The Big Programming Thread - Page 641

On June 15 2015 05:11 wherebugsgo wrote:
for example at one of the places I interviewed at I was requested to solve something that is a slight variation of the collaboration distance problem. (e.g. Kevin Bacon number or Erdős number) and I was given maybe 20-30 minutes to whiteboard my solution to the problem which was initially not in an easily or obviously solvable format. I'm pretty sure that question was designed to fail almost every candidate that applied.

On June 15 2015 06:01 supereddie wrote:

If I ever get questions like that I'd just get up and leave. No point in wasting my time on stupid, irrelevant questions. Unless, of course, the position you apply for has an actual need for such algorithms and it said so in the job description. But then I wouldn't apply to that position

Sure, it can be useful to know bubble sort, of some pathfinding alogrithm, or whatever. But in my professional programming carreer I never needed to implement my own. There are existing frameworks and libraries who are probably widely used, heavily tested and have good to excellent performance...

On June 15 2015 05:11 wherebugsgo wrote:


it sucks but that's the way you have to do it if you want a well-paying job at a tech company in SV.

Most of my on-site interviews were all-day affairs, usually starting around 10 in the morning and ending around 4. The hardest part is the fatigue once you have enough practice and you know what is expected. Also you can consider the phone screens to just be individual interviews prior to the "real thing".

But it paid off for me :D hard to beat $150k++ in annual compensation and amazing perks right out of college

edit: also I should say that some of the hardest interviews are not at the places you'd expect. The ones for me that were hardest were some startups in SF and places like Dropbox, Quora, Patreon etc which are on the smallish to medium size.

for example at one of the places I interviewed at I was requested to solve something that is a slight variation of the collaboration distance problem. (e.g. Kevin Bacon number or Erdős number) and I was given maybe 20-30 minutes to whiteboard my solution to the problem which was initially not in an easily or obviously solvable format. I'm pretty sure that question was designed to fail almost every candidate that applied.

On June 15 2015 05:49 Nesserev wrote:

Hmmm, it's a shame that you don't remember what the exact problem was anymore, would be fun... but sounds difficult to solve if you haven't taken an algorithm course that has handled Dijkstra and such.

On June 15 2015 10:13 Manit0u wrote:


I guess they were testing him for the ability to write an app that serves "If you liked that, you might also like..." stuff and such

Anyway, it all boils down to the shortest path algorithms and if you know them (or even about them) or not.

On June 15 2015 05:53 WolfintheSheep wrote:
Pretty sure most interview questions like that are designed to evaluate thought processes, general knowledge and problem solving, not having specific answers to specific problems.

On June 15 2015 09:51 killa_robot wrote:
You must do a ton of side projects if you were even considered for such a high paying job just outside of school.

On June 15 2015 05:11 wherebugsgo wrote:
one of the places I interviewed at I was requested to solve something that is a slight variation of the collaboration distance problem. (e.g. Kevin Bacon number or Erdős number) and I was given maybe 20-30 minutes to whiteboard my solution to the problem which was initially not in an easily or obviously solvable format.

On June 15 2015 12:19 amazingxkcd wrote:
This might be off-topic, but this is the best github project i have ever laid my eyes on


https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpriseEdition

On June 15 2015 16:35 Manit0u wrote:



Naah, nothing will ever beat ToleranUX (sadly, it got blocked by GitHub) and C+=

On June 15 2015 21:05 BisuDagger wrote:
Okay this is a pretty odd question and either there is no answer or it is stupidly obvious. Reply in terms of C++, C# please:

If I have a function OnMouseDown() and it calls a function IsUISelected() such that it looks like this:

void OnMouseDown()
{
      IsUISelected();
}

If IsUISelected resolves to true in it's function I need to break out out of the OnMouseDown() function instead of continuing.

I'm trying to simply this statement. Simplying the state is purely just a curiosity not a necessity.

void OnMouseDown()
	{
		if (GlobalVariables.UISelected())
		{
			return;
		}
	
	}

void OnMouseDown()
{
      if(IsUISelected()) // IsUISelected() value returned
            return;
      //rest of code runs only if IsUISelected() returns false;
}

On June 15 2015 22:11 BisuDagger wrote:

That's what I thought. I just have to use this check in so many damn places I was trying to save white space. Oh well lol.

edit: The reason I keep the brackets is to match a coding standard of another companies programmers I have to work with from time to time.

//Break out of mouse handler if UI is selected
if(IsUISelected()) { return; }