My Favorite Engineering Interview Question • Hacker News Board

Re: My Favorite Engineering Interview Question

#51

Post by seigenblues » Thu, Oct 28, 2010, 4:05 AM UTC

lrm242 wrote: post #46

These types of questions are terrible interviewing techniques. An interviewer who, even jokingly, goes into the room with an interrogative mindset is fundamentally failing at the core purpose of interviewing: finding good talent, preferably relatively undervalued talent. An interviewer should not be looking for someone who mirrors their way of thinking or or their approach to solving a problem. They should be looking…

Man, I can't up vote this enough. I would also add that this is also usually symbolically equal to what VCs seem to do in their "interviewing"/wooing process. Well said!

Re: My Favorite Engineering Interview Question

#52

Post by timcederman » Thu, Oct 28, 2010, 4:10 AM UTC

jhuckestein wrote: post #43

swaits wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A picture? Are you hiring artists? Seriously. What do you get out of that?

A picture is a useful abstraction of reality. It forces people to think about what they'll 'answer' before they do. Some people might draw a diagram, some might draw a story, who knows. It tells a lot about people and how they think. For some people this may seem like a fun task and they'll get excited about it, some may not find it useful and argue about it and others (the ones you want to avoid) will frown upon it…

It takes a certain personality type to like a task like that, and that doesn't correlate strongly with being a good engineer.

Re: My Favorite Engineering Interview Question

#53

Post by ryandotsmith » Thu, Oct 28, 2010, 4:27 AM UTC

derwiki wrote: post #5

Advice for new questions: instead of contrived ones, pick a problem you've actually encountered in your job and ask the candidate to solve it. I've never had to implement a datastore like this -- so unless that's what you're actually doing, it doesn't seem particularly relevant. Another plus is that if you're doing interesting work, you have an almost endless supply of questions to choose from. Candidates also seem t…

True. During my latest interview, Heroku asked me to design a billing/invoice system. I won the position and my first assignment was to work on the billing / invoice system. When I have the opportunity of conducting an interview, I will most certainly use this approach.

Re: My Favorite Engineering Interview Question

#54

Post by mhewett » Thu, Oct 28, 2010, 5:22 AM UTC

Expecting a good answer to this question in 30 minutes without any warning is totally unreasonable. Expecting anyone to implement a deployable, generalizable, tested solution to this in two weeks is totally ridiculous. I wouldn't work at a place that asked questions like this or made development calendars with schedules like that.

Re: My Favorite Engineering Interview Question

#55

Post by ericlc » Thu, Oct 28, 2010, 5:33 AM UTC

sagarun wrote: post #49

These days i read "The Guerrilla Guide to interviewing" by joel before attending/conducting an interview. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000073.html . The OP's question doesn't have place there :-)

Who is Joel?

Re: My Favorite Engineering Interview Question

#56

Post by VladRussian » Thu, Oct 28, 2010, 5:35 AM UTC

zeraholladay wrote: post #24

jemfinch wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you describe your kobayashi maru question? I'm curious.

Yeah, but it wasn't technical. The point of the question was to assess my entrepreneurial IQ, or so I was told after. Generally if an unemployed person's applying for a job, their entrepreneurial IQ is low at the moment and they need money. Nevertheless: I was to acquire a desk to work at, which needed to have certain dimensions for under a certain dollar figure. The internet is down, the local office supply company…

the kobayashi maru isn't the impossible question itself. The kobayashi maru here is the situation of the jerk asking you the stupid question.

Re: My Favorite Engineering Interview Question

#57

Post by nirajr » Thu, Oct 28, 2010, 5:37 AM UTC

ericflo wrote: post #41

nirajr wrote: post #37

I love to ask something that is simple to start with, and then build on it interactively with the candidate. One of my favorite questions is - Give me a normalized database structure that you'll implement if you were to build gmail - incorporate conversations, messages, multiple message participants and labels. Then, depending on the candidate, I build upon the question,and go into various optimizations possible, the…

This. A million times this. I do the same thing starting with a simple kernel, but keep growing it, throwing in monkey-wrenches, see how the candidate reasons and adapts. Good candidates will start recognizing and acknowledging trade-offs, whereas bad candidates will settle on one clear path. Good candidates will speak about the ideas they're trying to get across, whereas bad candidates will drop into talking about s…

Definitely.

One candidate when faced with some questions on how he'll handle load said he'll switch to Oracle :) Promptly asked to leave.

Good ones clearly show that they have the ability to deal with multiple tracks of ideas, know that trade-offs need to be taken care of, in general, have an approach that with some ingenuity, almost all problems are solvable. Thats the attitude I (and I guess you too) look for.

Re: My Favorite Engineering Interview Question

#58

Post by tlb » Thu, Oct 28, 2010, 5:37 AM UTC

swaits wrote: post #33

zeraholladay wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but it wasn't technical. The point of the question was to assess my entrepreneurial IQ, or so I was told after. Generally if an unemployed person's applying for a job, their entrepreneurial IQ is low at the moment and they need money. Nevertheless: I was to acquire a desk to work at, which needed to have certain dimensions for under a certain dollar figure. The internet is down, the local office supply company…

Very dumb question, indeed.

The point of the Kobayashi-Maru test isn't to test whether they're capable of passing impossible tests, it's to test their character facing death. If you're choosing fellows to go to war with, you want to choose ones that won't shit their pants or otherwise make your last moments alive together awkward.

Re: My Favorite Engineering Interview Question

#59

Post by nirajr » Thu, Oct 28, 2010, 5:39 AM UTC

jhuckestein wrote: post #27

My favorite: "Write a script that will save you one minute of time every day" closely followed by "Draw a picture of your job/Facebook/the future /whatever"

Great questions to ask early employees for startups.

Re: My Favorite Engineering Interview Question

#60

Post by TheBurningOr » Thu, Oct 28, 2010, 5:51 AM UTC

rdtsc wrote: post #40

derwiki wrote: post #5

Advice for new questions: instead of contrived ones, pick a problem you've actually encountered in your job and ask the candidate to solve it. I've never had to implement a datastore like this -- so unless that's what you're actually doing, it doesn't seem particularly relevant. Another plus is that if you're doing interesting work, you have an almost endless supply of questions to choose from. Candidates also seem t…

I feel the same way about little puzzles that companies like to present to the candidates, especially the ones with a "trick" answer. I never worked in a place where I had to solve tons of small little puzzles all day, or have to memorize a set of obscure language features, and can't look them up online if I need to. As you said, the best interviews are the ones by a white-board, working together to solve something r…

As someone who was recently on the job market, I will say I wish more employers did this as well. As a candidate it gives you much more information about what you will actually be doing at the company too. There is just as much buzzword packing in job descriptions as there is in resumes these days and sorting through the interesting from non-interesting jobs is not always easy.