>tfw studying for programming interview 12 hours straight

>>57040230
At the bigger places like Google they are that bad. Because they can afford to be - everyone wants to work there. They literally have no strong reason to improve the process.

That said, any company worth your time cares a lot more about how you would approach the problem than whether or not you can remember algorithm XYZ. They might be concerned if you can't solve any of the questions correctly, but you'd be able to get the job with only half of the answers correct as long as you prove you can approach problems the right way.

Protip: do not be afraid to say you'd Google it. In the real world everyone Googles their problems. Unless your interviewer is a moron (in which case you don't want to work there) he will be glad to hear it. If you don't know how to solve something, your two sources should be google and the docs for that particular command or library.

>>57040281
Genuine thanks for the good advice anon, will keep all that in mind.

I hope they aren't picky about API calls and shit. I don't have time to memorize that.

>>57040300
>API calls

generally no at the larger companies it's going to be all algorithms, implementation, your own time management questions for entry level.

Also keep in mind OP, you'll all likelihood fail your first interview unless you're a trained actor or comedian. Keep lining them up, after the first few you'll get good at it.

>>57040352
Fuck, I know this is usually the case.

My resume is solid though, going to use that as my crutch as much as I can.

I have decent programming experience from a good number of hobby projects but none of them are theory-ish like these data structures questions are.

I just implemented fucking design, this is something else entirely. This is not where the fun is in programming, IMO. Total fucking grind, but necessary I guess.

>>57040230
interviews are usually done by business retards who have no clue about CS

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If they have me implement Breadth First Search from scratch i'm fucked bros. not wasting anymore time on that one.

Time to make sure I can fucking code a looped linked list detector. I see that problem everywhere on glassdoor.
It never ends.

>>57040510
Please, please let it be this. PLEASE.
Just give me a fucking reverse string or some shit... no more pointer cluster fucks or ILL FUCKIN'

whatever. i should have delayed interview.

When i'm doing testing in java, is it okay just to print the flow?

If not, what's the professional way to do it?

>>57040666
Debugging or testing? In first case print is semi-ok (you might want to use logging lib in some paraller projects) and in testing you want to use unit tests anyway.

>>57040685
>Debugging or testing?

Fuck me... time to study unit tests and syntax. Didn't know these existed, i'm not a CS major and it's showing.
thank you kind anon. I haven't touched java in years.

>>57040230
M$?

>>57040745
why do you ask this?

>>57040768
>>>57040745 (You)
>why do you ask this?
I have friends flying out for interviews this week just curious

>>57040775
maybe

>>57040791
Fucking neets thinking this will disqualify him

>>57040418
Data structures and algorithms are where the fun is for me. :^)

>>57040230
>apply for job at massive multinational
>literally just shittalk all the way trough it
>got hired as a senior application/system engineer straight out of college
Just don't be a sperg

>>57040730
>Not knowing about unit tests.
I mean, they don't teach them here either, but you MUST have come across them.

>>57040853
I have, just never used them because i'm a dirty programmer and almost forgot they existed.

Won't go into much detail but most of my programming experience comes from literally 2 big hobby projects.
They both had a GUI so I just made my own custom debugging terminal and used that instead for all testing and debugging.

No i'm not proud. I'm not a CS major. Trying to fix up my habits.

>>57040884
Dont worry, most cs majors dont use unit tests anyway.

Maybe you should learn to work with existing libraries, instead of writing your own shit like you did with the debugging terminal. Logging would be way better.

>get master degree in a difficult and rare field
>apply for a job
>have to do an IQ test, personality test, send my grades and references
Fuck that shit. I got my degree. Why would I need to jump through more fucking hoops?

>>57040925
Not to mention they sometimes have three or four rounds during the selection procedure where each time you get introduced to new people. And then they pretend to be angry to pressure test you.

>>57040925
>company makes me do intelligence test
>only invites me over not because my results are good but because they are out of line with they expect a CS mayor to have (high score on language things and mediocre results in computing)
Such is life

>>57040850
Man i've been employed before, that's not the hard part.
This just isn't my native industry but I have a serious thirst for it. I'm more a hardware guy.

Doing some impressive projects can get you far...way farther than I expected hence this entire thread.

Thankfully i'm not a sperg, at least compared to average CS major I see.

>>57040896
Yes logging would be 1000x better. Don't neglect good practices like me guys, I just wanted to punch out functional design code. Now I have to relearn a ton. Thanks though, this thread has been very helpful so far.

>>57040925
why would you do this? you can always study rare things on the internet, it's pretty obvious to go for most valuable degree possible in 2016.
Let me guess, no relevant internships throughout what was probably 6 years of schooling?

I will never understand why people major in non-marketable things. Not even a jab towards you, but you can learn almost ANYTHING on the internet provided you have motivation.

