer at the problem isn't going to get you out of that. If you need to fill a role so hyper-specific that several high-level members of your team legitimately need to weigh in on the hire, then you need to do more targeted recruiting in the first place. Anyone moaning about having hundreds of applicants that absolutely must burn up dozens of man-hours each is creating their own trouble.
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Sep 21, 2016 23:22
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I would prefer the current bullshit to a meaningful open-source portfolio becoming a requirement for employment, thanks.
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Sep 21, 2016 23:23
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Nessus posted:I mean in their free time. Or do most of these companies say that even your "side hustle" (gag, choke) belongs to them? Everywhere I've ever worked lets you exempt your personal projects from your work-for-hire clause. But it's also often true that your main job keeps you too busy to really hustle much on your side hustle, so it isn't the best example of your actual abilities when you're doing something as your job rather than dicking around with it in the evening every once in a while when you're not too tired.
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Sep 21, 2016 23:24
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Nessus posted:It seems like just about every job wants you to have five years of experience, including in software that came out last year, but to also be excited at the prospect of working at entry-level wages. And then if you find an entry-level job some of them want you to work for absolute beans. I don't even feel bad about laughing at people that offered me $30K.
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Sep 21, 2016 23:24
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Baby Babbeh posted:There's also the dangerous idea that intelligence is a very general thing which predicts your performance on a wide range of tasks, rather than a more specialized thing often born of many, many hours of study and practice. It leads companies to think that their job is to recruit the smartest person in some abstract sense, rather than the person who's shown the most aptitude for whatever it is they're hiring for. As someone who works in learning and development for the tech industry, this is really pervasive and often why we have to go so hard to make the case for why companies should invest in professional development.
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Sep 21, 2016 23:26
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blah_blah posted:As you may be aware, most people are unable to share the work they do for their previous employers in any significant way. Even if they were able to, it's very difficult to tell how much of the work is theirs, given collaboration and all that. Oh it's too hard to do your job well? Maybe you're the analogous thing in your field. In any case, while you have that impairment that prevents your brain from remembering what you were arguing about, I remember that the issue at hand here is expecting candidates to run a gauntlet of 1:1 interviews with multiple people. If judging quality is so incredibly impossible, what is it the fourth interviewer can catch that the first three didn't? Companies think making interviews longer and more complex will make up for the fact that they have a talent pipeline problem and a delegation problem. Recruiters shouldn't be bringing in total unknowns for high-level roles, and CEOs shouldn't be weighing in on low-level ones.
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Sep 21, 2016 23:31
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:I deal with NDAs too, it's hardly an insurmountable obstacle. It's not an issue of NDAs, I don't own the code I've worked on so I can't just show it to a new potential employer. Even if I could show it, it's part of a much larger code base, so you wouldn't be able to tell what's mine anyway without spending a huge amount of time going through source control.
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Sep 21, 2016 23:32
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Baby Babbeh posted:Everywhere I've ever worked lets you exempt your personal projects from your work-for-hire clause. But it's also often true that your main job keeps you too busy to really hustle much on your side hustle, so it isn't the best example of your actual abilities when you're doing something as your job rather than dicking around with it in the evening every once in a while when you're not too tired.
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Sep 21, 2016 23:34
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Nessus posted:Sounds like they need to be more energetic and care more about their field or else they're deadweight slackers. oh absolutely, it's reasonable to expect people to invest hundreds of hours in an extremely fancy resume now let's discuss how the interview process favors young men who don't have large constraints on their time or resources, and what we can do to prevent that
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Sep 21, 2016 23:35
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pairofdimes posted:It's not an issue of NDAs, I don't own the code I've worked on so I can't just show it to a new potential employer. Even if I could show it, it's part of a much larger code base, so you wouldn't be able to tell what's mine anyway without spending a huge amount of time going through source control. That's not unique to tech. A comedy writer can't point at a late-night monologue and say "one of those jokes was mine." It is a challenge but gauntlet interviews are a poor tool for solving it. I'm getting annoyed at the smuggo up there who keeps sputtering about how it's The Only Way and telling me I must suck at my job because I know more than one way to tackle a problem.
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Sep 21, 2016 23:37
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WrenP-Complete posted:A tree like this guy? Turn it upside down? Or invert it left to right? hobbesmaster posted:Without violating an NDA - if you think "make heap" is unreasonable then lol don't try and get a job at google.
