191–200 of 220 posts
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Well, that _is_ the conceit here. The ‘right’ answer is that all manhole covers are round because a round cover can’t fall into the hole.
But a triangle works for this, too.
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The 747 ping pong ball estimation problem is a Fermi problem, where the goal is to get the right order of magnitude of the answer. Sure. But "why are manhole covers round?" is not. It's a stupid "have you ever heard this clever fact" question that's often designed just to figure out if you're clever and/or lucky vs testing actual knowledge and skill. If your aim in interviewing is to fill the team with people who lov…
I worked and interviewed a lot of people in business consulting. We did ask what you call Fermi problems as they are surprisingly representative of the abstract thinking that is required in the job, specifically proposing frameworks for what kind of information we need to either go and get or state as assumptions in order to support a decision. As the GP points out, the questions are testing how you model something y…
I'll go one further - interviewers doing Myers Briggs Personality Tests.
It amazes me how defensive, threatened, and snarky people get about interview questions. When leading an interview, do you know how hard it is to tease out if someone is a creative thinker or just a bullshitter? Very hard. You come at it from multiple angles. Sometimes you need questions like this, it is part of the interviewing toolkit along with coding examples, and domain-specific challenges. EDIT: And sometimes y…
One day, we'll look back at brainteasers for interviews like how most of us currently view phrenology today.
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Please show me where anyone in this thread is glorifying anything close to sexism.
You have poor reading comprehension. Glorying him and his personality includes his sexist personality as well.
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You have poor reading comprehension. Glorying him and his personality includes his sexist personality as well.
It’s really not. I wouldn’t have known he was sexist until you said something.
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It’s really not. I wouldn’t have known he was sexist until you said something.
You’re wrong, please stop responding. And I know your downvoting me. Your accounts over the threshold and my top comment is flagged, so it’s you.
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But a triangle works for this, too.
Pretty sure I can toss a triangular cover into a triangular hole. You might be thinking of a Reuleaux triangle (which is not a triangle, narrowly conceived.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reuleaux_triangle
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I'm so pissed at these stupid questions during interviews that now I start doing that. The last one was "how many tennis balls could you fit in the Empire State Building?". I spent maybe 10 minutes asking idiotic "clarifying" questions before the interviewer realized I was messing with him (e.g. "can I use any color for the balls?" "Do I have a crew to help me?" "Can I try to crush them?" etc). He got pretty upset ye…
Wait. Is this some old story (I hope!) or are these questions still used in interviews?
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In an interview, stopping at this might just make you not get the job. If you're lucky the interviewer will laugh and ask the appropriate followup question. It goes something like this: Haha, awesome answer. I agree with you from a business perspective it seems stupid at first. Now I can't come up with a good reason to do this, but let's say I as your Product person have convinced you with enough good reasons that it…
Yeah, unfortunately you get asked to do some pretty silly stuff all the time and being able to cope with that is a critical skill.
Let's say the answer is that it's still supposed to fly (working software you are adding a feature to), so also no stuffing ping pong balls into wings and such. Ignore fire hazards and such (no edge cases for now, build an MVP). Now a plane fuselage is basically a cylinder. At one end I assume full size but there's suddenly a wall where the cockpit and such is. The other end is more "fun" because the cylinder becomes more narrow. In any case now we are probably gonna have to find a 3D bin packing algorithm for packing spheres into a cylinder, potentially its already implemented or we might need to implement it from some research paper we find but in any case it is probably a solved problem (reinvent the wheel in-house or use a library and be done with it? Is the library good enough? Is it supported or some dude in a basement wrote and abandoned it?). Just like in physics where we ignore some forces sometimes for easier calculations for example we can probably cut the narrowing cylinder into sections of one ping ponf ball width and assume constant diameter for those. The difference this make in the end either doesn't matter (80/20 rule of software development, don't gold plate it, make it good enough) or we assume that any extra balls we "miscalculated" can fit into the nooks and crannies we have ignored anyway because a plane fuselage is not a perfectly smooth tube anyway. Never mind the landing gear and such.
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It’s really not. I wouldn’t have known he was sexist until you said something.
You’re wrong, please stop responding. And I know your downvoting me. Your accounts over the threshold and my top comment is flagged, so it’s you.