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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

#251

Post by EngineerBetter »

biztos wrote: post #66
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.

Yep, we pair at least 80% of the time.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#252

Post by 01100011 »

pmiller2 wrote: post #218
01100011 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose we've been exposed to different parts of the software elephant. When I say money is lost... it can potentially be a lot of money. Can you imagine what 10 minutes of downtime could cost Amazon, for instance? What about streaming the superbowl? Credit card payment processors? Even something simple like the test harness for a production line may mean that an entire shift of assembly workers now has to stand id…

I understand the concept of multiplication. In such a scenario, it is even more imperative that the fix you make (temporary though it may be) actually fix things. Take the time, get all the help you need, and get it done; don’t just commit code and pray.

There are times when you need to think about the fix, and times when the problem is more obvious. If possible, I'd hack in a fix and, once the pressure is off, go back and validate it more thoroughly.

For instance, my company had a very important demo of our new system on Monday. Friday night my friend was tearing his hair out in the lab trying to find the cause of some network corruption. We had a race condition in the kernel between our network driver and inter-processor communication driver. We're a uniprocessor system, so I suggested just using an if-check to see if we were in the IPC code when the network bottom-half handler hit. It was a disgusting hack but we made the demo and no one had to work the weekend. The following week, my friend crafted a correct solution which was robust even if we enabled more cores. It's not the high-pressure straw man I mentioned earlier, but it's fresh in my mind and represents the sort of on-the-fly hacks that often need to be made to allow businesses to make money.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#253

Post by ummonk »

mgkimsal wrote: post #195
corey_moncure wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you met 8 people, and one of them was a jerk? I'd say that's a pretty acceptable jerk coefficient for a workplace. I've been in places north of 0.5.

That they allowed that person to be a representative of the company when someone is interviewing the company to decide if they'd want to work there... that's a bad PR move. Yes, the company extends an offer on their end, but really, both parties are making decisions. If they can't put their best foot forward.... that's a problem. If they think this was their best foot forward, that's another problem.

Apple interviews are team-specific, so I'm not sure that the existence of a single jerk on a single team's interview loop should reflect on a company with hundreds if not thousands of teams and tens of thousands of engineers.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#254

Post by ummonk »

bordercases wrote: post #148
nicoburns wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Since Google is such a well-spring of computational resources and have incredible scalability requirements, I'd question your claim that they don't use algorithmic thinking regularly.

He is saying they do need to care about algorithmic complexity in choosing data structures or implementations, but rarely need to figure out really clever algorithmic tricks (of the sort which tend to be tested by harder algorithmic questions, like the "find whether there is a loop in singly-linked-list", which relies on the running pointer technique which you never need to use in real life).

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#255

Post by bryanrasmussen »

moduspol wrote: post #219
Klonoar wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of those moments where citing a source (that experiment) would be incredibly useful...

I wish my Googling skills were stronger, but alas, they are not. I remember one of the other key takeaways was that the manager role was treated more favorably--specifically that they apologized they could only offer some (reasonable) amount of relocation assistance while none was even offered in the developer role. It was theorized that managers were seen as an "in group" among other managers, but that was obviously…

I would think it isn't that managers are an in-group but are peers, even if a manager helps hire another manager that hire can be a potential problem for them if they feel slighted, but if the developer feels slighted - well the developer is subservient, not a peer.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#256

Post by kajmagnusmobile »

FundThrowaway wrote: post #239
Aeolun wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a candidate, someone we had already hired through an agency. Two someone’s actually. Never again. They were great people, but couldn’t distinguish a string from an int.

That's pretty crazy, how do these people exist and get jobs? What kind of development were they supposed to be doing?

And what's the reason they were asked to do the fizzbugz test?

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#257

Post by jpttsn »

ww520 wrote: post #132
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.

Humans attach prestige to solving problems the old school way. We have ladders but watch pole vaulting at the Olympics.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#258

Post by jpttsn »

cubano wrote: post #127

Maybe the correct stratagy is turn the tables and try to lighten the mood of the interview if a brainteaser is asked, and sort of shuck "oh one of these things? (laugh)...ok let's work this out together" and proceed to try to engage the interviewer with estimating the number of floors in an average building, the number of windows per story, and the number of buildings, all the time asking the interviewer what his est…

The interviewer doesn’t need to know the number of windows. They need to know that you will take things seriously on demand.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#259

Post by raverbashing »

mgkimsal wrote: post #192
jkingsbery wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> "What if you were a Google engineer, and you had to solve this problem, what would you do?" Well... I might ask one of the other people on the team (or in the company) for some help. Because I'm probably going to ask one of them for a review (or someone else will review it anyway). No man is an island, etc. What did Sergey and Larry do to solve these problems? They hired more people!

They consulted existing literature, they asked in internet forums, etc

Expecting people to know and remember beyond the basics is simply ridiculous especially at the age of Google

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#260

Post by scarface74 »

FundThrowaway wrote: post #233
moduspol wrote: post #67

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. 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…

> and there's more genuine fear of hiring someone who can't fizzbuzz. I always hear this fear proclaimed but have never heard an actual story of a candidate failing to fizzbuzz, would love to hear an anecdote or two from anyone who has one.

Yes it happens. I’ve interviewed people who couldn’t psuedocode an isOdd function after making sure they knew what an odd number is.
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