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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

#291

Post by stevenwoo »

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?

I could not find it but there was an old blog post complaining about this question because it was an open topic in computer science for more than ten years, and if one is not familiar with it they are essentially asking the interviewee to be smarter than then all the people in the computer science world in the 1960's or to be an actor and pretend to figure it out in 30 minutes or less.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#292

Post by stevenwoo »

hinkley wrote: post #27
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’ve been toying with the idea of stopping these sorts of interviews in the middle, but I’m not sure how to phrase it constructively. I want to suggest that while they may learn more about me if we continue, if I don’t learn more about them then I don’t want to work here. And they will learn more about me by letting me ask my questions. Long ago nobody knew how to interview. If you derailed it in the middle to talk a…

Most places advertise pretty loudly in the careers section or in the interview prep material they send to you beforehand that you are going to be hazed. Amazon and Google both send out preparation packets after a phone screen that made me laugh out loud.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#293

Post by kanelbullar »

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…

He told me finally "We expect Google engineers to be able to solve problems. What if you were a Google engineer, and you had to solve this problem, what would you do?"

At that point - he's talking to you as if he thinks you have the understanding of a child, basically.

There really is no positive recourse available other than to politely end the interview, and chalk up another day of your life (plus N days spent preparing) that you'll never get back.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#294

Post by kanelbullar »

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 came up with the wrong answer and told the interviewer that I wasn't sure if that was correct, and to let me know if it was incorrect. He blankly stared at me and said he wouldn't help me.

Meaning: presumably he's trying to be helpful, and give you a perfectly accurate representation of how people at his company interact when trying to solve problems together.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#295

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…

You may well need to spot a deadlock or a race condition in code.

The thing is - if your production system really ends up going haywire and losing $10 million every second or whatever, then then the root cause isn't some race condition. It's the whole human and organizational process (or lack thereof) that allowed that defect to slip in undetected (and in a position to cause so much damage without proper safeguards) in the first place.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#296

Post by darawk »

ubernostrum wrote: post #288
darawk wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Um, no. It's not cargo-culting. It's the correct way of estimating things. It has nothing to do with Fermi having done it. Some things actually have correct answers. 2 + 2 = 4, is not cargo culting.

You just moved the goalposts from looking for "a Fermi estimate" to looking for a correct answer.

Um...no. The goalposts have always been that the purpose of the brainteasers was to demonstrate reasoning skills. Using Fermi estimation is demonstrating reasoning skills. It's not like some trick that you have to know, it's not a formula. It's something any intelligent person would do on their own when faced with a task of this sort.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#297

Post by MagnumOpus »

dogecoinbase wrote: post #238
pzh wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't the examples of brainteasers actually Fermi problems? Maybe they sound like brainteasers if asked without the appropriate context, but when you're doing a system design interview and you have to estimate your throughput or storage requirements, you're effectively solving a Fermi problem just like the one that asks you to estimate the number of windows in NYC.

I love the term "Fermi problem", because the origin is, of course, the Fermi paradox. The idea that multiplying a series of uncertainties together does something other than blow your error range out is such a weird idea.

> The idea that multiplying a series of uncertainties together does something other than blow your error range out is such a weird idea

Might seem weird but it is massively useful. Having an educated estimate that is _only_ out by an order of magnitude is a massive improvement over wild-ass guesses that are 4-5 orders of magnitude off -- especially in systems design where over- or under-provisioning leads to millions wasted in effort.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#298

Post by bordercases »

ummonk wrote: post #254
bordercases wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

If you didn't know the answer to the question, would you have been able to come up with it on your own, from scratch?

Merely practicing interview questions without pondering them produces the false impression that they're useless trivia, when actually deciding to come up with the answers to these questions and struggle with the clues inside them which produce the answers show a much richer conceptual tapestry for data structures that goes beyond memorizing tricks.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#299

Post by reversecs »

stcredzero wrote: post #280
reversecs wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a Google interview where the interviewer started by saying we will start with a warm up question and then we would go into a real question. The warm up question was difficult and I was completely embarrassed that I didn't some it right away. As I walked out I knew for certain that was not a warm up question and was pissed that he had consciously shaken my confidence right off the bat.

The warm up question was difficult and I was completely embarrassed that I didn't some it right away. As I walked out I knew for certain that was not a warm up question and was pissed that he had consciously shaken my confidence right off the bat. How do you know it wasn't just a badly written question? Interviewing is hard in the same way that teaching and writing is. It's hard to put yourself into another person's…

You are right. It is possible. I did have to write a bit of code to get the work done correctly and he seemed satisfied with the progress, but I may have done it inefficiently and he was encouraging.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#300

Post by Nokinside »

cjg wrote: post #70
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.

People who are mentally strong and competitive love working in that kid of environment.

You need different recruiting and different 'back office' jobs for fragile people (60-70 percent of the population - and increasingly young males).

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