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Sadly I've seen this kind of interviewing from lots of places; maybe it's a technique they teach in college or something. Interview questions like this are useless as they are not an accurate approximation of a real work scenario. I've frozen up at a whiteboard in an interview before, and then figured it out on the drive home. The best approach I've found is to do a send home quiz, and then ask them questions about t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I can remember some obscure AIX partitioning-related fact Now you have my attention. I'd love to read about some of these trivia.
Not the GP, but I have one non-partioning AIX trivia I discovered by accident. Turns out that malloc(0) returns NULL on AIX, but non-null on Linux, SunOS, and Irix. (I was surprised multiple ways on that one!)
I wouldn’t go that far, but I think it’s perfectly fine to reverse-engineer the interview game and reap the rewards. There’s no reason to feel guilty about it.
Life lesson learned for OP, when it comes to tech interviewing: (1) the riddles you already know you answer after some staged deliberation to pretend you are working it out from first principles using your genius brain (bonus points if you can work "first principles" into the conversation). (2) The riddles you don't know the answer to are the ones you say you already read in a book or online and repeat this until you…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I can remember some obscure AIX partitioning-related fact Now you have my attention. I'd love to read about some of these trivia.
Not the GP, but I have one non-partioning AIX trivia I discovered by accident. Turns out that malloc(0) returns NULL on AIX, but non-null on Linux, SunOS, and Irix. (I was surprised multiple ways on that one!)
killall is very different between Linux and Solaris, for example. I would rather have not found this out on a client machine for the first time.
Counterpoint to many responses here - when I have interviewed people, it’s a really positive signal if the candidate says they have already seen a problem- the we can move onto something more interesting! Not solving does not mean failure either. As a candidate myself I always mention if I have seen similar problems, such as finding primes - real example, and I was hired on that loop at Microsoft! On the other hand,…
It would be dumb if the next one they throw at me is one i've also seen or is ridiculously hard for an interview. Then i'd question the value of my honesty.
1. Suppose you have a binary tree (NOT a binary search tree) where each node with pointers to its parent and children. Given pointers to two arbitrary nodes in the tree, find their lowest common ancestor.
2. My favorite: given a uniform random number generator mod 5, create a uniform random number generator mod 7
3. Forgot the exact question, but something along the lines of: suppose you want to keep track of function arguments as you call them. How do you do that?
I got (1) and (2) and utterly failed (3). (3) is entirely trivial and basically a stated fact if you know how anything about how operating systems work, but I was a freshman in college and didn't know that function arguments got pushed on a stack in memory, so I was totally lost.
I also got this riddle, in 2015. I couldn't solve it. Tbh, I think it's a terrible question. There isn't really a step-by-step problem solving process, but you just need to have a "leap" to realize you can weight the marbles in groups of 3. I also got rejected. It's crazy to get rejected from a one-question riddle like this
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I can remember some obscure AIX partitioning-related fact Now you have my attention. I'd love to read about some of these trivia.
Not the GP, but I have one non-partioning AIX trivia I discovered by accident. Turns out that malloc(0) returns NULL on AIX, but non-null on Linux, SunOS, and Irix. (I was surprised multiple ways on that one!)
^^^ THAT is how an Interview Question should work around this factoid.