>>57040941
>And then they pretend to be angry to pressure test you.
There is no way HR does that. If they want to scare off potential recruits, they wouldn't be paying so much to find them. Are you lying, anon?
>>57040925
Personality test is strange, but is only used if you apply for a team instead of a function. A bunch of autists grouped together is not a bad thing at all, but they have to have the right team leader and/or manager to fit them, as well as seeing if they can all work together well enough.
The IQ test, however, is highly strange and frankly somewhat suspicious. Do they even know what they're doing if they ask for an IQ test?

>be an interviewer
>only ask "what's your exp with oo." If it isn't obvious from resume
>only ask structured questions otherwise.
>it's the candidates job to tie in their experience in an engaging way.

In my interview we leave it to the candidate to show/tell us:
1) we can teach them
2) they have a personality that doesn't clash with the current environment
3) we won't need to babysit this person after being trained
4) OR you spew bull shit in such a way that 3 engineers and a manager are convinced you meet criteria 1-3.

When I interviewed I hit about a dozen home runs answering the questions because I can adapt my prepared answers in an engaging way to the audience.

>>57040970
That seems inefficient. Are you hiring salesmen? It's giving off an air of not preparing for the interview and just inviting everyone you meet on the street over for one.

>>57040970
I have become an excellent BS spewer and as a result I have netted multiple jobs in environment I fucking hated

>>57040970
Am I misreading this or did you not actually do a technical interview?

>>57041005
Just because you apply for a technical job at a mayor company and are interviewed by actual engineers doesn't mean they will ask you to implement a binary tree on the spot

>>57040352

I like you, Mensa member.

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>>57041027
Anon if I want to be in this competitive industry I need to learn this shit eventually, might as well now.
I've learned a crazy amount in the last day.... not healthy learning. More like shoving the material into my brain and roll dice to see if I remember. It's my best chance though, I was given the interview out of nowhere and on such short notice.

If I screw up this interview, i'll be really disappointed in myself. Suffer the pain of discipline now or the pain of regret later.
I don't see the purpose in sleeping tonight because i'll be way too anxious thinking about how i'm not getting ready.

Getting hard to think now though...


If you guys had one question to expect (yes, just choose 1) on a big five entry level interview, what would it be?

>>57041073
I already have a job at a major multinational
My resume is absolutely perfect
I have only once been asked a technical question and it was for me to implement a bubble sort in a pseudo language
I failed

make sure you use a lot of cool words to sound smart. talk about big data, reactjs, and deep learning. tell them elon musk is ur hero.

>>57041083
Sorting questions are such horse shit.

I get why they ask it, but still. Nobody will waste time typing the same sorting algos again and again.

>>57041132
Surely the 4chan contrarian way of talking is better anon, I agree.

Let me just purposely ignore the biggest upcoming fields and mention Stallman as my hero instead.
They will love the obscurity! Should I mention that I use Gentoo or Arch to impress them?!?

>>57041171
i just looked up this crack the code shit

>Write an algorithm to find an element in a linked list and move that element to the end of the list.

is this a fucking joke?

>>>>>esoteric

>>57041213
Well then solve it with c or c#

>>57041213
That's one fucking question, one I would LOVE to have in the next upcoming days. Maybe you have foreshadowed it.
The book is practically a standard. Just about every tech company circle jerks interview questions from it. Nothing new.

Plenty of esoteric questions that can be brought up in an interview, that's only one piece of content I study from.

But you sound like a special snowflake. Anon, i'm sorry i'm not up to your standards. Please accept my forgiveness.
Can I buy you ice cream?

>>57041243
i dont know c or c#
honestly writing it in a language u know is probably even easier than doing it in a pseudo language.
maybe that's the point? do they want you to use pseudo code?
did u go to school? i dont understand why ur stressing over these questions or even going to an interview if you dont know this shit.

>>57041258
im not saying you're not up to standard you must just not do a lot of data manipulation (the most fun stuff imo).

>>57041272
I'm not a CS major.

Just fuck off. I have other great offers, just trying to do my best in an industry that's not mine with limited time.
Typical arrogance among CS majors, you NEVER see this in hardware engineering because people don't have a stick up their ass.

>know ~10 sorting algorithms with their time and space complexity analysis (not that you can't cache the stuff before an interview) which always asked for some stupid reason
>well, yes, it is a double pivot quicksort in the JDK
>of course I'm well versed in all the design patterns you can imagine, not just OOP but FP as well
>do a shitty hackerrank test to 100%
>ace all the questions on the personal interview

>Thank you for your time you invested in our company, but we would like to hire someone with a better knowledge about the area where the company is located (well, you could at least mention it in the job description, otherwise it is a bit BS)

Such is life being from a 2nd world country.
Hiring is broken beyond repair, it has turned into another Tinder like numbers game. You might get a job at Google or MS but are rejected by Amazon and FB.

I just stopped caring, and usually trigger the interviewers when it is my turn to ask questions. They are usually clueless about basic math, even calculus. Then say I'm not interested working with dumbwits do a 360 and walk away.

