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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

#61

Post by misiti3780 »

Syzygies wrote: post #53

I interviewed a full day at a mathematical hedge fund. Not exactly brainteasers, rather a barrage of good, solid math and stats questions. Such a day is exhilarating (like skiing the Olympics) but truly exhausting, and only partially related to whether one gets an offer. My advice to anyone doing this would be to give up the last 10% of performance in order to focus some on contextual awareness. These puzzles are a f…

where did you find examples to practice - im horrible at these types of questions but would like to get better.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#62

Post by biztos »

eip wrote: post #44
rrggrr wrote: post #5

The single most effective interview question I ask: "What do you want to do?". I drill down on that to a granulator level as I try to make sure the tasks, duties and overall position matches what the candidate really wants for themselves. Its followed-up with a "How would you do it?", again persisting in the discussion (not interrogation) until we both are comfortable with the sensibility and symmetry of the answers.

If you think anyone 'really' wants to build your shitty CRUD app then you are deluding yourself. Do you 'really' love your job? Would you do it for free?

I might not want your shitty CRUD app to exist per se, but the building of it might not be half bad, and I might learn something useful on the way and maybe even make some new friends.

It's not unreasonable to look for a job where some of it is what you'd do for free, if you didn't need the money.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#63

Post by dbt00 »

manish_gill wrote: post #50

I took an interview today and was asked a simple problem which I immediately answered with linear time complexity. The interviewer then went on to say "no I'm looking for a specific answer which involves a trick". Literally said those words. Eventually figured it out but I came away with a bad impression of the company. Not the kind of stuff I judge people on.

“Are most of your day to day problems solved by rote memorization of esoterica?”

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#64

Post by athenot »

welcome_dragon wrote: post #25
rossdavidh wrote: post #4

So, there's a hidden value to these sorts of questions, but it is useful to the interviewee, not the interviewer. If they use lots of these questions, you probably don't want to work there, or at least not for the person who's asking those questions.

I disagree, as long as getting the right answer isn't important. I flat out tell people I don't care if they get the right answer, that I just want to hear their thought process. Such questions used in this way are extremely valuable.

I do the same thing. It's how the thought process works that's interesting, not the result. There is no problem or teaser whose answer is both short enough to be devised during an interview AND is representative of how a candidate would perform in real projects. Our field deals with complex systems in many dimensions.

Instead, looking for how a candidate approaches a problem, do they just go for the obvious solutions, how creative will they go, any experience they can draw on, how well they overcome unknowns, etc.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#65

Post by throwawaymath »

rossdavidh wrote: post #4

So, there's a hidden value to these sorts of questions, but it is useful to the interviewee, not the interviewer. If they use lots of these questions, you probably don't want to work there, or at least not for the person who's asking those questions.

I don't think your second sentence is a good conclusion to draw. If nothing else, it's very difficult to find companies which will offer the highest compensation packages (or better) without also asking these questions. You're going to come across these questions no matter which of FAANG you apply to; the same applies to hedge funds.

We're not talking about tens of thousands here, either. The top companies have packages which (including liquid RSUs) involve low hundreds of thousands more in compensation. Not everyone is optimizing their career for income maximization, but if you are it's hard to do so without being at one of these companies.

On another note I've found that, at least in my experience, there is basically no correlation between whether or not people ask brainteasers/trivia in interviews and how competent they are or nice to work with. There probably aren't any interesting conclusions you can draw about personality based on interview formats without being biased in one direction or the other.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#66

Post by biztos »

EngineerBetter wrote: post #49

We ask people to pair-program with an interviewer on a realistic task. No tricks, no brainteasers. We just get to see how people do the job we want them to do.

Is pair-programming actually used in your company?

Just curious, as I do something similar but solely to see how the person writes code. Folks are free to pair-program or not once hired.

I've found almost everyone needs help on some simple part of the task, and how they respond to the help is pretty useful information.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#67

Post by moduspol »

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 a pet theory that when people interview they bring this buried frustration into the room with them and use the interviewing process to play the part of the people they feel humiliated them.

I think it's possible--but there was an experiment someone ran a few years ago with a guy applying to jobs in both software development and management (while qualified for both and resumes optimized for each). One of the key differences that was found is that software developers essentially started out at zero and every wrong answer / misstep essentially reduced their score. For the management interviews, it was tougher to answer something wrong, but each good answer earned points.

It naturally results in software developers feeling like they blew it, but managers just wondering if they wowed them more than the other candidates. To me that suggests it's something more inherent to software developer interviewing than a frustration bias. If I had to guess, it's just that aspects of software development are more measurable than in other roles, and there's more genuine fear of hiring someone who can't fizzbuzz.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#68

Post by segmondy »

throwawaymath wrote: post #59
Syzygies wrote: post #53

I interviewed a full day at a mathematical hedge fund. Not exactly brainteasers, rather a barrage of good, solid math and stats questions. Such a day is exhilarating (like skiing the Olympics) but truly exhausting, and only partially related to whether one gets an offer. My advice to anyone doing this would be to give up the last 10% of performance in order to focus some on contextual awareness. These puzzles are a f…

Would you say the questions that fund asked you are relevant to the work you do (or would be doing) there? I think that's the core criticism most people levy against the "high tech" interview questions.

People that don't get the offer tend to complain about such things. They are asking questions to measure how you think, to measure your potential, to see how you handle stress. If you are stressing over an interview, what will you do when you lose $1 million in 10 seconds?

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#69

Post by framebit »

I had one of these brainteaser questions in an interview once, and I liked my mathematician friend’s answer to it the best.

Q: Given infinite setup time and infinite money, how would you fill the inside of a 747 with ping pong balls as quickly as possible?

A: Define the inside of the plane as the exterior. Now, by definition, all ping pong balls are inside the plane. QED.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#70

Post by cjg »

Nokinside wrote: post #24

Brainteasers are good for psychological evaluation. How does one perform under stress or when they are challenged in social situation. If the goal is to to find out what somebody can do, state a problem and start working together to solve it. For example ask them to help you to solve some problem and guide you trough solving it.

Does the job involve high stress and a challenging social situation?

Doesn't sounds like somewhere I want to work.

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