I’m in the middle of sending out applications and considering all the things I should refresh on. Does anyone have some good resources or practices they run through to get refreshed or otherwise prepared for technical and skill/personal interviews?

Ex. Sites, blogs, yt videos to refresh on data structures and algorithms. Checklist of things to look for when researching companies. Questions to ask recruiters during an interview. etc.

  • The Cuuuuube@beehaw.org
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    9 months ago

    I mean don’t bother with jobs that ask you about esoteric programming challenges or nonsense brain teasers. All questions or take home problems should be demonstrations of your ability to work with the actual material issues at the company you’re going to be working for

    • varsock@programming.dev
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      9 months ago

      I agree with you. practically speaking, candidates don’t have a way to tell if the problem they are solving applies to the role, especially when bringing tour skillset to a new-ish domain.

      That being said, hackerrank generates a report based on if you pass or fail. Hiring managers tend to only look at the metrics in the report instead judging the candidate based on their approach to the problem. And for code that doesn’t run, the metrics are nearly all 0. Not to mention there is no fucking debugger to step through the code and catch the 1 off index error that is common to make when you’re under pressure.

      Anyway I’m beginning to rant. There are a lot of things that should be addressed but as long as someone else can solve it and the candidate pool is large, there is no point to optimize the selection process (from a company point of view). They feel as if they are getting the best candidate because they assume better experienced == better chance of passing

      • The Cuuuuube@beehaw.org
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        9 months ago

        Hackerrank is a huge joke for so many reasons. I would rather hire a Dev whose biggest project thus far is an arduino project with 6 stars on github than looking at someone’s hacker rank

        • varsock@programming.dev
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          9 months ago

          my experience with hackerrank is a company will use hackerrank platform to facilitate the online assessment - NOT look at someone “hacker rank” like you mentioned.

          Candidates follows a link a company sent them and gives them an in-browser IDE to solve a problem. The platform records keystrokes, mouse events (like if you left the tab) etc etc. Then when you submit your code it is complied, executed in a sandbox, and tested with test cases. Based on which test cases pass, the execution time and memory usage, hacker rank will generate a report and fwd to the hiring team.

          What I was saying in the above comment is if you had the right idea but your code didn’t compile or failed the test case, it’s as if you failed entirely. No hiring teams sits there and reads the code. Not even garuanteed that an engineer is reviewing your submission.

          Hackerrank (to my knowledge) does not parse the code to determine your knowledge of algorithms, data structures, etc etc, it inferes it from which test cases passed and their execution time amd memory usage.