
Show HN: InterviewBit – Interactive Coach for Tech Interviews - syshackbot
http://interviewbit.com/invite/hfij
======
nodesocket
Nice job, but I really loathe tech interviews.

I've absolutely bombed tech interviews in the past, I now will refuse to do
any. Particularly, because I've got some "street cred" with my startup, and
basically my work with my company and GitHub speaks for my talents. I get it,
you have to "vet" a candidate, but tech interviews in my opinion are not a
good solution.

O(N) notation, data structures, academic computer science.... Rubbish.

~~~
codeshaman
Logged in to second that.

I might not be the best programmer, I'd say that I'm about 'average', but I
have about 20 years of experience building apps in a dozen programming
languages and operating systems.

I could count on my fingers the number of times I had to solve a problem
similar to these tech interview puzzles, like 'count the number of mushrooms
that a person can collect in M steps' or 'How many jumps can a frog make' or
whatever.

My issue is _understanding_ the problems, because they have nothing to do with
what I usually have to solve on a day by day basis. Added to that is the fact
that many problems have some irrelevant clauses, just to fuck with you :).

Yes, you want the most efficient solution for a tight loop that runs on a list
with a gazillion elements, but in a typical application, it's usually _the
only_ place where you need to apply deep CS knowledge.

And that thing has to be researched, usually a 10-minute investigation on
google/stack overflow or just steal the solution from someone smarter than me
on github, even if it involves translating it to a different programming
language.

That's how the real world works.

99% of the code deals with APIs, UIs, file formats or network protocols, etc.
Real, palpable stuff.

What worries me is that now these interview things are being automated and
your 10 minute half-baked solution is being tested against huge datasets with
all the possible corner-cases. Good thing in theory, I guess, but still
irrelevant for the real world.

I've worked with interview ninjas who couldn't put together more than a
console application.

~~~
eranation
It is all true for most web / mobile jobs. But if you are looking to work on
medical devices, driverless cars, AI / game development, image manipulation,
fraud detection, machine learning, data mining, scheduling. Then the real
world actually does work this way. You'll need to know these things. Even for
uber or home joy, finding the right taxi / cleaning service to match the
provider with the client on a map needs usage of graph and scheduling
algorithms, and understanding their complexity. You are right that once this
is done, most of the work is APIs, UIs etc. but someone needs to write these
APIs.

~~~
codeshaman
Agreed. There's a lot of places where CS knowledge is necessary and those
algorithms are usually the main IP of the company.

But these algos are developed during months or years of research, team
meetings, white boarding and experimental prototyping.

These things are not developed under the pressure of a ticking timer (well,
technically there is the time constraint, but usually the limit is more than
30 minutes).

Also, the problems are very palpable and concrete and the drive to solve them
is much stronger than in an interview, where the anxiety of failing the
interview hangs over your head.

~~~
ksk
You are conflating many things. Nobody ever has expected candidates to produce
an answer that would be the equivalent of months of work.

Basic CS/Math/AI/Physics knowledge affords you a starting point that's further
along in the development/tweaking of an algorithm. That is __NOT __the end
point. Its simply - knowing whats out there.

If you start with "well let me go read about whats out there" you will only
have time for superficial knowledge from wikipedia or what have you. Because
that starting set of knowledge takes years to accumulate. Testing whether you
have this starting set is a crucial setup in knowing whether a candidate is
going to constantly end up wasting time reading up on basic stuff. You can't
build a plane by opening a high school physics book.

One other thing is that when you have a broad enough set of domain knowledge
in your head, its much more likely that you're able to connect the dots cross-
domains. This is essential if you're going to be doing some interesting
algorithmic work.

Of course, all of what I said is predicated upon you being interested in that
sort of work.

------
ignoramous
To those who are unaware, in a country like India, there's real a lack of
opportunities to work for top firms. What InterviewBit does is not just solve
a problem of matching candidates with prospective employers, but solve the
problem of preparing the candidate for the interviews. The success of
interview books like one by Gayle Lakmann McDowell is an indicator enough that
there's a huge market for this sort of stuff.

