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Dear Startups: stop asking me math puzzles to figure out if I can code

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Re: Dear Startups: stop asking me math puzzles to figure out if I can code

#121

Post by bolder88 »

dagw wrote: post #103
smsm42 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the actual correlation is not with wealth (i.e. giving money so somebody with low SAT scores would not actually improve their scores - unless he would have enough money to bribe whoever is overseeing the test of course ;) but with some things that correlate with wealth.

Money buys access to tutors and training materials. It buys access to free time for practicing for your SAT. It also buys opportunity to repeatedly retake the SAT until you get a grade you like.

OR, those people are wealthy because they have a high IQ, and are likely to give birth to children with a high IQ.

I would bet that's far more likely.

Re: Dear Startups: stop asking me math puzzles to figure out if I can code

#122

Post by gregjor »

This is sadly common in a community keen on logic, evidence, and avoiding fallacies in thinking. Worse than puzzles are pointless faux psychological screening questions like "Tell me about something painful that has happened to you and how you dealt with it."

I would (and have) asked if the interviewer or organization has any evidence to show that interview puzzle performance (or shit like Myers-Brigg) predicts job performance. No? Not surprising. Google did look into it and found no relationship. (http://www.businessinsider.com/how-google-hires-2013-6)

Programmer interviews are so crazy and sometimes sadistic that I catalogued some of the more common interview patterns:

http://typicalprogrammer.com/thirteen-patterns-of-programmer...

Re: Dear Startups: stop asking me math puzzles to figure out if I can code

#123

Post by theanirudh »

Even after reading Jeff Atwood's post[1], it still amazes me how many programmers fail the fizz buzz test. We dont even get the chance to ask tough programming qustions. Simple questions like fizz buzz, loops and recursion were good enough to filter out a lot of applicants.

[1] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/why-cant-programmer...

Re: Dear Startups: stop asking me math puzzles to figure out if I can code

#125

Post by Pitarou »

kenster07 wrote: post #65
Mgccl wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't done any statistical surveys, in my undergrad years, I find math students are much smarter than the cs majors.

*presuming that you went to an undergraduate institution where the variance in student intelligence is large enough to detect an appreciable difference between the avg intelligence in these two majors.

Actually, I think he might have a point.

The phenomenon of the Computer Science graduate who can't write a FizzBuzz program, or even the post-graduate who can't write a simple recursive function, is well attested. But a Math student who can't handle a recursive definition is unlikely to make it through the first term.

Re: Dear Startups: stop asking me math puzzles to figure out if I can code

#126

Post by arethuza »

dionyziz wrote: post #119
mcphilip wrote: post #74

After much experimentation giving interviews for server side positions, I've come to favor questions that involve routine real world problems that can be handled in increasingly sophisticated ways. One example I use is getting the candidate to write crud, list, and search controller actions for a simple category data structure. Given a basic category data model (e.g. Name, Parent), the candidate starts with the crud…

OP would still blow you away by using the Nested set model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nested_set_model Although if you've been doing this interview for a while, you're bound to have come across someone who mentioned it, so I'm sure you're familiar.

And even better - knowing that quite a few database engines have extensions to help handling hierarchical data and it probably depends on the details as to which is actually better in a particular circumstance.

Re: Dear Startups: stop asking me math puzzles to figure out if I can code

#127

Post by sillysaurus2 »

tommorris wrote: post #120

Here's the test I've used in the past: Before the interview, I ask them to write some code to access an HTTP endpoint that contains exchange rate data (USD, EUR, GBP, JPY etc.) in XML and to parse and load said data into a relational database. Then to build a very simple HTML form based front-end that lets you input a currency and convert it into another currency. I ask them to send me either a link to a repository (…

despite Hacker News/Paul Graham dogma to the contrary, "smartness" isn't the only thing that matters in programmers. It's actually fairly low down the list. [...] I interviewed a guy who was intellectually very smart and understood a lot about CS theory. I asked him why the PHP code he sent me didn't have any comments. "I don't believe in comments because they slow the PHP interpreter down." Sorry, he can be smarter than Einstein but I ain't letting him near production code.

That isn't what Paul means by "smart." Worrying about trivial inefficiencies like that is a sign of an ineffective coder. That's the opposite of a great hacker.

Re: Dear Startups: stop asking me math puzzles to figure out if I can code

#128

Post by walshemj »

bolder88 wrote: post #121
dagw wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money buys access to tutors and training materials. It buys access to free time for practicing for your SAT. It also buys opportunity to repeatedly retake the SAT until you get a grade you like.

OR , those people are wealthy because they have a high IQ, and are likely to give birth to children with a high IQ. I would bet that's far more likely.

I think the number of dumb but rich people in American politics dis proves your thesis.

Re: Dear Startups: stop asking me math puzzles to figure out if I can code

#129

Post by trendspotter »

tl;dr

Stop asking this fine young lady math puzzles to determine her programming abilities. She is good at solving your seemingly pointless math puzzle, because she was practicing problem-solving since she was ten. But she is not anywhere near as good at programming, yet - which caused her problems at the actual jobs she had to do after she was hired.

Re: Dear Startups: stop asking me math puzzles to figure out if I can code

#130

Post by fayyazkl »

Finally some one pointed out the importance of the ability to actually code and produce something that works. Algorithmic problem solving ability is far less utilized in actual every day job compared to being able to code. Just imagine how much of your math skills did you actually need going well through all those bad experiences? Would you still be considered slow learner and fired if you knew how to code pretty well but just wasn’t so good at figuring out shortest path in a graph. Isn’t it possible to know the CS basics well i.e. familiar with complexity, big Os, basic data structures and sorting and being able to learn any advanced standard algo when needed by looking it up? Just wondering….
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