51–60 of 503 posts
Weirdly enough one of the problems discussed in the interview was about the Josephus problem which has a neat solution in binary [0]. I don’t recall if I ever asked the interviewer whether they also watched the video recently or how they came to think of it.
I'm surprised that atm there is a consensus in the comments saying that it's not cheating. Companies ask interviewers to not reveal the questions they had to other candidates. It's likely that his friend was told not to say that. Overall he clearly had an unfair advantage, and even if legally it wouldn't be the definition of "cheating" it would go against the intent of the interview: which is to evaluate candidates i…
It's a pretty obvious thing that anyone who spent much time thinking about math as a kid or teenager would have encountered, and maybe that's who MS wanted to hire! Especially back then when more of their programming needs dealt with algorithms and mathematical thinking, as opposed to gluing libraries together, I think it makes some sense.
Why are all the other comments so negative and stuck up whether it constituted “cheating” or not? That wasn’t the point of this story. It was a beautifully well written account on luck and how sometimes the things align. The interviewee at the time was receptive towards the kind of questions that are asked at Microsoft and got the right one. Good luck. And then he passed a 6 hr on-site interview as well! No luck at a…
Why are all the other comments so negative and stuck up whether it constituted “cheating” or not? That wasn’t the point of this story. It was a beautifully well written account on luck and how sometimes the things align. The interviewee at the time was receptive towards the kind of questions that are asked at Microsoft and got the right one. Good luck. And then he passed a 6 hr on-site interview as well! No luck at a…
It's all positive traits in my book. The discussion about the ways to interview to smooth this out is great but I don't think he should self flagellate or consider that his entire career was predated on this.
If you have the right attitude, prepare and work for it, you find any number of paths to get to the next level.
It's unfortunate that interviews sometimes feel so badly fit to achieve the goal and we should actively challenge whatever practice we have an iterate to make things better for everyone.
Got a chuckle out of the author thinking this was some kind of cardinal sin. The only person "at fault" here is his friend for telling him what interview question he received and I'd expect companies know this happens, which is one of the benefits of having further interview stages in the first place.
I would say the only person “at fault” is the interviewer for using such an awful question. This is precisely the kind of question that gives programming puzzle interviews a bad name. If you’ve heard it before, it’s trivial and proves nothing. If you haven’t, you have to have a clever a-ha moment in order to do anything but brute-force it. “Have you heard this one story about Karl Gauss as a child” is a really terrib…
Real world requirements usually contain inaccurate assumptions. He spent days to find a terrible answer, when the obvious solution is much better
I got the job, stayed at the company for 4 years with great performance reviews and it shaped my experience as the programmer I am today. I couldn't imagine where I would be without the experience I gained there.
I'm surprised that atm there is a consensus in the comments saying that it's not cheating. Companies ask interviewers to not reveal the questions they had to other candidates. It's likely that his friend was told not to say that. Overall he clearly had an unfair advantage, and even if legally it wouldn't be the definition of "cheating" it would go against the intent of the interview: which is to evaluate candidates i…
Would he have chosen to volunteer the info, he would have actively decided to penalize himself against all the other candidates who had also heard about this question before. This would have been borderline stupidity.
Who wouldn’t just sort the array and check it? His solution is very brittle: it fails in so many ways if the data had unexpected properties. Real world requirements usually contain inaccurate assumptions. He spent days to find a terrible answer, when the obvious solution is much better