Facebook Lost a Great Engineer
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Facebook Lost a Great Engineer
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Re: Facebook Lost a Great Engineer
#2"Solutions are in the sidenotes."
Where are the sidenotes?
Re: Facebook Lost a Great Engineer
#3Yeah these sort of questions are pretty ridiculous.
Though I wonder what the intent is here, say for the first question - "What is the pattern here ?"
After looking up the solution on wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look-and-say_sequence I would have to admit there is no way I'd figure that out without knowing the concept ahead of time.
So are they looking for someone that knows the 'look and say sequence' explicitly ? Same way if you presented the meaning of numbers 80 or 443 to someone they'd either know or not, but not be able to guess.
Or did they actually expect someone to work it out on the spot ?
Re: Facebook Lost a Great Engineer
#4Title made me think that one of their lead engineers died. Perhaps there would be a more accurate title option?
Re: Facebook Lost a Great Engineer
#5"Solutions are in the sidenotes." Where are the sidenotes?
The sidenotes were too narrow? ;)
Re: Facebook Lost a Great Engineer
#6Writing an article to bash a company for not hiring him doesn't seem like what a great engineer would do.
Re: Facebook Lost a Great Engineer
#7Do you think they only failed you because you didn't know how to compute the square root? Did they tell you that you underperformed? There are tenths of reasons why a candidate might be rejected, outside of "did not perform well in tongue twisters".
The fact that you got rejected does not mean that you suck. It means there is somebody who scored better feedback. He could have given the exact same answers like you, but better worded! Perhaps he would fit better with the FB culture!
Maybe they failed you for your attitude? I mean, you made a post 2 years later saying "Ha! Look at me Mark!!! I am the king of the world!", good for you buddy. But I don't think anyone is going to weep for facebook's loss...
Re: Facebook Lost a Great Engineer
#8Yeah these sort of questions are pretty ridiculous. Though I wonder what the intent is here, say for the first question - "What is the pattern here ?" After looking up the solution on wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look-and-say_sequence I would have to admit there is no way I'd figure that out without knowing the concept ahead of time. So are they looking for someone that knows the 'look and say sequence' e…
> Or did they actually expect someone to work it out on the spot ?
My hope is that they'd hope a candidate would be able to identify the connection to run length encoding within the pattern.
Why do these puzzles emerge at big companies? It looks like a sort of institutional power trip emerges: "if you want to work with us, you need to be real good, and these are the sorts of problems we want you to think we deal with every day!" Except in most cases, they aren't, and there are plenty of mediocre folks already employed there. But the institution NEEDS to believe it only hires the best, and one way to perpetuate that belief is to haze new applicants more and more. All it really produces is candidates who are very lucky, or very compatible with the existing culture.
Hiring is hard, and puzzles are a fail-fast mechanism that is terrible, but produces some sort of results, so it gets used.
Re: Facebook Lost a Great Engineer
#9You'd have been just a cog in the machine at Facebook anyway. If you listen to some of their seasoned engineers speak they seem to take great satisfaction from delivering some inane and tiny little web app feature, seeing it through a year of testing, and seeing it in production. Whilst I'm sure that is satisfying if you've never known any different. It sure as hell isn't anywhere near as satisfying as building and scaling out a product or service of your own or one in which you are vested.
The article is well written but you really shouldn't put Facebook on some sort of pedestal. Especially after two years, it seems like you still feel sore about it. It really isn't "all that" to work at Facebook. Do you really want to write PHP all day, for example? For an engineer it is more a bragging right and CV fodder than anything else.
Re: Facebook Lost a Great Engineer
#10Yeah these sort of questions are pretty ridiculous. Though I wonder what the intent is here, say for the first question - "What is the pattern here ?" After looking up the solution on wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look-and-say_sequence I would have to admit there is no way I'd figure that out without knowing the concept ahead of time. So are they looking for someone that knows the 'look and say sequence' e…
Yes, the problem with the look-and-say sequence is that it's not something that you can derive; it requires having the right insight.
This makes it a bit different from other problems, where the interviewer is often not even so much interested in the solution, but in how you go about finding one. Many other sequence problems are amenable to a more systematic approach that at least tell them something about your problem-solving techniques.
With the look-and-say sequence, you either see it or you don't. Regardless of whether you got it right or not, it doesn't tell an interviewer much about you, and is therefore not a good use of the limited time they have with you that could be used more productively.