91–100 of 147 posts
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…
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…
> I never found out the BEST way to share data between programs. In fact, I'm still looking. I think we all are. Copy-paste.
>Copy-paste.
You may joke, but it's the most universally supported, and therefore the most likely to be available.
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…
> I never found out the BEST way to share data between programs Come on, add another layer of indirection! When given a problem to solve, hand back another problem. In this case: Q: "I want the SIMPLEST possible way to synchronize two threads. What is it?" A: The SIMPLEST possible way to synchronize two threads is a global maximal element (not necessarily unique) of a poset induced by a partial ordering on possible m…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If he gave reasonable answers when pressed, despite being initially resistant, it sounds like the interview didn't give any insight into whether he was a good employee or not.
It certainly did! I just didn't understand at the time not to hire employees who simply say "I'd Google it" over and over :D.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If he gave reasonable answers when pressed, despite being initially resistant, it sounds like the interview didn't give any insight into whether he was a good employee or not.
It certainly did! I just didn't understand at the time not to hire employees who simply say "I'd Google it" over and over :D.
That said, being able to at least describe some use cases of some relatively simple data structure is not too much to ask.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
linked list is not complex for christ sake.
Have you ever hired developers? FizzBuzz is still a very effective filter.
1. Write a function that determines if a number is prime. If they didn't know what a prime number was, we would tell them.
2. A simple problem that required designing a database schema and sql query that involved a left outer join.
There were a lot of developers who couldn't do it.
On the other hand, there was one developer who was just learning c#, who had spent most of his time doing VB.net, couldn't answer a lot of the technical questions but we could tell by his thought process and how he explained real world problems he solved that he would be a great asset to the company. We fought for him over more "senior" developers.
When I have a chance to hire again, I'm going to fight to get him -- even though he sucks at interviewing and i might have to do a little convincing.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
linked list is not complex for christ sake That depends on the language. If you're using something without pointers or references it's quite hard.
Hmm, which (general) language has no pointers or references?
They all use them internally, but don't tend to make them available to the programmer (usually because they aren't needed).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If he gave reasonable answers when pressed, despite being initially resistant, it sounds like the interview didn't give any insight into whether he was a good employee or not.
It certainly did! I just didn't understand at the time not to hire employees who simply say "I'd Google it" over and over :D.