Only interview there if you are ready to waste 3 days of your life and ~$1400 and think Justin Biber jokes are funny ( really? ).
Edit: Anyone know what I can do about recouping the money I spent, I sent all the receipts and filled out their candidate reimbursement form. They wont respond to my email.
A lot of people bash Human Resources departments, but they do inject a great deal of sanity into the process when your time is on the line.
I understand that when you give a reason for the no hire decision, you open yourself to lawsuits and other types of trouble. But I also see a problem with asking for a substantial investment of time from the applicant (with no corresponding investment of time from the company) and responding to the applicant with a three second brush-off. It is a small community, and of course this will influence my impression of this company.
Use Notepad++ or kwrite and disable those features, if your coding speed grinds to a halt under these conditions, good!
That's the point of the exercise, like trying to jog at 30 thousand feet, as you overcome the hindrance up there, and you come back down to normal level, you feel like you can leap over a car. Same with coding, you feel like you can code blindfolded. And your ability/productivity increases by an order of magnitude.
"you absorb more info when you’re doodling than when you’re just listening" I think this differs a lot per person. I find creative types tend to be bad at focussing on one thing, and can focus better if they are distracted by something they control like doodling. Personally I tend to think very linearly and once I'm distracted by something, that immediately means I'm not focussing anymore.
Copyright © 2008 - 2010 by Gayle Laakmann. All rights reserved.
This means something. The author needs to respect it.
In the Gayle book, they go from binay trees, to bit manipulation to queues, etc, etc. Of course that won't even get touched in some technical interviews, it will be more knowledge based, (Describe polymorphism).
I rarely get the complex algorithms (I am not in Silicon Valley) but I get a great deal of logic questions or draw this abstract concept out on the board. And it is hard for me to deal with NOT knowing a problem.
For example, if SQL is on the job description, might as well cover every aspect of SQL which aren't really covered in the technical interview books. How do indexes work, etc, etc? Venn diagram outer joins.
Some interviews are just unfair and there isn't really anything you can do to prepare, so don't waste your time worrying about it. Try to get a good story out of it and pity the company (I know, cold comfort if you need a job).
Decent interviews will stick to what's on your resume: "you say you spent 10 years working on networking internals, can you tell me about how you'd design a reliable network protocol?"
You can find lists of common interview questions online for almost every technical topic, so look up "SQL interview questions" and make sure you can answer the common ones if you're worried about them.
This is good technical interview advice, but I've never gotten a job that only had technical interviews. Programmers might not appreciate a thank you note or call, but managers probably will. They're trying to figure out whether you're someone who will follow up and be responsible rather than someone who knows what a binary tree is.
