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Gaming CS Interviews

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Re: Gaming CS Interviews

#131

Post by lucas_ »

_uhtu wrote: post #120
Eleison23 wrote: post #51

The first time I encountered a "riddle" type interview question, I'd already held 5+ jobs and I nominally had 8 years' experience in IT. The job was for a Unix sysadmin job in academia. The interviewer described a room with two lightbulbs in it, and a room down the hall with two switches, and I was supposed to figure out which switch controlled which bulb without going back-and-forth so much. I was stumped & didn't r…

Why is the heat thing even necessary? Turn on one switch, walk down, see which light is on, process of elimination for the other one. Am I missing something?

I remember this version of the riddle:

- 1 light bulb and 3 switches outside. Determine which switch powers the bulb while only entering the room once.

Re: Gaming CS Interviews

#132

Post by Izkata »

mnsc wrote: post #22
jonathankoren wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every squiggle language transliterates to 7 bit ascii without loss of fidelity anyway. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Of course, eg. {lefthandraised}\_({eyes}{slantedmouthkindabelowtheeyes})_/{righthandraised}

For the mildly curious who never bothered to look it up:

シ - shi, pronounced like the word "she"

ツ - tsu

(Japanese katakana)

Re: Gaming CS Interviews

#133

Post by Izkata »

lucas_ wrote: post #131
_uhtu wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is the heat thing even necessary? Turn on one switch, walk down, see which light is on, process of elimination for the other one. Am I missing something?

I remember this version of the riddle: - 1 light bulb and 3 switches outside. Determine which switch powers the bulb while only entering the room once.

There's also one with 3 switches and 3 bulbs; the solution is the same except you leave the third one on.

Re: Gaming CS Interviews

#134

Post by kweingar »

cbozeman wrote: post #83
newshorts wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My google coding interview was much l33t. He asked me a graph search question. However at the time I didn’t know what a graph was. I’m self taught. But I did understand the ask, which was to find a path through a series of locations. I also happened to have some experience with slime mold finding optimal paths and once even tried to simulate it using a genetic algorithm. That was the best solution I could come up wit…

> and its not an optimal solution. Therein lies your problem, and you can see it writ large on everything Google does. Because they're so dominate at so many things (search, video hosting / streaming, etc.), anything that doesn't fall under "optimal solution" and "immediately profitable" goes to the waste bin near immediately. There are entire websites dedicated to how fast Google kills a project that could have been…

As a counterpoint to this, I interviewed at Google and was sure I had flunked. On every one of the follow-up questions, I didn't produce a working solution, let alone an optimal one.

I still got the offer.

Truthfully I do attribute much of it to luck. From what I have heard, most people had more difficult questions than I did, often with more strict interviewers. It's a high variance process for sure. If I were to interview for the same position now, I would most likely not pass the interviews.

Re: Gaming CS Interviews

#135

Post by cbozeman »

kweingar wrote: post #134
cbozeman wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and its not an optimal solution. Therein lies your problem, and you can see it writ large on everything Google does. Because they're so dominate at so many things (search, video hosting / streaming, etc.), anything that doesn't fall under "optimal solution" and "immediately profitable" goes to the waste bin near immediately. There are entire websites dedicated to how fast Google kills a project that could have been…

As a counterpoint to this, I interviewed at Google and was sure I had flunked. On every one of the follow-up questions, I didn't produce a working solution, let alone an optimal one. I still got the offer. Truthfully I do attribute much of it to luck. From what I have heard, most people had more difficult questions than I did, often with more strict interviewers. It's a high variance process for sure. If I were to in…

Congratulations. I hope you enjoy working there. A close friend of mine used to work there in a very high position and they left after about a year or two, but left for what I consider to be pretty ridiculous reasons.

I'm not quite sure how much I could share without revealing their identity, but essentially they were sat down and told to work on their appearance. They had enormous technical chops (probably in the top 10 people in the entire world at what they do), but at least 60 lbs. overweight, no sense of style or fashion, etc., and as unfortunate as it might be to hear it... when you reach Director-level / C-suite positions, you need to physically project that OR you have to be so absolutely dominant at what you do that they cannot ignore you. They aren't that dominate.

