But is it math or programming skills you want to measure? Cause math is not programming. Hell, you don’t need to know more than high school math to program.
It is a domain specific skill in many domains.
Ask HN: How to assess interviewee math skills without test questions?
11–15 of 15 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to assess interviewee math skills without test questions?
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't need skills to pass tests. Many tests can be passed by memorizing solutions and cheating is common.
More importantly, for those who've been out of school for a while their math skills erode quickly. I'm having to reteach people basic linear algebra because they hadn't used it since their junior year of college 20 years ago and are now writing/maintaining programs that require it. Some of them were able to recall it with a bit of prompting, but for others it was a complete blank. For the former, the mechanics were s…
I understand now and agree with that point of view, thank you for clarification.
Now that you point it out, I have seen the same problem occur with electricians. They are very good workers, get along with everyone, are great team leaders and team members but struggle with simple single variable formulas like ohms law thus preventing them from being promoted to journeyman.
Re: Ask HN: How to assess interviewee math skills without test questions?
#13There are a few times where my better than average math skills were actually needed to solve a problem faced by the team I was on. These cases are so rare I'd say maybe 5 or less.
OTOH there are countless times my math sense of trends, growth, recognition of foldable cases, etc that I wouldn't be able to assess.
Can anyone give examples of math skills that would be useful day to day that a spreadsheet with simple formulas won't solve?
One example I can think of is solving a recurrence relation to get the big-O bound for an algorithm, but also rarely needed as the algorithm usually shows itself as being log, linear, poly or exp.
Re: Ask HN: How to assess interviewee math skills without test questions?
#14What space are you in that you need advance mathematics? I would think that you shouldn't really need more than average skills unless you are building the calculation software that everyone else is using.
Re: Ask HN: How to assess interviewee math skills without test questions?
#15There are a few times where my better than average math skills were actually needed to solve a problem faced by the team I was on. These cases are so rare I'd say maybe 5 or less. OTOH there are countless times my math sense of trends, growth, recognition of foldable cases, etc that I wouldn't be able to assess. Can anyone give examples of math skills that would be useful day to day that a spreadsheet with simple for…
Of course there's "Fast Inverse Square Root — A Quake III Algorithm"