Sites like this make me sad. For some reason it reminds me of an article I recently read in the <i>New Yorker</i> about Magnus Carlsen and his comments about how widespread use of chess software and databases is ruining human chess, because people have started to think like the computers. Too much reliance on information, less on originality.<p>Based on my experience, A lot of tech interviews in large companies nowadays are mostly done by young people who have limited understanding of what a good employee is (because more tech savvy guys don't want to waste time with interviews) and who therefore keep asking rote questions like: "how do you shuffle a deck of cards", or (my favorite) "What is the 'mutable' keyword do?" and string matching the answer to the right one in their minds. This in turn has affected the interview preparation process, consisting mostly of memorizing the answers to the rote questions.<p>Which (as the architect in <i>The Matrix</i> said) has led the would-be coders, inexorably, here and similar sites.
Haha, this is just the logical successor to brain dumps <a href="http://mcse-braindumps.net/" rel="nofollow">http://mcse-braindumps.net/</a><p>"if you read our exam dumps Seriously, you will pass the exam 100%"<p>vs<p>"candidates will be able to leap through the common hurdles of technical interviews"<p>These sites do neither candidates nor interviewers any favours.
I think this project would be far more useful as a computer-science-version of Project Euler (<a href="http://projecteuler.net/" rel="nofollow">http://projecteuler.net/</a>). People could then compete on full, working implementations of common interview questions in a variety of languages, that must execute on e.g. Codepad (<a href="http://codepad.org/" rel="nofollow">http://codepad.org/</a>), rather than posting what seem to be really wishy-washy, hand-wavy answers to puerile questions.<p>Then, perhaps with strong moderation, only questions that demand some compromises should be accepted. e.g. implement a container that can be traversed both forwards and backwards. What are the complexities of your container? How could you improve X, and what would the cost be? etc.
What's the goal of this site? I'm not sure I'd want to ask someone a question that they may have already read the answer to. When I interview someone, I want to know what they actually know or can figure out with hints, not whether they have Googled for the right list of questions.<p>Edit: oh, even worse, it tags them by the company that asks the question. Great. I'm sure those companies will appreciate having to come up with brand new questions for each candidate. And candidates will really be better off getting in based on memorized answers, then finding themselves unable to solve the actual problems in the job. (sarcasm)
I think "XOR Swap" sums up my opinion on most Tech Interview Questions.<p>The only question I would ever ask about the XOR Swap trick would probably be "Give 3 reasons never to use this" (assuming you are in a language as least as high level as C).
Most of the good candidates I have interviewed prepare a lot for interviews already so I doubt this helps them much. All of the bad candidates I have interviewed do no prep work at all so this won't help them either.
This site severely needs a way to rate other people's answers or something. Even just to comment on them. Otherwise it's just silly.<p>Case in point: <a href="http://xorswap.com/questions/85-what-is-a-hash-table-how-would-you-implement-one-and-what-is-the-complexit#answers" rel="nofollow">http://xorswap.com/questions/85-what-is-a-hash-table-how-wou...</a><p>No offense to ankur, but his hash function is the silliest hash function ever. It looks intelligent and reasonable and is the kind of answer I would trust if I didn't know better. But what kind of hash function is injective? If I wanted to store arbitrary doubles into his hash table I would need a zettabyte (that is a billion terabytes) of memory. Ooops. I should be able to warn people about that somehow.
I welcome sites like this. By spreading the answers to these largely contrived questions, perhaps we can get employers to move to methods which actually reveal one's ability to get stuff done and create value.