People from FAANG and the likes, I have a question. Do you guys ask DSA questions because those things are actually used by you on a daily basis or you guys ask them just because others are asking them in the interview and all you guys want to do is to look cool and sound intelligent?
Today, I cross-questioned the interviewer about the same and he told me that “They are not really using things like DP And Greedy Approach in their daily life”.
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Going to try and answer this obviously loaded question with sincerity. It depends a lot on the company, target team, and your specific role you’re applying for, but typically it’s not common to apply the concepts asked in software dev/eng interviews in your daily duties. You will at least semi-often find yourself considering DS&A questions, but more along the lines of which standard library implementation to choose to best solve a given problem rather than reinventing the wheel yourself like you do in interviews. However, like I said this depends; if you’re working on say an embedded system project where resources are highly constrained, you might find yourself needing to construct novel DS&A to fit a very specific situation.
That being said, interviewers don’t ask these questions to feel “cool” or “intelligent” - despite a potential lack of relevance to the duties of the actual job they do serve a purpose of making sure you know the fundamental concepts of software development that you’ll be leaning on. You may not need to implement a Hash Table from the ground up every day, but knowing the basics of how they work and the situations where they are strong/weak are certainly job-relevant.
Also - not a great justification but there’s no other field on earth where self-studying & practicing from free resources for an hour or two each night for a few months can help you land a job that comes with a 50+% comp increase well into the low/mid six figures, and Leetcode is currently a major component of how that is possible.
Last point is very valid, studying for 2-3 hrs for couple of months can land up
in 70-80 percent hike with the comfort of sitting at home and substantially high pay compared to other jobs.
Moreover people have a habit of complaining, compare it with a doctor's/ca or small business, they have their own struggles and don't have the comfort of WFH in this pandemic. We should feel blessed, this is what i feel.
An interviewer should never ask a question they don’t have a solution to. The questions aren’t asked to look good, they’re asked to measure your intelligence even if that question isn’t perfectly tailored to the role. They aren’t perfect but they also aren’t evaluated on perfection either (or at least they shouldn’t be) it’s about how you go about it.
Industry is occupied with 80% people who just know how to write if else statement and have learnt ds algo by heart.
Is scaler academy is good @amazon2?
I am a mentor there, they have a busy curriculum