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I have a job I love now, but I don't feel like I deserve it. Overall, I suck. You probably do too.
Writing an article to bash a company for not hiring him doesn't seem like what a great engineer would do.
Writing an article to bash a company for not hiring him doesn't seem like what a great engineer would do.
One thing you need to remember is that technical people that are performing phone screens are going to do a little research on you as a future candidate, and this isn't the first impression you want to make when vying for a job.
Title made me think that one of their lead engineers died. Perhaps there would be a more accurate title option?
Yeah 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…
In short, if you can't write a simple FizzBuzz program, then you are probably not a good developer. Questions like these are good for being a quick way to separate programmers from those who cannot program at all.
But I agree - as someone who sucks at puzzles under pressure, questions like 'what's next after 111221?' seems like a totally retarded question to me.
"At my current company, we hire based on provable real-world experience." That is also a pretty bad hiring schema, you are leaving out a great deal of potential great programmers that are just starting, so, which strategy is better? I guess you always leave people behind, if it works for you, it's the right choice, and it has been working for facebook.
Job offers will come and go. Don't burn bridges that you may want to cross later in your career.
If you really want to work at Facebook, and you are a conscientious developer, then you'll study and be prepared for their kind of interview.
Ok, any real-world usage might be applicable only in embedded systems which is a fairly narrow domain.
Still, it is a small (easy to describe) problem that can be used to see how the applicant does problem solving for problems without a widely known best/proper solution - and that skill is probably 90% of any serious programming; the remainder is just typing while following an arbitrary syntax which a trained monkey can do.
And the solution definitely exists - depending on how the interviewer wants output, you can either push the result out with a trivial iteration with a pointer on each array; or if the arrays aren't read only, you can sort them in-place with a slightly modified qsort or even bubblesort - both of these approaches don't need to allocate any memory on the heap, just 2 int counters in processor registers or stack.
Your article clearly tells me everything about you. I read your LinkedIN profile geeezzzz entrepreneur? you really? COME ON!!!!!!!!!
Well, the OP statement "write a function which merges two sorted arrays without allocating any additional memory. Aside from having no real-world value, it’s not actually possible" seems strange. Ok, any real-world usage might be applicable only in embedded systems which is a fairly narrow domain. Still, it is a small (easy to describe) problem that can be used to see how the applicant does problem solving for proble…
If all you need to do is print what the result of the merge would be then sure, a solution does exist.