Long reply but last October I had pretty enjoyable interview experience during a front-end screening at Google, for which I absolutely grinded LeetCode.
To my surprise, it was an actual front-end task. I told him jokingly "What, no leetcode?" to which he laughed saying "I have my ways".
To my even bigger surprise, it was also a DSA question in disguise.
After writing a component to render out a filesystem tree view, the interviewer asked me which algorithm I was applying for this task. I never really think of algorithms when doing front-end, only in terms of design patterns, but the answer was immediately clear that I was using DFS.
Sadly I didn't get a follow-up, I thought I just didn't pass. Then a few days after one of their massive layoff rounds, got an e-mail saying I did great but weren't hiring anymore, lol.
But I liked this approach so much that I've used variations of this question when interviewing candidates at my job.
The task itself is incredibly simple, but a surprisingly amount of people can't solve it or complicate it unnecessarily without or before asking for clarification.
I also tell them it's not necessary to write executable code. This somehow confuses people a lot? I've found a lot of candidates not comfortable writing code without an IDE, even with an "open-book" and when told it doesn't have to run.
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100% agree. A few in-house questions can save a lot of time by weeding out some true incompetents. There are way more of these than one might expect.
Long reply but last October I had pretty enjoyable interview experience during a front-end screening at Google, for which I absolutely grinded LeetCode.
To my surprise, it was an actual front-end task. I told him jokingly "What, no leetcode?" to which he laughed saying "I have my ways". To my even bigger surprise, it was also a DSA question in disguise.
After writing a component to render out a filesystem tree view, the interviewer asked me which algorithm I was applying for this task. I never really think of algorithms when doing front-end, only in terms of design patterns, but the answer was immediately clear that I was using DFS. Sadly I didn't get a follow-up, I thought I just didn't pass. Then a few days after one of their massive layoff rounds, got an e-mail saying I did great but weren't hiring anymore, lol.
But I liked this approach so much that I've used variations of this question when interviewing candidates at my job. The task itself is incredibly simple, but a surprisingly amount of people can't solve it or complicate it unnecessarily without or before asking for clarification. I also tell them it's not necessary to write executable code. This somehow confuses people a lot? I've found a lot of candidates not comfortable writing code without an IDE, even with an "open-book" and when told it doesn't have to run.
Yes, I'm incompetent and consistently fail code screens.