This guy is taking a lot of heat for bad interviewing technique, and this may or may not be the case - but it's hard to say, given that we don't know what kind of a position he's interviewing for. Given the job requirements of the position, this may be a perfectly reasonable question - i.e. if the job requires someone to build and maintain large custom data stores, it's pretty acceptable practice to ask questions that reveal how much they know about large custom data stores. Personally I wouldn't be over the moon crazy about this question, but it's still a hell of a lot better than being peppered with random "what is X?" type questions that test nothing about your ability as a developer, and only what you currently directly know. That is to say, those questions where you end up looking like an idiot if you didn't happen to read the same man pages as the interviewer. In the types of questions this guy is asking, you have to basically guess what they're looking for - so it can end up being a bit of a mind reading exercise, which is why I wouldn't be terribly crazy about it - but it's still by far the lesser of several evils, simply because it's a direct demonstration of how a developer thinks about development, instead of how much rote minutae they've mastered or whether they can find a way to stick eight kittens into six holes without any broken legs of flying fur, etc....
My Favorite Engineering Interview Question
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Re: My Favorite Engineering Interview Question
#92These 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…
> Questions like these are typically signs of bad interviewing technique, but not always depending on how they are presented. Given that the author presents the exact question and includes a moderately lengthy discussion on how he uses the question, what is your evaluation in this specific case, rather than the general one? Consider, for example, this comment from the article: I’m looking for quite a few things as we…
Were I in that hypotetical interview I would _think_ "a terabyte of data and 5000 lookups per second? what fucked-up examples, do these guys have too much iddle time here?", but I never would _say_ anything and just proceed with solving the problem.
Re: My Favorite Engineering Interview Question
#93These 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…
Your reaction says lot more about your attitude than it does about the OP's. I found the article interesting and informative, with none of the passive/aggressive overtunes you mention.
Your lip service about finding diamonds in the rough and catering to candidates who are nervous or can't think on their feet leads to just one comment: "Put up or shut up."
The OP has given us a very good, concrete example of his interview process, the traits it reveals in candidates, and how he tailors it to meet individual candidate reactions. Until you do the same your comment here is nothing but five paragraphs of whining about how some people don't interview well.
To which I reply, "Duh."
We all know the 45-60 minute interview is imperfect, and that both interviewer and candidate are just trying to make the best of a very contrived interaction to begin with. So, please, lose the attitude and give us something we can learn from rather than bashing the OP with vague generalities.
Re: My Favorite Engineering Interview Question
#94I program (design and implement) better than all of you. Always did.
Re: My Favorite Engineering Interview Question
#95I design and implement programs better than all of you. Always did.
Re: My Favorite Engineering Interview Question
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand your objection here. The question presented is a simple, open-ended question with a number of acceptable solutions. It's not even remotely "unanswerable". It's at least mildly interesting as indicated by the number of responses at a similar question on StackOverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2573653/given-a-1tb-data-... . It's not far from the problems Ning solves. It's not an "aha" probl…
Seeing as you worked at Ning and likely participated in these types of interviews it's not surprising you don't get it. Surely Ning was a great place to work and I'm sure you found really top-notch employees through your well known tough hiring process, but I'd be willing to wager they all look very much the same when you blur your eyes a little bit. My diatribe, as you so eloquently put it, is based on the article.…
Well, I'm eager to hear what you think the candidate type of the best engineer is, why that type of candidate would fail to come up with a reasonable train of thought given the cited question in an interview, and how you select for that candidate type.
If questions like the one posted find a type of candidate who can think well under mild pressure, who can quickly brainstorm sensible approaches to technical problems, and who can communicate their ideas and reasoning to their peers, then that sounds like a pretty good outcome to me.
Re: My Favorite Engineering Interview Question
#97These 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…
I appreciate the feedback, but don't think I fall into, nor describe in the linked blog post, the interviewer category you describe (though it is certainly possible I do and just don't realize it).
Do you consider this question to be unanswerable? As I stated, I'll accept pretty much any viable answer, my goal is to get folk to design something ~realistic (okay, this is a simplistic system, but we have finite time in an interview slot).
Honestly, I think the question I blogged about is pretty straightforward, and exists for purposes of framing a discussion about real systems and constraints. There is no answer I was fishing for at any point I used this question.
"Questions like the one in this blog post are tell-tale signs of alpha-geek interview dominance gone wild," is so far off base from what I am trying to convey that I think I utterly failed to convey my point, which was quite literally the opposite :-(
Re: My Favorite Engineering Interview Question
#98I'm confused... why specify a 1 TB disk ? It doesn't seem that the problem's solution has any dependence on the aforementioned disk aside from the data it contains unless I'm misreading how he's explaining the answer?
Yeah, I also thought he expected to serve it all from a single disk. Hopefully in real life it gets clear in the discussion. It's a problem when asking interview questions: there are many ways in which the question may be unclear and the interviewer is mislead that the applicant can't answer. Another problem may be that the interview interferes with the thinking style of the applicant: you try to discuss it with him…
How the applicant seeks clarification is just as important as how he answers.. he's going to be presented with problems all the time.
When I pop the open-ended technical questions, there really is no right or wrong answer - it's just there to judge someone's real ability - I have some questions you can't fake your way through. You don't have to have every little detail right, but I can tell from how you answer whether or not you are afraid to ask for clarification, and whether you know the material, and to a good degree how well you know the material.
It's a conversation - not a one-way thing (at least in my case). I can tell if someone's nervous - and that's okay, too, but the job is going to be stressful, so after I explain not to be nervous and don't worry about getting every detail right.... but if you can't even begin to describe the systems I'm asking about, you don't belong on the team... same goes for if you don't seek clarification.
Re: My Favorite Engineering Interview Question
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand your objection here. The question presented is a simple, open-ended question with a number of acceptable solutions. It's not even remotely "unanswerable". It's at least mildly interesting as indicated by the number of responses at a similar question on StackOverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2573653/given-a-1tb-data-... . It's not far from the problems Ning solves. It's not an "aha" probl…
Seeing as you worked at Ning and likely participated in these types of interviews it's not surprising you don't get it. Surely Ning was a great place to work and I'm sure you found really top-notch employees through your well known tough hiring process, but I'd be willing to wager they all look very much the same when you blur your eyes a little bit. My diatribe, as you so eloquently put it, is based on the article.…
Asking how it will fail is a gotcha? To my knowledge and experience thus far, all systems fail. The question is "given this one, that we now have a good shared understanding of, which you designed with the tools you are most familiar with, how is it going to fail?
Not one candidate I can think of has been either surprised by this question, or felt stuck, fwiw. Again, I may be completely self delusional, but I hope not!
Re: My Favorite Engineering Interview Question
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
This may come as a shock, but you can put more than one SSD in a server :-P
I think that the parent thought that the system had to use a single SSD. The first time I read the question I thought that I had to use the hard drive that the data came on, and that it was all I was allowed to use. I didn't realize that the point was to design a system to simply serve the data that was given to us. After reading it, it becomes pretty clear that a simple raid5 with a few SSD's makes this problem moot…
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