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Ask HN: What are the best interview questions you've been asked?

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Re: Ask HN: What are the best interview questions you've been asked?

#31

Post by bsvalley »

joe563323 wrote: post #28
bsvalley wrote: post #23

Majority of the interview questions for software developers are retarded. It's either too academic (reverse a linked list) or too specific (What is the difference between StringBuffer and StringBuilder in Java?). To answer your question - none.

Being too specific is only bad unless you have not listed as your experience in the domain. But being too academic is actually good. The academic questions are constants irrespective of the domain in which the coding is done.

Put it this way - If you ask academic questions to a senior engineer during an interview, you might as well hire a college student. It will cost you less money and the student might even be a better fit, based on your evaluation.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best interview questions you've been asked?

#32

Post by api_or_ipa »

antoaravinth wrote: post #7

Find the minimum value in the stack in O(1) both time and space complexity.

I have a novel solution: use a delta ~~queue~~ stack! Instead of pushing straight numbers, push the delta of each new value against the next smaller value currently in the stack. Sadly I can't find a resource for this data structure. I learned about it in university when writing a sleep() function for an OS I was writing. On each tick, you simply decrement the first value (or pop it if it's 0).

[]

push(1) : [1]

push(2) : [1,1]

push(3) : [1,1,1]

push(3) : [1,1,1,0]

pop() : 3, [1,1,1]

pop() : 3, [1,1]

pop() : 2, [1]

pop() : 1 [0]

Re: Ask HN: What are the best interview questions you've been asked?

#34

Post by [deleted] »

harpocrates wrote: post #3

Consider two directed acyclic graphs where each node has a hash that depends on its value and its parent's hashes. Suppose you have a slow connection and one of the graphs is remote, how do you figure out as efficiently as possible which nodes both graphs have? The trick is to sample random nodes from the remote graph. If you get back a node that has the same hash as a node in your graph, you know that local and remo…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What are the best interview questions you've been asked?

#35

Post by laurieg »

daysforbeef wrote: post #27
cpt1138 wrote: post #21

A very senior guy comes in the room where I am with a very concentrated look on his face and my resume in his hand. On my resume its mentioned that I have a lot of experience bringing security relevant concepts to inexperienced people. So he describes a problem hes actually working through when he was "interrupted" to come interview me. He was trying to terminate an SSL connection, modify the stream (for video manipu…

A very senior dev had to be explained he couldn't do a man-in-the-middle attack on an encrypted stream without the server's private key? With all due respect and I don't know much about security but something seems off, maybe you haven't explained the whole story or maybe I'm getting something wrong.

I think the implication is that the senior dev conducting the interview wasn't really interrupted (hence the quotes around the word) and that it was just how the realistic interview question was presented.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best interview questions you've been asked?

#36

Post by [deleted] »

joe563323 wrote: post #28
bsvalley wrote: post #23

Majority of the interview questions for software developers are retarded. It's either too academic (reverse a linked list) or too specific (What is the difference between StringBuffer and StringBuilder in Java?). To answer your question - none.

Being too specific is only bad unless you have not listed as your experience in the domain. But being too academic is actually good. The academic questions are constants irrespective of the domain in which the coding is done.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What are the best interview questions you've been asked?

#38

Post by dagw »

"Here are 4 projects we're currently working on and that you might be involved with if you work here. On a scale from 1-5 how interested would you be to work on them. Briefly explain your reasoning"

Or any variation on "here's a real problem we are actually having. Do you have any ideas about how one might go about solving it?"

and bonus worst question:

"do you have kids/what does your family life look like?"

Re: Ask HN: What are the best interview questions you've been asked?

#39

Post by balamaci »

antoaravinth wrote: post #7

Find the minimum value in the stack in O(1) both time and space complexity.

What field of programming have you implemented that? I'm curios, is it in kernel development, some DB design. Not trolling, just curios where that usecase where this would come in handy and why ask it if it's not a direct relation to what you are doing.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best interview questions you've been asked?

#40

Post by rurban »

Always the non-technical questions. HR is usually staffed with psychologists, and they try to find questionable personalities, "good fit".

I talked with one hiring lady 30 minutes about movies and surfing.

The technical questions are usually superfluous if you have a proper resume and published work online. Nobody needs that crap.

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