>>57040230
Dude, if you can show up for the interview and do FizzBuzz, you are already in the top 0.5%.

>>57041213
That's esoteric? Seems like a valid data structure question imo.

>>57041370
lmao

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>>57040925

what field?

>>57040959

>internships

Why the fuck would work where I don't get fucking paid

>>57041592
Working for cheap and putting the experience on your resume, while searching for a paying job.

vs

Staying at home, waiting for government freebux, leaving a gaping hole of nothing in your resume.

>>57041592
>internships
>Why the fuck would work where I don't get fucking paid

Kek either shitty country or shitty major.
I was paid $36 an hour at my internship.

Even if you weren't paid, you still need fucking experience.
Really hard to believe people get their grad degree with ZERO real world experience and are surprised.

>>57040730
>>57040230
Mate, your worry too much. Nobody really knows all that shit. While it's nice to know about unit testing, dependency injection, all gang of four patterns, and millions of other concepts most devs are just winging it. You only learn those when the senior dev tells you to.

At a pro company they just want to know that you can get shit done. Some basic usage of git, don't micro optimise, use libraries and write readable code. The rest you learn on the job.

>>57041027
If you don't know how to implement binary tree on spot maybe programming is not for you

>>57041691
If you don't know how to invert a binary tree on spot maybe Google is not for you

>>57041761
define inverting a tree

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I'm still studying bros.... what is even going on anymore.

Jesus Christ I feel like my brain is a running array of 3 problems.

M-must understand bit manipulation..

God I hate these threads. I'm soon to graduate and my gpa is complete shit but I have done tones of extra curricular development activities and a 3 month internship but I still worry my grades are going to completely fuck me up

>>57042149
don't put gpa on resume, how bad is it?

if you have an internship and other projects and can actually code you have nothing to worry about, even with shit grades.

>>57042030
>xe does not know what is inverting a binary tree means

I mean, thank you for coming in for today's interview, please give back the badge to reception when you are exiting the building, we will inform you about your results in 2 weeks time.

>>57040896
This

I'd almost say to push further beyond just unit testing. If it's a big company, just talk shit about TDD and how you care about risk and they'll be sucking your dick.

Dropping buzzwords keeps the business types in check.

>>57042149
Your grades are not going to matter as much as you think. Experience, attitude, proving that you can do the work, showing up looking normal and not looking like a psycho... that matters more.

If another candidate is as good as you, but has better grades, then it will matter. It will also matter a lot if you are going into academia.

>>57041500
Not all of us live in the third world like you do

>>57041761
Mirror it.

>>57042263
>not knowing the definition of some useless procedure is a bad thing xd

>>57042434
Statistic did not come from the third world: https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/

>>57042458
Well shit, why am I even going to college?

>>57042572
Exactly

>>57042572
A very small number of people can learn programming on their own, and be good at it. Most people need a formal education to get good... but getting a formal education does not guarantee that you will get good.

A degree is also a sign of other things: This candidate can endure, this candidate can follow instructions, this candidate can manage their time, this candidate can study and pass. Larger companies will attract more job seekers, and having a degree helps!

>>57040230
link to that course please

>>57040230
It depends. A lot of the time it's one or more of these
a) they show you 10-30 lines of code and ask where the bugs are
b) describe a project you worked on
c) going to your github page and asking questions about a project of yours
d) they send you instructions to make a program and you have n hours(these can be pretty grotesque, some company expected me to spend a week making a demo app, politely told them to fuck off)

rarely it's 4-5 of these, unless google/apple/msoft etc.
f) implement a depth first search, linked list etc.

>>57040230
My "technical" interview for my current job was literally just "explain the difference between interfaces and abstract classes." Guess I lucked out.

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>>57040230
>tfw you have to compete with Pajeets and Chongs who falsify their resumes with the help of companies like Infosys and Wipro

>tfw did othing special at all except for use streams and filters in a 1h tech test
>tfw they said I was the best they've ever interviewed after I joined
>tfw the entire place is a shambles and their software has no real structure or standards
They don't even peer review

>>57041297
Engineer here. We definitely have a lot of stick in the ass people too. Particularly those with a degree from a top uni. Good news is you can usually banter around it.

>>57042645
>d) they send you instructions to make a program and you have n hours(these can be pretty grotesque, some company expected me to spend a week making a demo app, politely told them to fuck off)

I've heard a bunch of cases where they do this, have you work for them for a week 'as a trial-interview', or have you code a huge project 'just to test you' and then at the end they keep your work and tell you to fuck off. It's a 'hire a codemonkey for free' scam. Don't know how true it is though.

>>57043773
I've never seen that actually happen to anyone in ten years and I know a lot of young devs. If someone handed my a project that was going to take me more than a few hours I'd give them my hourly rate or just thank them and hang up.

Anyone engaged in that kind of time wasting of perspective employees is truly sadistic. I say that as someone who has been on both sides of the desk. The whole reason we do DSALG routines is so we don't have to waste a lot of time with demo projects.