One reason I asked about the difficulty of Ben’s problems, is that I want to calibrate myself to the EA tech talent pool when giving comments.
It would be good to know if many people here, with little practice, can solve unseen leetcode hard problems in a BigTech interview format (where you have to simultaneously create a verbal narrative throughout the interview).
If this is true, I will stop giving “advice” on any tech related post as this is out of my reference class.
Charles, TL;DR: I would not stop giving tech advice just because you can’t solve hard leetcode puzzels
Longer:
If this [solveing unseen leetcode hard problems in a BigTech interview format] is true, I will stop giving “advice” on any tech related post as this is out of my reference class.
If it influences your opinion:
I think I’m very good at leetcode puzzels
I give tech advice
I think those “skills” are almost totally unrelated.
It is very rare for me to actually teach someone how to solve leetcode
It is more common for me to just point out “cracking the coding interview” as a legit way to prepare for big-tech interviews, but knowing this is unrelated to my ability to solving the questions myself. (I know it because a Google recruiter recommended that book for me. I can elaborate)
I guess my intuition is that the correlation between being good at giving career advice for techies and being able to solve algorithms puzzles is only moderate, and very little of that is causal.
It would be good to know if many people here, with little practice, can solve unseen leetcode hard problems in a BigTech interview format (where you have to simultaneously create a verbal narrative throughout the interview).
Fwiw I suspect this is pretty uncommon among EAs, including EAs in tech. I was unusually good at leetcode-style problems (both in general and especially relative to my ability to actually do useful work in programming), and I suspect my hit rate for novel LC Hard problems in 30 minutes was less than 50%*.
*I’ve regressed a lot in my algorithms puzzles ability, I’m not even confident I can consistently do LC Easys now.
As Linch says, we don’t use the interview format you describe. It’s all done asynchronously, and with less time pressure. I’m not well calibrated on how well the average EA does under the whiteboard format, but I would say that in our format:
~50% of applicants pass our 30 minute screen
5-10% pass our 2.5 hour in-depth task
~5% get an offer
Note that the people who apply for our jobs are probably not representative of who you would speak to on the Forum, so I’m not sure how helpful these statistics actually are.
One reason I asked about the difficulty of Ben’s problems, is that I want to calibrate myself to the EA tech talent pool when giving comments.
It would be good to know if many people here, with little practice, can solve unseen leetcode hard problems in a BigTech interview format (where you have to simultaneously create a verbal narrative throughout the interview).
If this is true, I will stop giving “advice” on any tech related post as this is out of my reference class.
Charles,
TL;DR: I would not stop giving tech advice just because you can’t solve hard leetcode puzzels
Longer:
If it influences your opinion:
I think I’m very good at leetcode puzzels
I give tech advice
I think those “skills” are almost totally unrelated.
It is very rare for me to actually teach someone how to solve leetcode
It is more common for me to just point out “cracking the coding interview” as a legit way to prepare for big-tech interviews, but knowing this is unrelated to my ability to solving the questions myself. (I know it because a Google recruiter recommended that book for me. I can elaborate)
Thank you for the thoughtful reply Yonatan!
I guess my intuition is that the correlation between being good at giving career advice for techies and being able to solve algorithms puzzles is only moderate, and very little of that is causal.
Fwiw I suspect this is pretty uncommon among EAs, including EAs in tech. I was unusually good at leetcode-style problems (both in general and especially relative to my ability to actually do useful work in programming), and I suspect my hit rate for novel LC Hard problems in 30 minutes was less than 50%*.
*I’ve regressed a lot in my algorithms puzzles ability, I’m not even confident I can consistently do LC Easys now.
As Linch says, we don’t use the interview format you describe. It’s all done asynchronously, and with less time pressure. I’m not well calibrated on how well the average EA does under the whiteboard format, but I would say that in our format:
~50% of applicants pass our 30 minute screen
5-10% pass our 2.5 hour in-depth task
~5% get an offer
Note that the people who apply for our jobs are probably not representative of who you would speak to on the Forum, so I’m not sure how helpful these statistics actually are.