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I've got an interview coming up for a company that works in "big data". This company specializes in analyzing very large datasets. I will be required to write sample code during the interview. How would you prepare for this type of interview? What types of algorithms would you brush up on?

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Read this and hit the books: steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-google.html – Jimmy Hoffa Oct 8 '12 at 19:28

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2 Answers

up vote 2 down vote

I would get a good night's sleep ahead of time. A clean shave will help too.

Joking aside, I never understood peoples' questions about preparing for an interview. Either you know the stuff or you don't. Companies specifically pick things you cannot cram for because hiring people who can regurgitate answers but not do the work are worse than worthless. You might get the job by studying hard, but what happens once you're there?

Getting a job you're ill-equipped to do is nothing but setting yourself up for long term failure.

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While I understand your sentiment, I think many interviewers tend to ask questions that most competent programmers intuitively understand, but have not taken the time to memorize. If an interviewer tells me to write a quicksort algorithm from scratch, as long as I can do a quick Google search to remind me of the details, I'll do fine. But do I actively spend time memorizing these things as a part of my everyday job? No, that's a waste of time. – Justin984 Oct 8 '12 at 19:44
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@Justin984 Then tell the interviewer that. It's completely reasonable to not memorize things, and some of these questions are traps to see if you understand the concept or simply regurgitate answers. (also consider if you want to work at a place where the interviewer expects you to memorize such things in this day and age). – Telastyn Oct 8 '12 at 19:55
I must say I totally disagree with you. Everything you've said is 100% sound if you do not want to worry about trying to get a job other than for a really good company that understands all these things where all the interviewers are completely aware of and sharing your beliefs on the topic. But if you aren't trying to filter down to the 1% of companies which are so enlightened, you're likely to be interviewd by someone happy to test people on completely memorizable trivia, this is the majority of interviews sadly in fact. – Jimmy Hoffa Oct 8 '12 at 20:39
@JimmyHoffa - Fair enough. My experience is that vastly more than 1% of companies are actually competent and the rest are surefire career killers. YMMV. – Telastyn Oct 8 '12 at 20:41
up vote 3 down vote

"Big data" is too generic. They can ask for a lot of things: Graphs, low level optimizations (bitwise operators, lookup tables, etc.), SQL and NoSQL distributed databases and database optimization, etc. Topcoder is a good place to practice your algorithmic skills. A nice book related with approaching a programming interview and sample problems is Cracking the Coding Interview.

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Unfortunately this is what I have to go on. I have not worked for this company before so I don't have insider details on exactly what they do. Thanks for the link though! – Justin984 Oct 8 '12 at 19:48

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