kostka's blog

One easy trick to make $$$
By kostka, 5 years ago, In English

I noticed that in recent years, a lot of "pass any coding interview"-ads started appearing out of nowhere (or maybe I live under a rock). On the other hand, I worked in many places and talk to many people and no one ever mentioned participating in such courses/bootcamps before. Therefore, I would like to ask if you know any successful stories, where a person went to some programming bootcamp without any prior experience and then started working in some well-known IT company?

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5 years ago, # |
← Rev. 2   Vote: I like it +11 Vote: I do not like it

I can share how only doing competitive programming made me not perform well on a job interview. Competitive programming very rarely makes you think about:

  • linked_lists
  • hash maps
  • O(memory) better than O(runtime)
  • threading

But there is a huge Math.random() factor in job interviews in my opinion, so no doubt there are cases of inexperienced guys doing a bootcamp and getting a job.

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    5 years ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it +30 Vote: I do not like it

    True, interviewers are often like obsessed with hash maps as if it's the one most important thing from computer science. Some google booklet for interviewees even almost explicitly says so :)

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      5 years ago, # ^ |
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      Well, a lot of large-scale software development is about fast lookup in some sort of databases, so it kind of makes sense. Either exact lookup, through hashing, or close enough lookup, through nearest neighbour structures or rounding and then hashing. Situations where you can't do generic lookup are when the fun begins.

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      5 years ago, # ^ |
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      Hash maps + heaps + avl and Rb tree + a lot of luck factor..

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    5 years ago, # ^ |
    ← Rev. 2   Vote: I like it +8 Vote: I do not like it

    I might agree only with threading. Lately, I had an interview when I was asked to do something in parallel and I was really surprised, but I managed to remind myself how to do it with the documentation.

    For the other points: hash maps are used really often in problems. In POI we have a special tag for problems which focus on the limited memory (there are about 7 tasks with this tag if I remember correctly). Maybe linked lists are not very popular, but I saw some problems using them as well.

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5 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +12 Vote: I do not like it

Bump.

Nobody replies positively. Does it mean that courses and bootcamps are shit? I might make one in the future so it's quite important for me :D

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    5 years ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it +50 Vote: I do not like it

    Or that people taking them and making use of them are not active users of CF (which makes sense)

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