Haha - whiteboard firing squad - I like that. Thank you for the offer to do a trial interview. I really appreciate that! Let me see how this week interviews go, and I may take you up on that.
As opposed to failing 2 out of 2 whiteboard interviews, the "live coding" sessions have been a mixed experience for me. It often works just fine if I'm given a clearly defined problem at the beginning of the interview and enough time to quietly think about it. It does not work very well when I'm asked behavioral questions first, coding session is limited to 20 minutes, problem keeps evolving and interviewer comes across impatient or in a rush. Solving a LeetCode/HackerRank hard problem within an hour also does not work for me. But most companies in my experience have been more reasonable than that so far.
Btw, TripleByte (no affiliation) does a much better job at technical screens in my opinion than the rest of the companies I tried so far. I wish more companies would use them.
Yes, starting with a brute force solution is a good advise. That paid off for me a couple of times. I need to keep reminding that myself - sometimes I get carried away trying to jump straight ahead to something more optimal.
Yeah, that would require a whiteboard and a programmer friend who is kind of enough to endure the misery of watching me struggle with a marker, trying to remember how to write by hand again..
I have very little experience interviewing (my previous job lasted 10+ years, my current one - almost 6). But I thought that solving problems on a whiteboard is fairly common, if not a golden standard for an on-site. At least both of the on-sites I had recently had a whiteboard component.
I think certain problems are a good _partial_ fit for a whiteboard interview: math/geometry, graphs and trees, combinatorics, system design. However, it does not feel natural to solve the _entire_ problem on a whiteboard. Additionally, I was also expecting whiteboard sessions to be a collaboration and a discussion. That hasn't been my experience so far.. I had either very little feedback, or a feedback that was more confusing than helpful (to me at least). Hence the question if I can do anything at an interview to increase the chances of a positive outcome. Or if there is a systematic approach to this problem.
Yes, I think that will help. For me personally it is also helpful to be able to analyze the problem by myself, without having to talk through it. Being able to write some code in an editor is also helpful as it springs my brain into action. Not sure how to adapt all of that for a whiteboard interview. Maybe a mental trick? Or an entirely different way to approach the problem?
Just wanted to share another thought about protection from bots. In my tests, I didn't get any retweets from bots or other fake accounts. I think it is because iOS promo codes don't have any tangible value to a bot operator. You cannot easily resell a promo code (AFAIK). And money is what they are after. I'm telling this from experience because I also tried to run a gift card giveaway from the same account I usually run promo code giveaways. I don't have many followers, just a bit shy of 200. The rules were similar: chance to win a $25 gift card for a retweet. I had about 20 retweets, only one of them was a real person. Everything else was retweeted by seemingly fake accounts, who followed my right before retweeting.
I'm not saying bots will not be an issue. But I'd like to gather more data on this.
That's what I thought, only most recent timeline counts. From my experience anything older than 15-30 minutes is not noticed anymore. So I agree, that's a good amount of time to use as the grace period. Just intuitively I think people wouldn't care to remove their retweets. I might be wrong though. Need to get more data on this.
I read Twitter ToS pretty carefully, and I didn't find anything that my service would violate. As for Apple, still need to look into that.. It is something I see all the time though. And I do it for my own apps without any issues so far.
It is not for everybody, that's for sure. But if you want to run a giveaway of iOS promo codes on Twitter then you'll see that it is kind of a tedious task. You need to constantly check who retweeted your tweet, get a new promo code from the list, send a message to the person, delete the promo code from the list of available.. I was so bored doing that, I decided to build this service. :)
Also, you get extra exposure every time when your tweet is retweeted by one of your followers.
Thanks! I built it because I wanted to use it myself. You can read more about pricing here:
https://www.productpush.io/pricing
Essentially, i wanted to have per usage fee people would be comfortable paying instead of doing the same task manually.
I thought about this possibility actually. At least for my apps I only get retweets from real users. In future, I can try to implement a combo of:
a) Flat campaign fee with no charges for retweets. So you won't pay for bots.
b) Send a link instead of a promo code. The code is only displayed (and considered as used) after the receiver follows the link or solves a captcha.
That's true. But my service doesn't detect the retweet right away. So it has to stay retweeted for some (currently about 1 minute) period of time. I can tweak this parameter in future if I see that users misuse the service and undo retweets after receiving a code.
That's a good point. Thank you for the suggestion. I guess I'm a bit naive not thinking about this right away. :) Not sure if it is fair to only count retweets with 100-200 followers though.. Plenty of novice Twitter users don't have that amount of followers. What if I just charge a flat campaign fee? Or maybe a duration based fee? Need to think a bit more about it..
That's right, it can deliver any "string" as a reward. I personally only needed to deliver iOS promo codes, so it seemed like the most useful application to me.
I was surprised how much the article resonated with my personal experience. I too had anxiety attacks and ER visit fearing it was a heart disease. Many (too many) doctor visits later, here is what works the best for me:
- Exercise. Can not stress this enough. I swim 3 times a week for about 45 minutes each. It loosens my body and significantly elevates anxiety. Strength exercise helps too.
- Healthy diet. Minimum sugar, alcohol, caffein, processed foods.
- Lunch walks, weekend hikes.
- Standing desk. Don't have enough data yet but I think it was helpful overall. As someone mentioned below, I believe too that body tensions and pains have a lot to do with sitting too much.
- Enough sleep.
As opposed to failing 2 out of 2 whiteboard interviews, the "live coding" sessions have been a mixed experience for me. It often works just fine if I'm given a clearly defined problem at the beginning of the interview and enough time to quietly think about it. It does not work very well when I'm asked behavioral questions first, coding session is limited to 20 minutes, problem keeps evolving and interviewer comes across impatient or in a rush. Solving a LeetCode/HackerRank hard problem within an hour also does not work for me. But most companies in my experience have been more reasonable than that so far.
Btw, TripleByte (no affiliation) does a much better job at technical screens in my opinion than the rest of the companies I tried so far. I wish more companies would use them.