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I've called out interviewers for stupid puzzle questions multiple times. Never got the job in any case, but I like to think I improved the hiring process marginally before being rejected.
OK - but here's a genuine problem that came up the other day in my work (reconciling two datasets - we have various many-to-one mappings of ids that we then want to reconcile against each other). I think it's quite a neat computer science/algorithm challenge, so here goes: Write a function which takes as input a list of sets, many of which are not disjoint, but will output a list of sets where all of the non-disjoint…
OK - but here's a genuine problem that came up the other day in my work (reconciling two datasets - we have various many-to-one mappings of ids that we then want to reconcile against each other). I think it's quite a neat computer science/algorithm challenge, so here goes: Write a function which takes as input a list of sets, many of which are not disjoint, but will output a list of sets where all of the non-disjoint…
Your two examples have the same inputs but different outputs if I am reading this right. What did I miss?
OK - but here's a genuine problem that came up the other day in my work (reconciling two datasets - we have various many-to-one mappings of ids that we then want to reconcile against each other). I think it's quite a neat computer science/algorithm challenge, so here goes: Write a function which takes as input a list of sets, many of which are not disjoint, but will output a list of sets where all of the non-disjoint…
Your two examples have the same inputs but different outputs if I am reading this right. What did I miss?
The hiring manager of a small software company gave me a quick brief before handing me off to his technical heavy. "He's hard to get along with, but he's really smart. Oh, and he has two PhDs. He'll tell you that." I was ushered in. The Guy with Two PhDs (he showed me his business card first, and there were indeed two PhDs on it) asked me: "What is the simplest way to synchronize two threads?" I rattled off some sync…
If someone asks you the "best" way to do something but does not give you context for the problem being solved then the question is stupid. There is no all-purpose "best" way to do anything when it comes to complex systems. You use the "best" way for the problem in hand that may be shared memory, pipes, writing to a file, RPC, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could model the problem as a graph (each integer represents a vertex and two consecutive integers an edge, e.g. (1, 2, 3) is a graph with nodes 1,2,3 and edges between 1 and 2 and 2 and 3). Then your problem is just to find all connected components of the graph ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connected_component_(graph_the... .
Yeah but realising that two "nodes" of the graph are connected requires doing a set intersection, which I concluded was quite expensive to do between all possible sets. i.e. building the "graph" was an expensive operation... unless I've misunderstood you.
Thats hilarious. I was once interviewing for a C++ position and the interviewer presented me with some C code with a broken "swap" implementation and a driver function and asked me to fix it. I simply prefixed the call to swap with "std::". He wasn't very happy about it. ;-)
Seriously that's the correct answer as far as any productive engineer is concerned right?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could model the problem as a graph (each integer represents a vertex and two consecutive integers an edge, e.g. (1, 2, 3) is a graph with nodes 1,2,3 and edges between 1 and 2 and 2 and 3). Then your problem is just to find all connected components of the graph ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connected_component_(graph_the... .
Yeah but realising that two "nodes" of the graph are connected requires doing a set intersection, which I concluded was quite expensive to do between all possible sets. i.e. building the "graph" was an expensive operation... unless I've misunderstood you.
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