221–230 of 503 posts
Then in the actual interviews they did ok as well.
Sounds like the system worked the way it was supposed to.
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Out of pretty much all the people I know, I can't think of any successful career not pivoting on one such fateful moment of "luck". One lucky question/answer, one fortunate encounter, one near miss. Of course we'll never know how the road not taken looks like. Any moment could actually be a pivotal one but most are very unassuming and only the memorable ones stick with us, making them feel more important. Also, as so…
Not disagreeing with your points. > Preparing for this kind of question isn't cheating as long as you understood the answer. TFA notes that because of lack of interview prep material in 2004, even when the author knew the question before-hand, it took them days to arrive at an optimal answer. And then it dawned on them that everyone else at the job fair, who may be seeing a question for the first time, only had 15 mi…
I've got a story of my own that has some remarkable similarities to this one. When I interviewed with Microsoft, they asked me to write a program that detects whether the stack grows toward lower address or higher addresses. Since I had studied computer engineering with an emphasis on CPU architecture, this was trivial for me, and I got the job. A few years later I interviewed with Google, and they asked me the exact…
> they asked me to write a heap allocation algorithm for the Linux kernel, and since I had recently written some kernel code, I happened to know (at the time) exactly how to use the kernel linked list manipulation macros from memory, which really impressed the interviewer. > seem to give enough momentum to make mediocre coding performance a non-issue. These two statements contradict each other.
One time a company I interviewed with asked me obscure algorithm questions about playing card shuffling. As a former professional magician I knew the optimal answers instantly and could jot them down straight away. They had allocated an hour for answers I wrote in a few minutes. I could have told them I had a massively unfair advantage, but I did not bother. They were visibly impressed and told me I was moving on to…
The question: You get on a ski lift going up. It's 1000m long and you move at 20m/s. Between when you get on at the bottom and you get off at the top, how many of the chairs going down do you pass?
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It's not even a trick, though. The sum of zero and n is n. The sum of 1 and n-1 is also n. So is the sum of 2 and n-2, and so on. There are n+1 numbers when counting from zero to n, and they can be paired so that each pair adds up to n. 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 th…
Isn't this the famous Gauss proof/algorithm that he came up with when he was 5 or something?
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I'd start with, "What do you mean by 'random'?"
Yup. Seemingly trivial questions can reveal a lot about the candidate.
I have been routinely questioned about what happens from when you type www.somesite.com and when the webpage is displayed when interviewing over the years and realised that nowadays I could fill 2 whole hours talking about all the stuff that actually happens (and many times I would have to say “but about this specific thing I’m not very knowledgeable about)… whereas at the start of my career i would have probably spoken for like 15 seconds and felt smart about answering “such an easy question”.
Isn't this the very premise of LeetCode - do a bunch of LeetCode questions and you're likely to have a similar one in the interview?
Also, if the article hadn't revealed the interview question, I would've assumed it was like, write out a proof of Fermat's last theorem or something. Even if you don't think of comparing the sum, the next obvious solution is to use a hash table to track duplicates, which I highly doubt they would've failed someone for. So basically this is a story of someone's non-cheating on something relatively trivial anyway.
This probably increased the author's chances of going to hell about as much as standing next to your friend in 7th grade while he smoked a cigarette contributed to your chances of lung cancer.
IMHO, this was not cheating. This is a phenomenon called success. If you are fortunate (?) to be around in the entrepreneurial world long enough, you will realize that intelligence, hard work, good time management etc are not adequate. They just qualify as deserving. There are serendipities that separate those who succeed from everybody else who was deserving. Survivor bias [1]. Calling Eli was your serendipity. The…
Not just as an entrepreneur. I have found that these traits don't guarantee a reward for ICs, or anyone really. I used to work hard. Now I just work hard enough. Pays the same either way.