A shame really, but they went off to work for a private startup and seem to be quite happy anyway.

Re: Gaming CS Interviews

#136

Post by zzyzxd »

sarchertech wrote: post #57
leetrout wrote: post #2

> Guidance is expected; a great interview should be more of a conversation than a one-sided question and one-sided answer. I had a particularly awful interview at Google where the interviewer scoffed at me needing assistance. And in an interview at Twitter with a xoogler they asked me what I knew about number theory and I said "nothing" and they said they majored in it and proceeded to ask me number theory questions.…

The fact that the twitter interviewer introduced themselves as a xoogler is absurd.

You would be surprised how common this is. Lots of startup companies also love to brag about how many xooglers they have recruited. I once interviewed at a startup and the CTO introduced himself as "xoogler". After the interview I checked his Linkedin profile and he had a summer internship at Google 7 years ago.

Re: Gaming CS Interviews

#137

Post by pclmulqdq »

trinovantes wrote: post #66
Cyphonetic wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But to order a list is O(n log n)

In the worst case, you need to insert every element into your set to find out if there's no duplicate hence it'll take O(n log n) too

Not with a hash set - that gives you expected amortized O(1) insertion (yes, both expected and amortized). In contrast, a generalized sort is O(n log n), but you can sort numeric types in O(n).

Re: Gaming CS Interviews

#138

Post by sudosysgen »

Ancalagon wrote: post #130
Eleison23 wrote: post #51

The first time I encountered a "riddle" type interview question, I'd already held 5+ jobs and I nominally had 8 years' experience in IT. The job was for a Unix sysadmin job in academia. The interviewer described a room with two lightbulbs in it, and a room down the hall with two switches, and I was supposed to figure out which switch controlled which bulb without going back-and-forth so much. I was stumped & didn't r…

Obviously I don't get the question. But, two switches, two lightbulbs, can't you just turn one switch on, leave one switch off, and see which lightbulb is lit? You only interact with each room once. Unless there's some funny business going on? Edit: oh, the bulbs need to be off at the end? Nah

I guess the idea is you turn both on for a while, then turn one off. The hottest one is the one that was recently turned off

Re: Gaming CS Interviews

#139

Post by atoav »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #110
atoav wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In such situations I tend to ask that question directly: "It was my understanding that you looking for someone who will help you with Django tooling. I can do that. Although number theory sounds interesting, I never felt the need of diving into it in order to solve any Django-related issue. I would be happy to learn more about how you think number theory relates to Django tooling should I start working here." When pe…

This doesn't always work - many software engineers believe that you should be a bit of a generalist. However, if you ask the question about Django tooling, you are at least keeping the door open. Asking the "what role does number theory play" question is a way to send a message and lose your chance at the job, but so does "optimus prime."

Depends. I am a decent software dev by all the standards I can observe. Yet I don't know a lot about number theory. I know a ton about other fields like e.g. control theory. If I now interviewed a django dev and asked them about control theory or hardware registers, I wouldn't even ask them whether they know that, because the answer is not really relevant to their position. I might ask them just our of curiosity, but then I would not care so much if they don't know it, I would care about how they handle dealing with something they don't know.

If they go all optimus prime that would be a red flag. If they show curiosity a green one.

Re: Gaming CS Interviews

#140

Post by jordanozang »

checkmypythons wrote: post #126
Verdex wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is an 'okayish' position to take. There are some people who absolutely can't handle being wrong, and I've personally seen them wreck havoc when they get out of their depth. However, there has to be a limit to the nature of the questions that are being asked. If I'm spending my free time to go check some place out because they're telling me that they might be willing to give me a job, then I'm going to be…

I think you forget that even technical interviews are still aimed at examining soft skills. "What is the 50th letter in macbeth?" could easily be interpreted as "How would you go about finding the 50th letter in macbeth?" which is plenty relevant to basic scripting. "Do I have a source I can pull macbeth from?", "How does that source work?", "Can I query it for individual characters/words/chapters/etc.?" I think a fu…

Alternatively, this could be taken to fall into the bucket of brainteasers, where a good answer might be "e", since it's the most frequently occurring letter in the alphabet in english texts.
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