Courses like one offered by InterviewBit provides a lot of candidates with a
clear curriculum to getting a job at a mega-corp like Google, Amazon,
LinkedIn, Microsoft, or Facebook. Think of it as a highly specialized course
in Interviewing. Of course, the right approach would be to what Recurse Center
and the Insights Foundation are doing... focusing on the means (gaining
expertise), rather the end itself (getting a job, making an earning); but
that's not a priority in a country like India where STEM graduates by the
millions graduate every year and only a smaller percentage of them land jobs
at a "dream company" as it were.

I personally think InterviewBit is an excellent product/market fit for a
country like India. They're also good acquisition targets for companies like
HackerRank, and LinkedIn.

InterviewBit's co-founder on the product: [https://www.quora.com/What-are-
Anshuman-Singh-and-Abhimanyu-...](https://www.quora.com/What-are-Anshuman-
Singh-and-Abhimanyu-Saxena-working-on)

~~~
syshackbot
100% agree with you..

------
zerr
It is frustrating how much time and energy is wasted on these useless tech
interviews when it really has nothing to do with most real world jobs out
there.

~~~
ayahusa
Says the guy who was asking around if he should join Google, 14 days ago.

FYI, the "useless" tech interviews are what would get you in, for now, or
unless you are this guy: [http://imgur.com/Fn1a8xr](http://imgur.com/Fn1a8xr)

~~~
zerr
> Says the guy who was asking around if he should join Google, 14 days ago.

You mean this?

[http://www.quora.com/Is-Google-a-good-company-to-join-
for-a-...](http://www.quora.com/Is-Google-a-good-company-to-join-for-a-mid-
career-software-developer-with-10-years-of-experience?share=1)

That was a question someone asked on Quora, and I thought there was an
interesting discussion regarding joining Google as a mid-career professional
(the conclusion was that it is not a good idea, Google is more fresh-graduate
oriented shop - thus the need for that useless interviews, I believe).

As for personally me, these kind of interviews is one of the main reasons I've
never applied to Google (other reasons: not remote friendly, not part-time
friendly, and now I know - not mid-career friendly...).

------
andrei512
Similar concept -
[https://www.talentbuddy.co/practice](https://www.talentbuddy.co/practice)

~~~
simi_
I can vouch for TalentBuddy, they have a great service.

If you're interviewing, I maintain a list here (that desperately needs some
attention from me, btw):
[https://github.com/andreis/interview](https://github.com/andreis/interview)

------
smcl
Thanks for this. I'm absolutely awful in Tech Interviews (I'm a competent
developer but I'm overcome with self-doubt and anxiety in these situations)
and I'm planning on a move very soon. I've been putting it off because of the
stress of the interview process, so hopefully this will help!

------
eranation
Well done, I'm really impressed, works well on mobile, feels like elevate for
CS. Still lot of work, but better than anything else out there that I know of.

One obvious question: How do you plan to monetize? Become a hiring broker like
piazza? Do these things work?

------
hellboy_86
very good sight for the preparation of interview.The coachs are very
helpful,they will listen your problem even at midnight and tell you the way to
solve the problem

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mkagenius
Hey OP, I found the parallax image kind of jerky on scroll. OSX, Chrome
Latest.

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dotdi
The signup form seems to reject passwords with special characters but there
are no indications besides "8 characters minimum". Kinda lame.

------
bunshin
login/signup over http ╯□）╯︵-┻━┻

------
simi_
Template modified from here [0]; doesn't inspire too much confidence to be
honest.

0: [http://startbootstrap.com/template-overviews/landing-
page/](http://startbootstrap.com/template-overviews/landing-page/)

~~~
oskarth
These types of nitpicky, detail-oriented comments are toxic. Who cares? The
only thing that matters right now is that they solve a real problem and do it
well. Anything else is peripherals at this point.