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Sep 21, 2016 23:37
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Popular Thug Drink posted:oh absolutely, it's reasonable to expect people to invest hundreds of hours in an extremely fancy resume
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Sep 21, 2016 23:37
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:A 2 hour commitment vs. a 12 hour one are very different things to a person who has more to do when they get home than play video games, not to mention an hourly worker. Lots of people have to schedule interviews so they can take as little time off as possible, and companies have figured out an easy and blameless way to keep those people from darkening their doors is to have inflexible and time-consuming interviews. quote:I work in entertainment, and I think the best example of this is Samantha Bee's search for writers on her new show. She didn't require people to have filtered through the traditional gatekeepers like having an agent, and the call for writing samples clearly laid out exactly how to format the scripts, so no one was run aground on arbitrary, easily trainable technicalities that have nothing to do with the quality of one's work. Baby Babbeh posted:Everywhere I've ever worked lets you exempt your personal projects from your work-for-hire clause. ...
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Sep 21, 2016 23:39
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twodot posted:I meant left to right, that's a simple operation that you could plausibly want to do a binary tree. Turning it upside down wouldn't make any sense, and if someone asked me to do it, my first question would why in the world would I ever do that. Edit: I'm not sure if there's like a treenode object in Python, so I think first I'd define that. class TreeNode(object): def __init__(self, x): self.val = x self.left = None self.right = None Edit2: class Answer(object): def invertTree(self, root): """ :type root: TreeNode :rtype: TreeNode """ if not root: return None if root.left: self.invertTree(root.left) if root.right: self.invertTree(root.right) root.left,root.right=root.right,root.left return root I *think* that works but it might be the long way to go about it... Maybe the I of invert should be capitalized but I'm not sure. Edit3: but wouldn't you also have to reverse all the comparison functions? I'm not sure if I did it right. WrenP-Complete fucked around with this message at 00:02 on Sep 22, 2016 |
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Sep 21, 2016 23:41
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Arsenic Lupin posted:We used to score people on being "Googley", which I realize, looking back, was a guaranteed recipe for "white or Asian people who'd been to a certain sort of school." We thought it was "being a nice person who's fun to work with" but boy, howdy, what an opportunity for discrimination, both conscious and unconscious. Any kind of "would this person fit in" has unfortunate results. I think she did, yeah! And yeah, the battles I have waged on "culture fit." In my experience the nerdier the writer's room the more vicious they are about outsiders. Your typical bro-y action dude room will at least accept a woman or minority as a token if you bully them hard enough, but nerds interpret the intrusion of anyone but an exact clone of themselves as a violation of their precious safe space. It's especially hard on women who have trained themselves to fit into a boy's club environment by emphasizing their appreciation for sports or COD or beer or whatever. You can rocket right past Fake Gamer Girl and into Evil Jock, no way to win.
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Sep 21, 2016 23:46
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Arsenic Lupin posted:My experience has not been like yours. I couldn't get HP to agree that my @#$@# novel wasn't included under work-for-hire; it was either sign the contract without any additional clauses or quit. The bigger the company, the less likely the corporate office is going to allow any exceptions to the standard "we own your body, your brain, and your soul" contact. i thought lots of these were shown to be unenforceable after that supreme court case involving stanford a few years ago
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Sep 21, 2016 23:48
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:It's especially hard on women who have trained themselves to fit into a boy's club environment by emphasizing their appreciation for sports or COD or beer or whatever.
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Sep 21, 2016 23:51
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also this assumes that you're not in california where these classes of things can't be covered by your assignation-of-inventions agreement
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Sep 21, 2016 23:51
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H.P. Hovercraft posted:i thought lots of these were shown to be unenforceable after that supreme court case involving stanford a few years ago We don't all live in California unfortunately.
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Sep 21, 2016 23:52
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Arsenic Lupin posted:It wasn't until I felt I was senior-level that I felt free to routinely wear dresses and bring my embroidery to meetings. Before that, it was jeans and sweaters or T-shirts, depending on the coast. There was a substantial period during my career when being femme-y at work meant you weren't an engineer: you were marketing or management or support staff. It's the same in my industry, even though you might think it would be different. Women in production are careful to dress like they could break down a C-stand at any moment, even in off-duty work socializing situations, and a lot of women I talk to worry about not "looking like an intern," since female interns here are stereotyped as dressing more to be sexy than practical. Buuuut then if you never dress femme you're "not a real woman" and don't have any right to speak up about gender equality issues or even voice a female perspective on a story.
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Sep 21, 2016 23:57
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Would you really go through the effort write a novel if your employer has a (likely unenforceable) claim on it?
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Sep 21, 2016 23:57
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ocrumsprug posted:Would you really go through the effort write a novel if your employer has a (likely unenforceable) claim on it?
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Sep 22, 2016 00:01
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Nessus posted:Novel-writing? Sounds like you aren't really focused on the team, Jim, if you have enough energy left to do something like that. Sorry Bob, I'll come in on the weekend to make up the time. *prints my 800 page manuscript using the office printer*
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Sep 22, 2016 00:04
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