add 6 feet to a rope around the world, stretch it out and how far off the ground would it be is this a technical puzzle/question? to me it reads like a middle school geometry question. it would be fun to discuss it with friends/colleagues but I wouldn't expect it during a software engineering interview
That's just the first question. The follow-on is, if you add 6 feet and put your finger under the rope and pull up until it's tight again, how far have you raised your finger? 1ft? 10ft? 100ft? 1000 miles? The answer to that is very difficult. There are several approaches.
Yes, but that's still a geometry problem. Don't get me wrong, geometry was my favorite branch of mathematics in school, but I don't see how this is relevant for most software engineering jobs.
I guess this type of question might serve the purpose of finding like-minded people with similar interests (in your case geometry or puzzles) but it might alienate others.
I asked some puzzle questions - add 6 feet to a rope around the world, stretch it out and how far off the ground would it be? I can only imagine being "charmed" by a question like if I was much younger in my career, eager to be seen as smart and in the company of like-minded folk. Nowadays... my focus is on solving problems... as in real problems, not made-up ones. Thankfully I haven't heard questions like this in ye…
Yeah it's easy to act all butt-hurt and be too good to even try. But how outrageous is it to imagine that folks who can solve such problems might be able to solve other problems?
Also, it's not about being too good to even try but about being old enough to no longer put-up with corporate non-sense; too much bullshit in a job to put up with as it is. Once you get to a certain age, you learn to prioritize real stuff rather than appearances.
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…
The serendipitous knowledge of the question isn’t the cheating. The cheating is the deception in the interview that this is a question being encountered for the first time.
It’s cheating because it’s the type of unethical behavior you wouldn’t want in a colleague: pretending that they are brilliantly generating insights on the spot that they have actually researched previously.
I don’t think it’s an unforgivable sin, particularly for someone new to interviewing. But as a candidate, I’ve considered it appropriate to make it clear to my interviewer what my level of experience with the question was before diving in. And as an interviewer, I’ve always looked positively on candidates who have done the same
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…
On the flip side, we questioned a candidate the usual way with pertinent technical challenges and so on. Then when driving in a van to lunch (our habit was to do a social segment as well as technical) I asked some puzzle questions - add 6 feet to a rope around the world, stretch it out and how far off the ground would it be? and suchlike. He was charmed, we brainstormed some answers and had a fun lunch. Years later,…
Was this a situation in which you were asking the candidate while everybody else either already knew the answer and was listening to the candidate think?
Or was it more like everybody was discussing (and explicitly or implicitly through discussion) admitting that they don't necessarily know the answer (while assumedly is an engineer in good standing on the team), and the group is working together to solve it?
Because both situations seem equally plausible based on what you wrote, and if it's the first one then I agree with your detractors below that it's messed up. If it's the second situation then I would have loved it and been excited to join your team.
It's very possible that the ambiguity of the situation is why there's such variance in reactions.
add 6 feet to a rope around the world, stretch it out and how far off the ground would it be is this a technical puzzle/question? to me it reads like a middle school geometry question. it would be fun to discuss it with friends/colleagues but I wouldn't expect it during a software engineering interview
That's just the first question. The follow-on is, if you add 6 feet and put your finger under the rope and pull up until it's tight again, how far have you raised your finger? 1ft? 10ft? 100ft? 1000 miles? The answer to that is very difficult. There are several approaches.
People who get "recommendations" don't feel guilty at all for their unfair advantage. So please, more of this! Let the kids know that we don't live in a meritocracy! Otherwise, the good ones will become discouraged and we will all lose.
> we don't live in a meritocracy Nothing is perfect, but we do live in an approximation of a meritocracy, especially in tech. I had no special connections anywhere going into or coming out of college and ended up at my first company "the hard way". Any good references I made were only made through delivering results, I didn't know any interview questions in advance, and my college had no "prestige", certainly no Micr…
Just because you made it in your specific case (however you seem to define this) doesn’t mean we have meritocracy.
This sentiment gets shared a lot, but what's a better alternative? Without ignoring the reality that you only have 15-20 minutes with each candidate, some of them will be brilliant, and at least a third or more won't be able to code their way out of a paper bag. Oh, and keep in mind false negatives have almost no downside but false positives hurt the recruiter financially, and hiring bad people is expensive.
> but what's a better alternative? "Write a function that, when given an array of length n + 1 containing integers 1 through n, find the duplicate integer in an array. You can use this equation: sum(1 to n) = n(n + 1) / 2" Basically, if your solution is made trivial by someone knowing a generic formula or equation, just give it to them. Not giving them the formula doesn't give you any additional information.
Of course it does. Have they seen the question before? Are they really good with math? Are they really bad with math? Do they even know how to approach a mathematical problem like this if they've never seen the formula before? Do they even consider that there might be a mathematical formula to determine this, or do they immediately just try to brute force it?
We can debate whether or not any of the above is useful information (I think it is), but not giving them the formula definitely gives you more information than just giving it to them.
>Now I just work hard enough. My review from management actually got much better once I stopped knocking myself out working too hard and instead worked just enough. That was a pivotal moment for me. That and also learning how to manage your manager.
Would you be able to share some tips or sources on managing your manager? It sounds like a really valuable skill
I had a similar realization, but it’s not really about working hard vs. not working hard, it’s about knowing what’s important to your manager. Early in my career I would never say no to any task, and would give the time estimate I thought the manager wanted, and then work over time to get it done. Half the time the finished product had bugs, got delivered too late, or ended up not matching what the client wanted, so the “hard work” didn’t translate directly into success. Now I try to figure out what the client’s actual needs are and how to meet them as quickly and with as little work as possible, and when something is requiring overtime, I immediately stop working on it and communicate that it’s a bigger issue than expected, and either push the project, get additional engineers, or find a different way to solve the issue. I think programmers really enjoy solving problems and we never like to admit that something is more difficult than we expected because we feel like we failed, but actually that’s just an expected part of the job. Obviously this only works if you have a good manager who actually cares about results. Bad managers are easy to manipulate because you just optimize for whatever BS metric they’ve decided is important, but those jobs are soul crushing.
This is basically no different than a take home assignment, and not cheating.
I always do better thinking about problems in my own space, without the quiz show drama of someone staring at you and "taking notes".
I asked some puzzle questions - add 6 feet to a rope around the world, stretch it out and how far off the ground would it be? I can only imagine being "charmed" by a question like if I was much younger in my career, eager to be seen as smart and in the company of like-minded folk. Nowadays... my focus is on solving problems... as in real problems, not made-up ones. Thankfully I haven't heard questions like this in ye…
Yeah it's easy to act all butt-hurt and be too good to even try. But how outrageous is it to imagine that folks who can solve such problems might be able to solve other problems?
I think you've got it backwards. Lots of people who could solve your real world problems with a computer might not have a background in maths or physics and so may not be able to solve your puzzles. They may just feel anxious about appearing stupid in front an interviewer, and annoyed they weren't allowed any downtime in the day.
This is about empathetically understanding the stress levels between both of you would have been miles apart. Unless the candidate had brought up the subject somehow it'd have been nicer to just try to relax them and get to know them informally by asking about them - or better yet letting them do their own thing for lunch if they wanted.