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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

#131

Post by nicoburns »

hectormalot wrote: post #121
pmiller2 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Why would I need to estimate that if I worked at Google?”

“I’d like to understand how you structure problems, we can do a different topic if you like?” “With ~50M people capable of clicking ads, and assuming they click one ad a day at 20cnt CPC, it would be around 3.6bn. I think my assumptions are on the high side, but order of magnitude is probably correct” If done well, solving a problem (not a brain teaser) together can yield insight in how people approach new challenges…

What I find weird about these questions, is that they are expected to be answered without any research? How often do you expect your people to solve a problem in a domain they know nothing about without doing any research? And the given example is odd, a lot of useful information that would help to answer the question will be public, and the obvious way to answer the question would be to look it up, before estimating the stuff that isn't public (but you won't know what information is publicly available until you look for it)

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#132

Post by ww520 »

8_hours_ago wrote: post #123

I recently interviewed at Apple and one interviewer caused me to decide to never work there. I was put into a conference room and had 8 people over 6 hours come in and interview me one after another. Each person asked me about my background and then jumped into a whiteboard coding problem. Most of the interviewers were understanding of the fact that writing code on a whiteboard is nothing like writing code on a compu…

Division. Damn. That's what calculator is for. I would just whip out my phone to do it.

Human has evolved to leverage tools to augment intelligence. If he can't understand the advantage of tool utilization, he's not a good engineer.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#133

Post by Loughla »

GW150914 wrote: post #108
delavara wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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." This also explains when people chew out service workers for petty things.

I think that has more to do with the massive power asymmetry, because a service worker is generally expected to smile and take it. They don’t represent someone who humiliated the angry customer, they represent a punching bag.

Completely off topic, but 100% this is why people are awful to service workers.

I worked retail management while finishing post-grad work to pay bills. People who were loud and awful always had something else in their lives that was making them mad - broken down car, not much money, shit job, etc - and they used the retail employee as a punching bag.

I never saw one person who was loud have a reason to be loud other than that. In 10 years.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#134

Post by bordercases »

8_hours_ago wrote: post #123

I recently interviewed at Apple and one interviewer caused me to decide to never work there. I was put into a conference room and had 8 people over 6 hours come in and interview me one after another. Each person asked me about my background and then jumped into a whiteboard coding problem. Most of the interviewers were understanding of the fact that writing code on a whiteboard is nothing like writing code on a compu…

> The only thing that the interviewer was evaluating was my ability to do math problems in my head after being interviewed for 6 hours.

Although I agree with you about the (ir)relevance of the task, I disagree with this particular move you're making when other people do it.

Typically when people want to trivialize test results they don't like, they say it's over-fitting to the immediate situation (like IQ tests "don't measure anything intrinsic, they just measure how well you do IQ tests"). Unfortunately this criticism can be logically generalized across any statistical or empirical measure whose job is not to let people into the job/tell the truth, but minimize the impact of something bad happening if the test returns a false positive, or the opportunity cost if it's a false negative. This means two things:

(1) Because the chance of error always exists, there are always going to be people who feel gypped by the process; yet on the other hand, it is supremely difficult to come up with good measures of anything that is too costly to observe directly no matter what the domain. Thus sour grapes that want to claim over-fitting.

(2) For software companies like Apple, they can probably afford to have bullshit tests to weed out applicants, because the alternative of having to place each applicant through a probationary period for three months is quite costly, if we're willing to refute all tests as being narrow or irrelevant indicators in the manner above.

With Apple, it's still possible that they have an internal model for hiring that claims to have predictive power that relies on this particular task as a proxy in conjunction with all the other ways that they've tested you, before they move you over to a probationary period. But as the article pointed out this is also unlikely since the effectiveness of interview practices is understudied in a formal setting.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#135

Post by kitsune_ »

8_hours_ago wrote: post #123

I recently interviewed at Apple and one interviewer caused me to decide to never work there. I was put into a conference room and had 8 people over 6 hours come in and interview me one after another. Each person asked me about my background and then jumped into a whiteboard coding problem. Most of the interviewers were understanding of the fact that writing code on a whiteboard is nothing like writing code on a compu…

Long division under pressure? This sounds as dumb as Password Swordfish.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#137

Post by jlarocco »

mgraczyk wrote: post #92
illumin8 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interviewed at Google (back in 2005, mind you) and I remember being asked a couple brain teaser questions like how to estimate the number of windows in NYC. I will say that out of my loop, there were only 2 interviewers that came across as intentionally mean, the rest were genuinely wanting to see how I solved problems and understand what my thought process was, which is what most interviewers should be attempting…

This was 13 years ago, and Google has since had many "revelations" about its misuse of useless tools like brainteasers. The current process and interviewer training/selection process is nothing like the process in 2005.

