211–220 of 324 posts
My favorite (probably apocryphal) Microsoft brain teaser question I've heard is, "If you had to move Mt Fuji, how would you do it?" I've never interviewed there, or been asked that question, but I think it would be a lot of fun to answer.
Once long ago when I interviewed at Apple I was asked the classic "fork in the road, two guys, one always tells the truth and one always lies" riddle, with complete earnestness as far as I could tell. Possibly the single worst interview question I've ever been asked. Of course I told the interviewer I'd heard it before and then gave the correct answer. In my case we just ended up chatting about previous experience in…
Here a few additional teasers, - How many golf balls fit into the plane - How many gas stations exist in country (or alternative version with city ) - How many turns do you have to go on a gum machine until colour comes out? Naturally they all evaluate properly the skills required for the job, and other professions get asked the same kind of stupid questions. Unless it is for a position I really, really want, or are…
I interviewed for an internship in 2006 and didn't get any brainteasers, but I got some pretty interesting questions that were somewhat computer science-related: 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 generat…
Nowadays, with x64 and AArch64, the first several arguments will be passed in integer or floating-point registers.
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Which is why, as mentioned, unless I am desperate for a job, I walk out. Or maybe the job is about actually carrying golf balls into planes.
I bet it is about solving the daily brain teaser of working with unmaintainable code!
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First one depends on the bowling ball. Most alleys have balls ranging from 7lb to 16lb, all the same volume, and the crossover point where they’d sink is 11.6lb. If it was a floating bowling ball, the lake water level would stay the same when you toss it from a boat. If it were a sinking one, it would decrease.
I think you're counting the overall sphere as the volume, but water would leak in through the finger holes so only their actual material counts. I suspect different weight bowling balls generally have different volumes.
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I find it very easy to solve some of these physics questions by thinking about a degenerate version of it instead, with exaggerated parameters (since these physics phenomenons are described by continuous/monotonic functions). So for the bowling ball, I replace it with an imaginary marble weighing 1 ton and the answer is now self-evident.
That’s exactly the path I would have gone, ask clarifying question to confuse the interviewers: - Is my boat actually floating in the lake? - Is the lake filled with water? - If yes, what is the temperature gradient of that water from top to bottom? - How deep is the lake at the spot the ball is dropped? - What is the current time and phase of the moon, and what are the exact coordinates of the ball drop? - Are we do…
Just don't ask brain teasers when you conduct an interview; I believe they give no valid signal at all, and I also believe Microsoft does not ask them anymore. The coding questions that require an "aha!" moment are very similar to brain teasers, and should also be avoided. When I conducted interviews for FAANG, I asked somewhat simpler coding questions, something around DFS and/or topological sorting (without calling…
I had an interview with Google about 10 years ago. Everyone said "Google doesn't ask brainteasers or leetcode-challenges any more". The interview was literally nothing but back-to-back brainteasers and leetcode-challenges for 3 hours straight. I didn't get the job even though I only failed to solve one problem, and looking back I think that the problem was in fact unsolvable and they wanted me to come to that conclus…
Google, just like all other FAANG companies, uses a lot of Leetcode-style questions and there's no tendency for this to change so far. The thing that Google does is that they ban interview questions which were exposed on Leetcode, so they could've meant that you won't be given a question that is known to Leetcode crowds.
> looking back I think that the problem was in fact unsolvable
As for the unsolvable problem, this is weird, but when the company has tens of thousands of active interviewers, chances are that one of them will surely ask some bullshit question, and there is a very low chance that someone will ever let that interviewer know that they're not doing a good job. The lottery aspect always exists here.
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I think it's because most of us don't do CS once we graduate. We build APIs and websites which don't involve CS at all. It barely involves engineering. lol. No one uses binary trees or some manual form of serialization. They use "superlib.search(arr)" or (seriliazer.parse(thingy)" and that's about it. No one cares about what it does. They just know it does it faster than something they could write. The only places th…
I'm not some Google/Microsoft/whatever engineer who's been working on highly scalable, highly available systems. I've mostly worked in consulting on small projects. I have never not had problems with the defaults on any of those sorts of libraries. I've almost always had to roll my own graph manipulation and heavily customize any serialization system I've used. And when I do so, because I've gotten good at doing it (…
Once long ago when I interviewed at Apple I was asked the classic "fork in the road, two guys, one always tells the truth and one always lies" riddle, with complete earnestness as far as I could tell. Possibly the single worst interview question I've ever been asked. Of course I told the interviewer I'd heard it before and then gave the correct answer. In my case we just ended up chatting about previous experience in…
This reminds me of the weirdest interview I ever had (boutique software agency, maybe 30 devs). I walk in, and the CEO's secretary hands me an IQ test and says I have one hour. I do the test, then I meet the CEO and we chat about general topics while she grades the test nearby. Then she announces my IQ, and the CEO says "hmm, yes, that's above the minimum I'd consider for a developer." Then for the last few minutes h…
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> He didn’t get the job because even though the technical attributes were all good, he should have pressured the customer. I'd say he didn't get the job because they would have asked him to pressure customers day in day out, he would refuse, never get promoted and be otherwise miserable in an aggressive culture. IMHO he shouldn't change his answer to please the interviewer, the process is working as intended and I'd…
I've too many wacky interview stories to list here, but the first time I came to this same conclusion was when I had an interviewer interrupt me mid-answer to correct my pronunciation of "idempotent" (because I said it in what is apparently a more British fashion). I asked him to repeat himself to see if he'd apologize or brush it off as a tic and he repeated himself with an elevated level of contempt. I declined the…