You’re simply taking away from an incredible achievement here.
She cleared interviews at both Repl.it and Google. She implemented an assignment based on operational transformations and having studied this myself it’s far from trivial. If you folks ever retire this question Id love to have a crack at it.
She also cleared the Google interview which goes deep into algorithmic aspects and system design. Which means that she’s brilliant at both abstract design and execution.
To be able to do both while graduating does place someone in the upper brackets of engineering skill. Some don’t fulfill it because of other reasons but that’s another matter.
It’s not like the bar is being lowered. They’re held to the same bar as Stanford and MIT grads who apply and they come from a third world country with only a bit of remedial coaching. It’s what top school grads already know from their campus coaching and tips from their seniors.
People who say this is akin to gaming the process you too can easily get the same by dropping a trivial amount of money on CTCI, EPI and Pramp for mock interviews.
I wrote this a little bit too much in frustration but I’m tired of these assumptions that people from the third world cannot show incredible potential sometimes exceeding their first world peers and are only held back by bad systems and politics.
There are untold depths of genius all over the planet. We haven’t even come CLOSE to most people on earth realizing even a fraction of their potential.
“ I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
- Stephen Jay Gould
I feel like you’re projecting unrelated frustrations onto the questions being asked:
> taking away from an incredible achievement here
> held to the same bar as Stanford and MIT grad
> you too can easily get the same
> assumptions that people from the third world cannot
These have nothing to do with the discussion, which is that it’s disingenuous to call a new grad better than an experienced engineer in that the interview process is obviously biased towards new grads.
No one is complaining that she got the job. We all know how to “game the system.” Whether from Stanford or community college, anyone with Leetcode and a few weeks can easily pass these interviews. So I am not sure why you are implying that people are bitter about some perceived inability to get such a position.
People are just pointing out how disingenuous of a statement it is for the OP to say “better than an experienced engineer” when they have literally no metric to judge this. And no, system design interviews don’t really count. A few days with the System Design Primer will solve that.
>These have nothing to do with the discussion, which is that it’s disingenuous to call a new grad better than an experienced engineer in that the interview process is obviously biased towards new grads.
From root comment: “Dalia and the other youngsters from Palestine performed better than at least half the experienced engineers I've interviewed in the past.”. There’s nothing disingenuous about the interviewer’s belief.
From Dalia’s article: “repl.it’s interviews were really different. First they gave me an operational transformation homework assignment.”, “For my second interview, about two weeks later, I had to prepare a presentation with ideas to improve the product.”.
You are making stuff up about Leetcode and whatever - the article itself has facts that show your assumptions to be wildly incorrect.
But this is what people are objecting to, isn't it?
That anyone reasonably clever which spends months studying CTCI, EPI and Pramp and whatever else and doing mock interviews will pass the interview, while an experienced programmer will not just by virtue of their skills and knowledge.
> anyone reasonably clever which spends months studying CTCI, EPI and Pramp and whatever else and doing mock interviews will pass the interview
Spoken like someone who has never interviewed at Google.
I have 6 years experience, a M.S. in CS, have worked at SV unicorns, and studied for 2 months for my Google interview and still failed. Am I an idiot? Possibly, but more likely that the interviews are hard and there is a lot of randomness.
Until you actually study and try yourself, don't talk about how easy it is for anyone "reasonably clever".
Randomness is definitely a factor, there are so many things that can go wrong, from having a bad day, an interviewer having a bad day, just bad luck on the set of questions you are asked, the list goes on.
I have performed a lot of coding interviews (probably 400+), I'm painfully aware of how limited the signal is that I can reliably read from 45 minutes with a candidate
I deliberately ask a question that has no algorithmic or data structure component to it (and tell candidates that) it's just a simple problem solving coding question which allows some insight into general coding and engineering chops
I still see experienced engineers struggle. It is hard to pinpoint exactly why, but lack of preparation/practice definitely seems to be a problem
Covid appears (at least for me) to have killed off the whiteboard
I've seen experienced engineers who I know for a fact can code and solve problems decently completely freeze and blank out during easy live coding challenges.
I think interviewing is a stressful situation. It's hard for reasons outside an applicant's knowledge or intelligence. Interviewing seems to be a skill in itself. I know I hate it... :(
I give out a certain coding question to my candidates. I recently interviewed and was given the exact question - and I blanked! Like, this was a coding kata style problem that I’ve done in several languages and seen done in others. I just absolutely blanked. Brains are strange.
Steve Yegge famously talked about Google's "interview anti-loop", where you get two interviewers in your process who wouldn't have hired each other, so the things one of them values are actually negatives for the other, and viceversa.
I don't know if that's still a problem at Google, but it could explain why some people don't pass the interview process even though they are reasonably clever.
From my more than 5 years at google I saw a lot of random stupid interview questions. I was astounding. 10 years ago they didn't seem to do any interview question checking, you could ask anything.
I was referring to tech interviews in general, not a specific company. Interviewing's like dating: if you do all the right things you may still not charm the person you want, but the odds are very good that you will be able to find a good partner.
She cleared interviews at both Repl.it and Google. She implemented an assignment based on operational transformations and having studied this myself it’s far from trivial. If you folks ever retire this question Id love to have a crack at it.
She also cleared the Google interview which goes deep into algorithmic aspects and system design. Which means that she’s brilliant at both abstract design and execution.
To be able to do both while graduating does place someone in the upper brackets of engineering skill. Some don’t fulfill it because of other reasons but that’s another matter.
It’s not like the bar is being lowered. They’re held to the same bar as Stanford and MIT grads who apply and they come from a third world country with only a bit of remedial coaching. It’s what top school grads already know from their campus coaching and tips from their seniors.
People who say this is akin to gaming the process you too can easily get the same by dropping a trivial amount of money on CTCI, EPI and Pramp for mock interviews.
I wrote this a little bit too much in frustration but I’m tired of these assumptions that people from the third world cannot show incredible potential sometimes exceeding their first world peers and are only held back by bad systems and politics.
There are untold depths of genius all over the planet. We haven’t even come CLOSE to most people on earth realizing even a fraction of their potential.
“ I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” - Stephen Jay Gould