P.S. I'm CEO of a Series A company. I get a lot of email from prospective candidates. I never hold it against them, and as long as it doesn't look like spam, I reply. Telling people not to send emails (I saw a bunch of that in the comments) is categorically bad advice.
I also regularly get cold emails from candidates. Most often for marketing roles, rarely for technical roles.
Cold emailing definitely wont hurt your chances at the job.
But to be effective, the outreach needs to be heavily tailored and personalized. You need to make it obvious you aren’t copy and pasting the email to 20 other people.
Would you actually hire a candidate from a cold email? I did it when I was in undergrad looking for research experience. But for professional level jobs it seems so presumptuous considering how you cost 10 or 20x more than an undergraduate on work study.
You certainly wouldn't hire someone from a cold email. But if they seem like they're the kind of person who's smart and gets things done, you can certainly get them into the process.
The purpose of these emails is just go get you in the door. From there, you gotta interview well.
Presumably budget is already set for the year and employees (at the level we talk about on HN) are extremely expensive. Whereas if you were an undergrad looking for work study, an intern, lowly mail room clerk, you are almost free for the organization.
You can try to short-circuit the AI Interviewer by just entering your solution into the IDE. OR you can ask to end the interview, and then you'll get a link to the solution.
We built it this way on purpose, though... the intent is to mimic an interview and gently force you to talk through your thought process, not to have yet another LeetCode clone.
We use Clearbit for enrichment: https://clearbit.com/ That said, all interviews on interviewing.io are anonymous unless you and your interviewer both explicitly opt in to unmask.
OP here.
A few of you have asked why we made these problems free. The answer is twofold, simple, and maybe even a bit underwhelming:
1) We want people to read the book (To wit, we've also made 9 chapters of the book free: http://bctci.co/free-chapters)
2) We want people to use interviewing.io
In my career, I've written a lot of stuff about hiring, and I've shared a lot of interview-related materials (e.g., full length interview replays). I hate paywalls for content, and you probably do too... and I have never regretted making it free. In my experience, putting good stuff out there is the best way to market to an eng audience.
I agree with what Mike said. We shared the content because we want people to read the book and to use interviewing.io... it's not because we've given up on it (see my longer comment about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44136448). We have yet to see any real evidence that technical interviews are dying.
What is hopefully dying is companies asking verbatim LeetCode questions and candidates having to memorize a bunch of questions. We wrote this book largely because we wanted to teach people how to think. I knowing how to think is only going to get more valuable.
I've seen hundreds of people do this without ill effect. I know it's counterintuitive, but it works. The times it doesn't work are listed in the post, but it's basically when there's limited headcount.
Shoot me an email at [email protected] if you'd like some mock interviews on us. I'm sorry we didn't get you there... but if it's a matter of more reps to get your speed up, happy to get you those for free.
I hope Mike jumps in to answer your question about where the book fits in, in a world where speed matters more than it used to.
I'm Aline, one of the authors. We actually doubled down on teaching the fundamentals in this book. If you've read it, please tell us where we could have done better.
If you have not read it, check out two of the technical chapters to see our approach to teaching binary search and sliding windows and let us know what you think: https://bctci.co/free-chapters
Sorry the opinion was based on the prior version of the book. I took a look at the link. My honest opinion is that binary search is kind of rushed in its break down. On the other hand, I really liked the explanation of the various sliding window problems since that is a topic that is normally not covered in CS fundamentals. I also like the pseudocode -- it reads well. I think a book focused on concepts could serve as a delightful companion to this book. Or simply add the pages. Thanks, i'm sure you will sell tons of copies.
P.S. I'm CEO of a Series A company. I get a lot of email from prospective candidates. I never hold it against them, and as long as it doesn't look like spam, I reply. Telling people not to send emails (I saw a bunch of that in the comments) is categorically bad advice.