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Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

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Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#31

Post by golergka »

spython wrote: post #2

This reminds me of Jewish Problems[0], designed to "prevent Jews and other undesirables from getting a passing grade" at the entrance exams to the math department of Moscow State University. [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556

Wow, I never knew they actually published a paper on it. Coming from a Moscow math school that traditionally had a lot of jewish students, most of whom went on to MSU to study math, I remember studying these exact problems - although in my time, this filter was supposed to long been gone.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#32

Post by wolfgke »

pinewurst wrote: post #9
jfasi wrote: post #7

As someone who does both a lot of interviewing (at Google) and gives a lot of advice on interviewing to people just starting out, this rhymes with my intuition about why some people get into interviews: even without the use of brainteasers (which, for the record, are not used at Google), the interview process is hard . People rarely come out of it without at least a twinge of frustration of humiliation. I'm not immun…

It's like military academy (or fraternity) hazing. You've been abused, therefore you want to pass the load of that abuse on. Maybe you delude yourself into calling it "tradition" or "high standards" or maybe you're just honest and enjoy the sadism of it all.

> It's like military academy (or fraternity) hazing. You've been abused, therefore you want to pass the load of that abuse on.

I really cannot imagine why people have this behavior. I was often treated unfairly in life, so I try to architect systems that attempt to avoid my perceived unfairness so that the next generation does not have to suffer similarly (ideally in way for which correctness can be shown in a mathematically rigid way).

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#33

Post by mike_ivanov »

gcatalfamo wrote: post #12
jfasi wrote: post #7

As someone who does both a lot of interviewing (at Google) and gives a lot of advice on interviewing to people just starting out, this rhymes with my intuition about why some people get into interviews: even without the use of brainteasers (which, for the record, are not used at Google), the interview process is hard . People rarely come out of it without at least a twinge of frustration of humiliation. I'm not immun…

I have been interviewed at Google and I was given a brainteaser. "Can you estimate Google AdWords revenue for Italy - B2B?"

Oh, that is how they do it. /s

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#34

Post by ElysianEagle »

I realize that the study was specifically talking about brainteasers, but I wonder if irrelevant algorithm questions have a similar motivation? I was once asked at an interview at a FAANG company to come up with an algo for finding the longest palindromic subsequence (!). At another I was asked to get all partitions of an integer (https://www.whitman.edu/mathematics/cgt_online/book/section0...).

I'm pretty certain I'd never be working on problems of that nature as part of the role.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#35

Post by sigi45 »

jfasi wrote: post #7

As someone who does both a lot of interviewing (at Google) and gives a lot of advice on interviewing to people just starting out, this rhymes with my intuition about why some people get into interviews: even without the use of brainteasers (which, for the record, are not used at Google), the interview process is hard . People rarely come out of it without at least a twinge of frustration of humiliation. I'm not immun…

I failed a google interview and it is frustrating. Emotional speaking, the rejection was hard but also other rejections as well.

At least at google i got feedback, audi did not. No feedback after coding project and 2 interviews sucks hard...

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#36

Post by [deleted] »

gcatalfamo wrote: post #16
grivescorbett wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn’t a brain teaser. It’s market size estimation, I’m guessing this was not an engineering role?

How is that question different from "please estimate how many golf ball fit in a school bus" ? The only thing changing are parameters. EDIT: it was for the Search team, search spam prevention, can't remember role it's been 4-5 years, sorry.

[deleted]

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#37

Post by grivescorbett »

gcatalfamo wrote: post #16
grivescorbett wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn’t a brain teaser. It’s market size estimation, I’m guessing this was not an engineering role?

How is that question different from "please estimate how many golf ball fit in a school bus" ? The only thing changing are parameters. EDIT: it was for the Search team, search spam prevention, can't remember role it's been 4-5 years, sorry.

If it was an engineering role I’d definitely call it a brain teaser. But for say a marketing role, an interviewers wants to see that you understand the way money flows through the business and what the parameters therein are. Maybe it’s still a brain teaser but I would say it’s relevant to the job.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#39

Post by titanix2 »

gcatalfamo wrote: post #12
jfasi wrote: post #7

As someone who does both a lot of interviewing (at Google) and gives a lot of advice on interviewing to people just starting out, this rhymes with my intuition about why some people get into interviews: even without the use of brainteasers (which, for the record, are not used at Google), the interview process is hard . People rarely come out of it without at least a twinge of frustration of humiliation. I'm not immun…

I have been interviewed at Google and I was given a brainteaser. "Can you estimate Google AdWords revenue for Italy - B2B?"

"Estimating it from the taxes paid to the state, I would say 0€." (Yes, that’s not the kind of expected answer)

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#40

Post by sjg007 »

gcatalfamo wrote: post #12
jfasi wrote: post #7

As someone who does both a lot of interviewing (at Google) and gives a lot of advice on interviewing to people just starting out, this rhymes with my intuition about why some people get into interviews: even without the use of brainteasers (which, for the record, are not used at Google), the interview process is hard . People rarely come out of it without at least a twinge of frustration of humiliation. I'm not immun…

I have been interviewed at Google and I was given a brainteaser. "Can you estimate Google AdWords revenue for Italy - B2B?"

Get population estimate for all countries with adword revenue, get adword revenue for each of these countries, fit to a linear model, predict italy. Or calculate adword revenue per capita and apply.
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