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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

#171

Post by vivekseth »

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…

So you will never work at Apple because you had 1 bad interviewer out of a sample size of 8? That seems foolish.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#172

Post by adrianmonk »

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…

I will defend about 20% of the interviewer's behavior here. I've had candidates try to negotiate away requirements or get me to give them part of the answer. They'll say something equivalent to, "Hey, could this method I'm supposed to implement have an extra parameter that makes everything easy?" Sure, any problem can be made easy by taking away the hard part, but we're not doing that. Or they'll say, "So what data structure would you use?" That's for you to solve.

From time to time, I ran into candidates with a crazy attitude like this, so I learned to stand my ground. It was an unfortunate and surprising necessity. The interviewer might have been doing this but going overboard with it. (Or maybe they were just a jerk.)

Now the 80% of the behavior I won't defend:

1. An interviewer should have the soft skills to stand their ground without being harsh and implying that you suck.

2. An interviewer should know the difference between minutiae and important stuff. Partly for time management reasons during limited interview time.

3. Even if an interviewer is rough around the edges sometimes, they should understand that in this context, they are the face of the company. And it is stressful and tiring. So they should reign it in and be understanding and nice.

4. The company should be in control of their own interviewing process, at least enough that failures like this aren't common. Maybe an interviewer needs some guidance to improve, or maybe some people aren't cut out to do interviews, but they shouldn't be just left to their own devices.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#173

Post by stcredzero »

kanelbullar wrote: post #165
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…

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.

Certainly, there are lots of problems with interviews.

That said, the interview should be designed to specifically weed out the ones who hope to pass by regurgitation. The answer can't be just a pattern match for a particular algorithm. The emphasis shouldn't be on dazzling recall of something obscure. The purpose should be to look for actual experience implementing something.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#174

Post by misiti3780 »

throwawaymath wrote: post #72
misiti3780 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Depending on the hedge fund (I'm thinking of a few in particular), there isn't really a route to practicing these problems just to get better at the interview. You'll be asked to talk about your own research in the domain and you'll work on re-deriving (very small parts of) the research of other members of the team with guidance and from first principles. Regardless of applicability to the job, if you're asked to pro…

thanks

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#175

Post by munchbunny »

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…

At risk of proposing a generalization, I think that this comes from the same place that other gatekeeping behaviors come from: you see yourself as the in-group's bouncer.

That puts you in a mindset to run the interviewee through a gauntlet, partly as a ritual to show their desire to get in, and partly through a sense of duty to hire "only the best".

But hiring is not a filtering problem. It's a matching problem. And the more interviewers embrace that they're there to find the right people and to recruit them, not to filter people out, I think the more humane the interviews will be.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#176

Post by annywhey »

stcredzero wrote: post #150
pinewurst wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many interviews are hard, but there's a distinct difference between good hard and bad hard. My current gig interviews were all deep storage strategy conversations and hard in the sense of needing to show a lot of knowledge articulately. I left there feeling really good if exhausted. My Google interviews were hard in the sense of embarrassing regurgitation and thinking nonsense on one's feet. Hard was being made to fe…

Hard was being made to feel inferior. I had an interview experience, where the interviewer was looking for a particular answer. I give him 3 answers to his design issue. Then the interviewer says he was looking for the 2nd answer I gave him, as if I didn't just say it. It's one thing to reach and fail. It's another thing to be in a context where the truth of what you know doesn't even matter.

The pattern of "stay silent and look dubious to make the candidate feel dumb" is a really common interview hazing strategy in my experience.

I think the next time I see it, I'm just going to question whether this is how they behave in their job too, even if it means ending the interview right there.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#177

Post by nitwit005 »

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…

I just become unable to do math during interviews. You know how people hate public speaking, because they feel super nervous, sweat a lot, and have trouble saying what they want? That but with calculous you haven't touched in 12 years.

If they gave me a piece of paper and let me do it without interruption, I could do it, but generally interviewers will sit there and demand you explain what you're doing.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#178

Post by hectormalot »

nicoburns wrote: post #131
hectormalot wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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…

In the context that I've seen them used, the interviewer usually provides information if asked (and says so up front). e.g. if you don't know the # of inhabitants of Italy it should be completely okay to ask.

In any case I don't think it is about the calculation or the final number. It's really the approach that you develop that's interesting.

I've seen this mostly used in (management)consulting though, where you actually are regularly expected to solve problems that you might not have deep understanding of. When I was interviewing developers I discussed how they would architect an application to solve a specific problem. It gives similar insight and is closer to the actual job.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#179

Post by stvswn »

wolfgke wrote: post #32
pinewurst wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mathem…

I went to a military academy (and now I interview a lot at Google, too). Doing a lot of soul searching now...

But seriously, I agree with the top comment about interviewing at Google, and as far as the military academy "hazing" it's generally misunderstood. It's very, very rare for an upperclassman at my particular school to be cruel in the movie-sense, or what I think is the stereotypical fraternity-sense. More common is an institionalized set of standards for the freshmen that may seem overly tough or even arbitrary but serve several purposes: a) they give the freshman a crash course in being accountable for details, b) they give the upperclassman a crash course in enforcing accountability and holding others to high standards, and c) they create a sense of shared hardship and camaraderie. These are actually all very important lessons before a second lieutenant takes on responsibility for decisions that could mean life or death for his or her soldiers (which, in the case of my graduating class, was a reality for us as quickly as 4 months after graduation). You have to force the upperclassmen to come out of their shells and make the freshmen wear their uniform correctly, or make their bed correctly, etc. so that when they graduate they will have the courage to tell their soldiers that they really do need to inspect the vehicles, or maintain the weapons, or wear their safety gear. It takes practice to be accountable for standards on a team. It's not supposed to be about making people suffer for the fun of it, but of course there are jerks everywhere.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#180

Post by tjungblut »

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.

would you be able to share the question?
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