In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal
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Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal
#2Some of the more flippant sounding ones could be useless but I thought the idea of the simpler ones (how many golf balls etc.) is to get a feeling for how people's minds work and whether they can make sensible best guesses in the abscence of concrete facts and make judgements based on those guesses. Weed out the ones who have no appreciation for how the volume of a golf ball relates to the size of a bus.
Good logical thinking shown here could indicate an ability to rapidly prototype systems without getting hung up on too fine detail.
Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal
#3The original article - http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-huntin...
Distraction free reading and without all the annoying cruft of Quartz.
Fascinating use of "Big Data" to cut through the bullshit. Wonder if it will change anything. I suspect the "tough" interview plays well into a company's PR.
Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal
#4Sounds great, although like with any retraction I doubt this will be enough to stop the spread of interview puzzles. Even I'm guilty of asking my share before I realized that the only thing that matters about the candidate is whether they can sit down and start writing code (and the quality of said code).
Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal
#5Just use SAT.
God says... longing workest changes monastery test_pilot subversion I_had_a_crazy_dream imbue excursive Ours Essence vanished mingled Antony tend Electronic decayeth Fire
Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal
#6Some of the more flippant sounding ones could be useless but I thought the idea of the simpler ones (how many golf balls etc.) is to get a feeling for how people's minds work and whether they can make sensible best guesses in the abscence of concrete facts and make judgements based on those guesses. Weed out the ones who have no appreciation for how the volume of a golf ball relates to the size of a bus. Good logical…
On the other hand, demonstrating evidence for being able to rapidly prototype systems without getting hung up on too fine detail also indicates an ability to rapidly prototype systems without getting hung up on too fine detail. And it does it much more directly (i.e. there is an obvious link rather than a tenuous at best one) and with much less stress, awkwardness and mind games.
Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal
#7When I interviewed at Google 5 years ago they weren't using those brainteasers.
There are many posts online about the actual, CS-y questions that you can expect in a Google interview, I had just assumed that the mentions of brainteasers were merely urban legend.
Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal
#8I don't understand people's problem with estimating. It's a useful skill. Perhaps it would be better if the questions actually related to technology, rather than golf balls - but the principle is the same.
For instance - "how many hard drives does Gmail need?" requires a rough guess of how many users Gmail has (if you're interviewing at Google, you should know it's 1e8-1e9). How much space each one takes (probably nowhere near a gigabyte on average - let's say 1e8 bytes). And that the current capacity of hard drives is (1e12 bytes).
Then you can say that they probably need 1e5 hard drives, link it to redundancy, availability, deduplication, backups etc. You can comment that it's feasible to build a datacenter with that many hard drives.
No one cares that the actual number is 12,722 - but you've demonstrated a broad set of knowledge about the current state of technology. Saying "dunno - a billion?" is not going to get you anywhere, and with good reason.
The Monopoly question is crap, though.
I'd like to know how useful http://google-tale.blogspot.com/2008/07/google-billboard-puz... was.
Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal
#9Some of the more flippant sounding ones could be useless but I thought the idea of the simpler ones (how many golf balls etc.) is to get a feeling for how people's minds work and whether they can make sensible best guesses in the abscence of concrete facts and make judgements based on those guesses. Weed out the ones who have no appreciation for how the volume of a golf ball relates to the size of a bus. Good logical…
On the other hand, demonstrating evidence for being able to rapidly prototype systems without getting hung up on too fine detail also indicates an ability to rapidly prototype systems without getting hung up on too fine detail. And it does it much more directly (i.e. there is an obvious link rather than a tenuous at best one) and with much less stress, awkwardness and mind games.
fair point :) I guess I work in an industry (design engineering) where my interviews have only ever consisted of a "nice chat"
Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal
#10I don't understand people's problem with estimating. It's a useful skill. Perhaps it would be better if the questions actually related to technology, rather than golf balls - but the principle is the same. For instance - "how many hard drives does Gmail need?" requires a rough guess of how many users Gmail has (if you're interviewing at Google, you should know it's 1e8-1e9). How much space each one takes (probably no…
They do ask those sorts of questions still, but I wouldn't call them brainteasers.