Comments by "Inconspicuous Chap" (@InconspicuousChap) on "How I Got Good at Coding Interviews" video.

  1. I've failed an algorithmic interview a while ago. Solved both of their tasks, but not within the timeline. But if their job comes down to continuously developing patches in emergency mode, then f..k their timelines. A proper implementation saves man-years of development in future, so no point in hurrying to get it done strictly within an hour. My ex-colleague same age and experience as me, an extremely in-depth understanding, productive and reliable guy (I worked with him for 7 years) has recently failed a leetcode-based interview. What's most funny is that most people at the company he was applying to had been doing monkey job of writing trivial microservices passing pieces of data from one endpoint to another, tuning settings, performing arcane rites around black-box components developed by someone else, etc. They never think of any algorithms for years in their daily routine. And when they do, they call some experienced guy who solves the problem for them and moves on to some other dept to solve someone else's problems. No need to bind experts to the monkey routine. But the company wants to look like Google, so they give candidates the algorithms and judge them by how close to a standard "approved" way they solved them. They can't even value solutions over each other, they just think in standard patterns.
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