Do you have any resources or suggestions for better types of questions to ask, e...

avitzurel · on Jan 18, 2019

I don't have anything written up in a blog post.

I try to work on soft skills during the interview, I found those to be way more important than knowing to invert a tree.

How does one converse through a problem? How would you go about solving this bug.

I usually do something really simple like

logMessage(from, to, content) {} searchMessageBySender(senderName) {} getMessages() {}

Have the candidate fill in the interface and walk through what the choices are and what are the ups/downs of their solution.

hocuspocus · on Jan 18, 2019

Even among textbook questions from the infamous leetcode and the likes, there are a few good ones. For instance I was once asked this one: https://leetcode.com/problems/flatten-nested-list-iterator/

- it's not too short or too long

- there's no trick, it's just a matter of being thorough

- it's pretty concrete (modern languages have that in their standard lib) and/or might actually come up someday in your day-to-day job

And in my opinion, what matters even more is that your full round of interviews shouldn't be just 5 slots of algo questions. One or two should be enough. I like combinations of a take-home challenge (keep it short!), pair programming sessions and architecture / systems design discussions.