During phone and Virtual on-site interviews, if you are asked a problem you have already come across , do you let your interviewer know if you’ve seen the problem before or pretend this is the first time you’re encountering the problem? Edit: For those of you who vote yes, why do you inform the interviewer?
If the interviewer never reveals what he is going to ask before the interview I don't think I have to declare that I already know something.
Agreed , I’m curious as to why anyone would reveal that they have come across the problem before ?
A lot of people are saying that you shouldn't _have_ to reveal the answer, which I agree with, but I clicked yes because it asked if it is something I do, and yeah I tend to be open and honest about these sorts of things and it would never occur to me until afterwards that it is a bad idea or not. Two times it happened to me, one was a simple itoa function which I've written optimized versions for in my job before anyway and also did it on leetcode and understood a number of the overflow cases and didn't tell them any of that before starting, yet I _still_ managed to screw it up pretty bad. The other was like my 3rd question with a Google interviewer and he was saying he wasn't allowed to ask it any more because too many people had seen it and I was like "yeah, I've seen it", and it has some trick where you can flag number as -ve in order to claim that you don't use "additional space" in the algorithm, and we had a great chat about that. I don't know, it was fine I think.
Honorable, you are.
😂
Just answer the question
If you have seen the problem before but don’t know how to solve it, definitely take the chance to act honorable. If you know how to solve it, try your best to win the Oscar for best actor.
Actually this could backfire badly. Suppose they don’t change the question and they expect you to solve it in 5 minutes?
Wow, my heart beat increased when I saw this response. So I’m just gonna gun for best actor Oscar award all my life no matter what the question is.
I’d be way more impressed by a candidate’s honesty than their technical ability if this ever happened.
Yeah but if he gets the next problem wrong then all of the good impression will go out the window.
Then if the person solves it in like 10 mins with code, instead of letting him enjoy, you will ask him another questions just for the sake of spending that 45 mins ?
In one phone screen, the interviewer pressured me to say if I knew the question. I actually did and told them I already knew it before trying anything, then royally screwed up the next question. I got rejected. Learn from me and always pretend you don’t know.
Which company was this ?
You should never tell, I in my mind think I know this question beforehand as I had practiced, it's my headwork whose results is getting the same question. Recruiters ALWAYS ask a much harder question if you tell them you know it.
Most of these LC problems are derivative and test thinking / problem solving skills about as much as 8th grade algebra or an SAT test. Would you admit that you’ve factored a specific quadratic equation, or just acknowledge that you know how to go about solving it? You probably don’t remember the exact answer anyway. It is a stupid game and I don’t think the candidates owe the interviewers anything.
If I've seen it on that same loop, then yeah. It not 🤐
On my FB loop, I'd seen 5 of the 7 questions before. I did very well in that loop
Shhhh!