Perhaps that true, but I think it's a recent change. I vaguely remember having a brain teaser question as recently as 6 years ago, but I concede it was a long time ago and I could be remembering wrong.

BI had an article about it as recently as 2015. https://www.businessinsider.com/google-brain-teaser-intervie...

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#138

Post by nicoburns »

Timmah wrote: post #83
jf- wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most algorithms questions only prove one thing: whether a candidate has brushed up on algorithms beforehand. That has some usefulness, being a proxy measure for conscientiousness, but offers little beyond that. Maybe that they’re able to follow the reasoning, but it could just as easily be learned by rote and parroted back. The fact is that no one comes up with a from-scratch efficient algorithm for doing anything in…

I've been a cpp and java programmer for 12 years and not once needed to use algorithmic complexity on the job. The fact that so many places focus on this baffles me. Big-O questions should be reserved for system architect positions only. Out of all the arbitrary topics, I think they should focus on pedantic syntax questions for whatever language they use. Show snippets of code and ask "what's wrong with this picture?…

I don't really believe this. You use algorithmic complexity every time you choose between a HashMap and an Array. I'm a javascript developer, and I make that kind of choice several times a day.

Having said that, I've never once needed to know the kinds of questions that the ask in these interviews off the top of my head. And I highly doubt google engineers need to often either.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#139

Post by stcredzero »

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've been flat-out accused of cheating and bald-faced lying, on scant evidence, when I was clearly doing neither. I very strongly suspect that the interviewers were motivated by their ageist prejudices in that case. I also have a very strong feeling that your intuition about the interview process is correct. I've done a bit of introspection and realized that there is a bit of dark side in me which can come out in situations where I wield power.

Also, and this is probably more specific, there's a bit of a mythos around companies like Google and friends that have tough interviews and high standards: they hire the best people, they're doing the best work, they're the smartest, etc. I can tell you from experience, that mythos doesn't hold up once you're doing you day to day job. I've seen people with stunning credentials doing what most would consider exciting work become genuinely bored.

There's a class of real world activities of substance and significant consequence where one encounters, "long stretches of boredom, punctuated by moments of terror." Lots of development also falls into this category. You spend a half year, doing basically nothing but "fixing bugs in a CRUD app." Then, there's a high priority bug where error dialogs pop up for a whole bunch of high profile enraged users who quickly and definitively figure out they're being lied to by the system. The logs and HTTPS proxy captures tell you contradictory information, and you discover that some vital logging information is getting swallowed by lazy coding. Then the logging system goes down, staying down for weeks. On top of that, someone breaks the development debug build. All the while, director level execs are breathing down your neck. I'm not making this up. This actually happened to me.

Most of the time, the job can involve almost nothing, then all of a sudden, you need more than your wits about you. It's for times like that, that one seeks to hire people who can actually apply knowledge, as opposed to those who regurgitated it on an exam then promptly forgot it.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#140

Post by biztos »

jfasi wrote: post #114
biztos wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> brainteasers (which, for the record, are not used at Google) Out of curiosity, how is this controlled?

Interviewers write up questions asked, candidate solutions, and their commentary and hiring recommendation. Those writeups are sent to a hiring committee which reviews all the candidate's feedback and makes a hire/no hire recommendation. If the committee sees a brainteasers, disagrees with a question, spots inconsistencies in the feedback, etc., they moderate their use of the feedback or ignore it altogether. There's…

Thanks, that's interesting. It must be a little bizarre doing interviews in a place where lots of candidates specifically prepare for your interview process, and some presumably try to game it.
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