Earlier quoted context omitted.
African or European. Everyone knows that.
How do you know so much about electricity?
I assume they keep a few jars of electricity at home.
Steve Ballmer's incorrect binary search interview question
221–230 of 257 posts
Re: Steve Ballmer's incorrect binary search interview question
#222The (TV) interview is kind of funny because the journalist asks him, after he goes through the idiotic song and dance of this brain teaser: "so what did you learn about me?" This is actually a very insightful question. What did you learn, Mr Ballmer? To which he literally has no answer: "I learned you need to step back and really ask if you're going to make money on this thing".. uh, okay Steve. Cool. Thanks for your…
He was being polite and understanding. They aren’t in a job interview setting, it’s not a correct frame to judge. But if it were, she would totally fail with that attitude of not thinking through the problem. That’s what his comment about stepping back meant.
Well even if they were in an interview setting, how often in your day-to-day are you put on blast, being critically watched and scrutinized while having to give birth to an elegant solution to some stupid random question? How often does this solve-immediately-or-GTFO happens at work? They made so much money in the 90's that they could smash every other Ivy league candidate with a bat or make them do 500 jumping jacks, and still have people line up to interview.
Re: Steve Ballmer's incorrect binary search interview question
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
That SME guy sounds like an asshole, but I used to have an interview technique where I’d ask increasingly specific and low level questions about the candidates area of expertise until it got to the point where I’d be pretty confident they wouldn’t know the answer off the top of their head. I wasn’t adversarial or rude about it, I just wanted to find out if they were comfortable saying “I don’t know”, because not know…
I have the same idea in interviews. they need to be able to admit when they don't know or need help depending on the level. However I thought about it and I think the continuous "why" comes off as sort of childish or low effort. I didn't want to drive off people that reasonably didn't want to work in a place with a toxic culture. My solution was to ask a question that was specific to the workplace but technical so th…
I usually had some overlapping technical expertise with the candidates I was interviewing, so my approach was to prepare a line of questions relating to some obscure or esoteric technical issue I’d dealt with in the past. Usually I’d get to an I don’t know pretty organically.
One time I had a candidate who didn’t not know about a single massively obscure thing I’d asked him. He was a DBA for a Chinese ISP that had more subscribers than we had total population in the markets we were operating in. That guy was probably the best hire I ever made. He was always in an incredibly genuine good mood, he was always happy to help everybody, and he’d help people learn how to solve problems rather than just doing the solving for them. Everybody on the team got smarter and more competent working with him, and he was so good at his job that he never even got behind on his own work due to helping other people all the time. I hope he’s still doing well now, before I left that company I managed to make sure he was being paid bucketloads of money (which wasn’t something he ever seemed to be seeking out independently, he was always just happy to come to work and do his job).
Re: Steve Ballmer's incorrect binary search interview question
#224This is a game with imperfect information, and the optimal strategy for each player is probably different from "pick any number at random" and "run off-the shelf binary search".
How is it imperfect information? Isn't each guess made openly?
Now I am not so sure, but the first player makes the move first (selects the number), then the second player makes their move without seeing the results of the first player's move. Meaning after the first move there is information hidden from the second player.
Re: Steve Ballmer's incorrect binary search interview question
#225Re: Steve Ballmer's incorrect binary search interview question
#226I once had a colleague who had a favourite interview question, it had something to do with graph data structure and would always ask the question, many times candidate would reply and get rejected, strangely enough after a while all those candidates who replied got rejected. So we all gathered around him to work through what questions he was asking. We got to this question, and working with him on this question for a…
>strangely enough after a while all those candidates who replied got rejected.
That also seems like a bad interview strategy. Make a mistake and you're out? Did you have so many perfect people to hire that you could just sort out almost everybody?
Re: Steve Ballmer's incorrect binary search interview question
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's surprising the extent to which the tech community overfits towards classifying intelligent individuals as either exclusively technical or nontechnical. Recruiters are especially weak in this regard, e.g., if you've ever been effective at sales or people leadership, you are likely ineffective at swe or data science or vice versa. The most intelligent folks I've worked with are very diverse in their interests and…
Yep. Pigeonholing by narrow thinking individuals who aren't accustomed to ambiguity or lateral thinking, especially when exhibit talents in more than just technical areas, a person becomes "nontechnical" to a nonzero proportion of technical people while remaining "too technical" for a large fraction of business people. PS: Recruiters generally come from the same cloth as car sales and sports, so they're not usually g…
>PS: Recruiters generally come from the same cloth as car sales and sports, so they're not usually going to be the sharpest pencils in the drawer.
Aren't you committing a similar mistake here, saying that recruiters can only recruit? At my former job one of the recruiters was an engineer for 20 years. He said he just wanted to do something different after all these years.
Re: Steve Ballmer's incorrect binary search interview question
#228Slowly and for the span of many years I've come to realize that binary search is an amazing problem solving tool, specially on systems that are too big and complex to debug. For example, recently a colleague had a problem with a rendering tool for Figma, of which we don't have the source code. The tool would take too long exporting a specific design. The team mate tried changing things randomly for days to no avail.…
In electricity we do the same. Measure continuity at the halfway point to see if the wire is broken on that half. Rinse and repeat.
That's what we did in electronics too. There were kits with electronic circuits (this was back in the day with transistors.. and a bit more), where the teacher would introduce a fault somewhere. What we were taught was to start measuring signals in the middle, and then continue just like a binary search. This became so natural that when I ended up in programming in my first job I automatically did the same when searching for bugs in software. What surprised me was that other people didn't.
Re: Steve Ballmer's incorrect binary search interview question
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but not when asked a direct technical question. This is anything but a direct technical question though. > It's perfectly fine to ask followup questions with added constraints, but having the guessing game to figure out those constraints is nonsense. You say that. I say people being able to ask the right question is one of the most important skills to be a productive developer. So of course as an interviewer I want…
Sure, and there's a way to test the ability to ask questions that isn't some "gotcha" type question. As in interviewer you can just say "the specifications aren't clear, what questions would you might want to ask to clarify them?". It's not like in the day to day work you go around defining specifications for every tiny function - the default specification are clear from the work environment. Let's say you had to imp…
> As in interviewer you can just say "the specifications aren't clear, what questions would you might want to ask to clarify them?".
I do say that, yes. Not necessarily with those words, but I tell interviewees that they are free to ask questions and in fact recommend that they do rather than they go start coding immediately and accidentaly solve the wrong problem. (Heck! Some people solve a harder problem than we intended to ask from them!)
> but they shouldn't appear as some "gotcha".
1000% agree with you on that.
Re: Steve Ballmer's incorrect binary search interview question
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but not when asked a direct technical question. This is anything but a direct technical question though. > It's perfectly fine to ask followup questions with added constraints, but having the guessing game to figure out those constraints is nonsense. You say that. I say people being able to ask the right question is one of the most important skills to be a productive developer. So of course as an interviewer I want…
> I say people being able to ask the right question is one of the most important skills to be a productive developer. But you never know if by asking the "right" question you'll jeopardize the entire interview problem. Some interviewers may have only prepared 75% of the problem and haven't went through all the posibilities. If you ask a question that may pose itself as a "treat" (e.g., making half the problem non-sen…
> But you never know if by asking the "right" question you'll jeopardize the entire interview problem.
Yeah. That can happen. As an interviewer i would tell the interviewee that they are right and it is because the example is a bit contrived and would ask them to pretend it still makes sense. If they are polite about the thing it would actually count in their favour.
But i understand it is a risk.