<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>kamaal</author><text>&amp;gt;&amp;gt;I found none of them cared whether I am thinking on my feet for a solution or not.&lt;p&gt;There are section of people among programmers who give away tens of hours of time per week on sites of the likes you mentioned, these people have no other hobbies, hardly do any other productive or creative work, have no real social circle and generally spend all the time of their life in &amp;#x27;karma hunger&amp;#x27; kind of a pursuit for points in solving some thousand people like themselves already solved.&lt;p&gt;Now they have to justify all mega massive wastage of time by at least making it look some kind of an intellectually superior activity which other people are incapable of. They might as well fail a few people in the interviews to get some consolation for that kind of wastage of time.&lt;p&gt;Everytime I see people spending scores of time on these leetcode kind of sites, I&amp;#x27;m reminded of exams in India, where students just sit down and mind numbingly practice several years of question papers in hopes of finding similar questions or sometimes the same questions with minor modifications in exams. Finally you get students who barely know anything at all but pass the exams with high marks.</text><parent_chain><item><author>catchmrbharath</author><text>I had this view when I was interviewing for internships during this quarter. I have spent working and interviewing at a couple of places, before I came to pursue my masters and I believed people valued coming up with the solution on the spot.&lt;p&gt;I interviewed at atleast 10 places for internships and every single of them asked one of the questions from either leetcode or cracking the coding interview. I found none of them cared whether I am thinking on my feet for a solution or not. As long as you can reproduce the answers to the questions in a nice manner, you got selected. None of my interviewers were trying to understand &amp;#x2F; empathize how difficult it is to come up with a solution really quickly when you have not seen the problem before.&lt;p&gt;The thing I learnt through the ordeal is
1. Nobody cares whether you are thinking on your feet or not.
2. You need a month of preparation going into these sort of interviews.</text></item><item><author>geoelectric</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m all for interview prep, but this sounds like a fairly standard tech company loop.&lt;p&gt;I usually take a few days to brush up on algorithms and structures for the first one I do in a batch, and have some canned answers for the personal questions, but otherwise go in with what I know. Some of that&amp;#x27;s experience now, but I don&amp;#x27;t remember any point in my career where I&amp;#x27;d have done something this extensive. I hope the poster doesn&amp;#x27;t feel they need a month&amp;#x27;s prep every time they want to go test the waters on the job market!&lt;p&gt;I do agree with the frequent recommendations for Cracking the Coding Interview. As a lead who interviews frequently, my biggest tip is to be honest about what you do and don&amp;#x27;t know--take what you do know right to the limit then talk about how you&amp;#x27;d figure out the rest given normal professional time and resources.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not usually grading someone on whether they can solve my specific problem so much as whether I think they&amp;#x27;re someone I can work with while they do it. That said, if it&amp;#x27;s on your resume you&amp;#x27;d better be able to talk intelligently about it to whatever level makes sense for your experience. I definitely probe around that stuff to figure out if I can trust the rest.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Amazon software engineer interview</title><url>http://sobit.me/2016/07/08/amazon-software-engineer-interview/</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>yomly</author><text>&amp;gt; I believed people valued coming up with the solution on the spot.&lt;p&gt;So I 100% agree with this. Being intuitively clever and being able to apply what you know is intrinsically valuable:&lt;p&gt;Think of the extreme, imagine someone who is unable to apply something they&amp;#x27;ve learnt unless it&amp;#x27;s exactly in the context they learnt it.&lt;p&gt;That said, I think it&amp;#x27;s often underestimated how valuable prep is. Some people even get a bit salty over it, people who are unwilling to &amp;quot;jump through the hoops&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;As a teacher, I&amp;#x27;ve seen all kinds of people, people who need absolutely nothing to figure out things on their own, whose limit is only their imagination. On the other hand, there are bright people who need a bit of guidance but are nonetheless otherwise very brilliant.&lt;p&gt;We are the sum of our experiences. How we&amp;#x27;ve arrived at our present is completely unrelated to other people&amp;#x27;s. Some people have had parents who are scientific, other people were hacking consoles&amp;#x2F;linux&amp;#x2F;coding since they were 10. Other people got bored with their careers and decided to try something new in their late 20s.&lt;p&gt;Who&amp;#x27;s to say a month of prep is too much or too little to get ready for an interview.&lt;p&gt;Though, to the people who want to derive everything on the spot, I&amp;#x27;d ask:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;how did you figure out how to start a fire?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;when did you derive differential calculus?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;how old were you when you solved the schrodinger equation?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;My point is, &amp;quot;solving something on the fly&amp;quot; is a misnomer. Without a doubt, it takes intelligence to apply a combination of tricks to a new problem in an unfamiliar context. But trying to come up with a solution when you&amp;#x27;ve never seen the trick is a completely different ballgame, and its worth trying to see the picture from a different perspective.&lt;p&gt;Is the interview process flawed? Well that&amp;#x27;s an entirely different question
..</text><parent_chain><item><author>catchmrbharath</author><text>I had this view when I was interviewing for internships during this quarter. I have spent working and interviewing at a couple of places, before I came to pursue my masters and I believed people valued coming up with the solution on the spot.&lt;p&gt;I interviewed at atleast 10 places for internships and every single of them asked one of the questions from either leetcode or cracking the coding interview. I found none of them cared whether I am thinking on my feet for a solution or not. As long as you can reproduce the answers to the questions in a nice manner, you got selected. None of my interviewers were trying to understand &amp;#x2F; empathize how difficult it is to come up with a solution really quickly when you have not seen the problem before.&lt;p&gt;The thing I learnt through the ordeal is
1. Nobody cares whether you are thinking on your feet or not.
2. You need a month of preparation going into these sort of interviews.</text></item><item><author>geoelectric</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m all for interview prep, but this sounds like a fairly standard tech company loop.&lt;p&gt;I usually take a few days to brush up on algorithms and structures for the first one I do in a batch, and have some canned answers for the personal questions, but otherwise go in with what I know. Some of that&amp;#x27;s experience now, but I don&amp;#x27;t remember any point in my career where I&amp;#x27;d have done something this extensive. I hope the poster doesn&amp;#x27;t feel they need a month&amp;#x27;s prep every time they want to go test the waters on the job market!&lt;p&gt;I do agree with the frequent recommendations for Cracking the Coding Interview. As a lead who interviews frequently, my biggest tip is to be honest about what you do and don&amp;#x27;t know--take what you do know right to the limit then talk about how you&amp;#x27;d figure out the rest given normal professional time and resources.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not usually grading someone on whether they can solve my specific problem so much as whether I think they&amp;#x27;re someone I can work with while they do it. That said, if it&amp;#x27;s on your resume you&amp;#x27;d better be able to talk intelligently about it to whatever level makes sense for your experience. I definitely probe around that stuff to figure out if I can trust the rest.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Amazon software engineer interview</title><url>http://sobit.me/2016/07/08/amazon-software-engineer-interview/</url></story>