I feel your pain on these ‘trick’ algorithm tests and I doubt most of the people that work at some of these companies had to even take them.
So, I’ve heard a little bit about the book ‘cracking the coding interview’ and services like hackerrank, codewars, topcoder etc…
Are these the types of resources to look at to prepare for this part of the employment guantlet, does anyone have any experiences with these services/resources that wants to share?
Especially the crack the coding interview book and maybe hackerrank?
@kevinSmith Keep your head up and keep pushing!
@microbay I used to use hackerrank to practice Python. It’s been a while. But I liked it. I think that the challenges are appropriate and really stretch your problem solving skills with code.
I can’t comment whether or not it’s useful for preparing for interviews though.
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Cracking the Code Interview is a very good book and I’ve been working through it. Unfortunately, it’s not in JS, but you can kind of read the examples as pseudo code. And there are people that have published their JS solutions online. It’s kind of a review for me - I had all those data structures in high school in Pascal and then in college in C - but still, it’s useful stuff.
Some of the sites like hackerrank and codewars… I don’t know, I kind of burned out on some of those. Some of them, it’s just people trying to create convoluted algorithms and then they have secret test conditions. I’ve gotten into a few arguments with people whose algorithms were wrong. I remember I created a test and worked hard at it and learned how to do the test suite. I put it up and within a few hours, someone had copied my idea (shoddily) and put it up as their own. It’s a crap fest, but there is some value in it, I guess. But you got to put up with some idiots.
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I have just done a test in Chrome console, and it turned out undefined
let a = ((‘foo’+false)/5)?(typeof{}+7):7**true%4-1
undefined
console.log(a)
undefined
If I get presented with a test like this, I’ll write Syntax Error as my answer
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At some point those dumb quotes got changed to smart (curly) quotes. JS doesn’t like that.
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Hey,
I just bought this one on Udemy,
I have an interview with Luxoft next Tuesday and I will spend some time using this as prep.
I will write a review and update you on how it went.
Thanks
https://www.udemy.com/javascript-interview-prep/learn/v4/overview
The test are designed to make you fail. They use them to see how you troubleshoot, plan, handle pressure, and take failure. That is more important than actually completing it. It shows them a variety of things about you as a person and also to what level of the problem you can reach. You are NOT supposed to finish them, so don’t that you are going into the interview. Instead, focus on how you present yourself in the the areas I mentioned. It doesn’t hurt to ask them to phone a friend. It will make them laugh. If they happen to laugh, ask one of the interviewers to help you. lol. I actually did that in an interview once.
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Not in this case. There is not follow up. You either pass or you’re done.
wow that’s new to me.
How did the interview go? Was the course any good?
course is fantastic! unfortunately, I passed the interview with flying colors, but the salary and location of the position were not something I looked forward to, so I declined.
I was told I was going to be able to stay in GDL, but they wanted me to move to the US. ATM I am not wiling to do that.
Funny stat. After 11 months of daily JS practice @Codewars.com, I calculated it in a sec! This means I am close to becoming a JS Ninja 
Anyway I agree with your post. Most interviews are about Data Structures, Algorithms, mpla mpla mpla and after you get the job they put you to change the border buttons in their web forms!