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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

#161

Post by ergothus »

jkingsbery wrote: post #149
expertentipp wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Satisfacton from saying this during an interview at Google would be worth not getting the job:)

TRUE STORY: I interviewed at Google earlier in my career. In one of the interviews, the interviewer asked me to recite/reconstruct off the top of my head the convex hull algorithm. I remembered the lectures in undergrad algo class where the professor talked about it. I remembered where in CLRS it was covered. I remembered the general outline (efficient algorithms are O(n log n), because you have to sort the points as…

As an interviewer I always advocate for coding problems to be done at the computer and to allow internet searches. On the rare occasions someone does a cut-and-paste solution, I then modify the problem to see if they understand the solution enough to make the necessary change.

It's not perfect, but it seems as close to the actual work experience they are interviewing for.

I interviewed at Facebook recently and was shocked when they used Coderpad but did not allow code execution. Threw me for a loop, because I like to decompose problems and test that everything is still working as I add to it, something this did not allow me to do. I consider that a GOOD quality, why prevent me from demonstrating it?

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#162

Post by jf- »

bordercases wrote: post #146
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…

The test lost its validity over time, but how many people care about their craft enough to know how to write software without using a library, and be willing to reason about it from first principles? Or with systematic method? They would be capable of doing original work. The rest I'd give CRUD tasks to.

An algorithms question proves today what it proved 15 years ago: that the candidate learned the algorithm. It does not and never did prove that the candidate spontaneously generated the solution in the interview. In other words, it isn’t an intelligence test. It isn’t even a programming aptitude test, but it is a conscientiousness test because the candidate went to the trouble of learning many algorithms successfully. That does count for something, but not necessarily what the interviewers expect.

If you want to test for programming aptitude, give the candidate a realistic but difficult real world problem and let them solve it in an IDE.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#163

Post by kthielen »

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…

Google has a lot of good people, but in my experience the interviews are specifically looking for a particular bias -- not just knowledgeable and personable people but specifically people who think a certain way.

I had an interview there recently in NYC. I solved the guy's puzzle too quickly and I think that he thought that I'd prepped (I hadn't). Then we got started on a different problem and I tried to explain how it was a good example of "boolean blindness" and that using a specific form of dependent type was an ideal solution. He looked at me like I had two heads and smugly told me that it's impractical to solve problems this way (but it's a bog-standard type checking problem).

So yes, smart people, but you should know the bias that they have before you decide that you want to work there. It could very well be bad for your career if you _do_ get in.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#164

Post by smelendez »

illumin8 wrote: post #77
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 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…

That question doesn't seem great. People who've spent more time in NYC will likely perform better, since they'll immediately start describing classes of buildings where they've spent time and generalizing, but how familiar you are with NYC is irrelevant to the job.

Depending on your applicant pool, that might be correlated with a protected class, like race, gender, or national origin.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#165

Post by kanelbullar »

stcredzero wrote: post #154
kanelbullar wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are stressing over an interview, what will you do when you lose $1 million in 10 seconds? Beats me - but the "skills" demonstrated in the interview process you're defending -- "suck up; just keep going online until you memorize enough canned answers to most of these dang questions; suck up, suck up, suck up" -- certainly aren't going to help. If anything, they're basically orthogonal to the set of competencies…

Beats me - but the "skills" demonstrated in the interview process you're defending -- "suck up; just keep going online until you memorize enough canned answers to most of these dang questions; suck up, suck up, suck up" -- certainly aren't going to help. Right. People who don't think of Comp Sci knowledge as a set of substantive first principles, just as meaningless tokens they need to memorize and regurgitate to get…

People who don't think of Comp Sci knowledge as a set of substantive first principles, just as meaningless tokens they need to memorize and regurgitate to get the job -- those are precisely the people who should be weeded out.

And yet - those are the people who are not weeded out, but selected for by the default interview process.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#166

Post by ww520 »

jgtrosh wrote: post #113
riyadparvez wrote: post #26

My issue is more with tricky algorithmic questions. I faced these tricky interview questions, where you either have to know the trick beforehand or there is NO way you can come up with a solution in an interview. I never understand the point of these questions. Because these esoteric hypothetical questions will almost never come up in real-life. They don't test someone's skills, because these problems don't follow an…

I don't know the loop question. Do you have a formulation where it's not obvious but realistically possible to solve?

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2663115/how-to-detect-a-...

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#167

Post by jacquesm »

jkingsbery wrote: post #149
expertentipp wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Satisfacton from saying this during an interview at Google would be worth not getting the job:)

TRUE STORY: I interviewed at Google earlier in my career. In one of the interviews, the interviewer asked me to recite/reconstruct off the top of my head the convex hull algorithm. I remembered the lectures in undergrad algo class where the professor talked about it. I remembered where in CLRS it was covered. I remembered the general outline (efficient algorithms are O(n log n), because you have to sort the points as…

> We expect Google engineers to be able to solve problems.

Sounds more like he expects Google engineers to have perfect recall, rather than to be able to solve problems.

That's just a trivia question, nothing to do with problem solving.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#168

Post by markatkinson »

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

This was discussed in Edward Frenkels book Love and Math

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#169

Post by eip »

biztos wrote: post #62
eip wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is an enormous gap between being able to tolerate working on something vs 'really' wanting to work on something.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#170

Post by stcredzero »

pmiller2 wrote: post #159
stcredzero wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beats me - but the "skills" demonstrated in the interview process you're defending -- "suck up; just keep going online until you memorize enough canned answers to most of these dang questions; suck up, suck up, suck up" -- certainly aren't going to help. Right. People who don't think of Comp Sci knowledge as a set of substantive first principles, just as meaningless tokens they need to memorize and regurgitate to get…

> You may well need to spot a deadlock or a race condition in code. You may well need to spot code that is inefficient by construction, in precisely that kind of situation. How is that relevant to the practice of "memorizing enough canned answers to most of these dang questions"?

How is that relevant to the practice of "memorizing enough canned answers to most of these dang questions"?

It's not. Instead, ask something not particular tricky, a bit open ended, and just a little bit involved (at least 3 things interacting) with the purpose of seeing if basic skills can be applied. Instead of looking for an answer that can be memorized, you're looking for evidence to see if people have actually designed, implemented, and debugged something at a level beyond gluing libraries together.

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