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Ask HN: What's your speciality, and what's your "FizzBuzz" equivalent?

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Re: Ask HN: What's your speciality, and what's your "FizzBuzz" equivalent?

#31

Post by aaronem »

ColinWright wrote: post #4

I'm a mathematician, and sometimes I need to assess the level at which I'll pitch an explanation. Although I don't do this in a setting where it's possible to set a test, as such, I do ask this question: An equivalence relation is reflexive, symmetric, and transitive. If E is an equivalence relation, and we know E(x,y) but we know !E(y,z), what do we know about E(x,z), and why? It seems a great filter for people who…

I'm not a mathematician, but it looks to me like we know E(x,z) is false. The transitive property gives us

    E(x,y) & E(y,z) => E(x,z)
but since we know !E(y,z), we can infer !E(x,z).

(I'm not a logician, either, so I hope you'll excuse what may be imprecise phrasing on my part.)

Re: Ask HN: What's your speciality, and what's your "FizzBuzz" equivalent?

#32

Post by freehunter »

Information security. Our most basic interview demonstration question at my job is to hand the candidate a couple pages of tcpdump output and ask them to describe what was going on.

We don't use tcpdump all that often as we have more advanced tools, but if you can't understand a pretty raw representation of network traffic, you're probably not qualified to administer those advanced tools.

Re: Ask HN: What's your speciality, and what's your "FizzBuzz" equivalent?

#33

Post by [deleted] »

ColinWright wrote: post #4

I'm a mathematician, and sometimes I need to assess the level at which I'll pitch an explanation. Although I don't do this in a setting where it's possible to set a test, as such, I do ask this question: An equivalence relation is reflexive, symmetric, and transitive. If E is an equivalence relation, and we know E(x,y) but we know !E(y,z), what do we know about E(x,z), and why? It seems a great filter for people who…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What's your speciality, and what's your "FizzBuzz" equivalent?

#34

Post by EvanAnderson »

YesThatTom2 wrote: post #6

I have been unable to think of one for Linux system administrators. :-(

I've been a contract sysadmin for a long time. In a former "life" part of my work was doing phone screens and job interviews for contract sysadmin candidates.

If a candidate's answer to a nonspecific troubleshooting scenario didn't begin with (or contain very close to the beginning of the answer) "look at the logs" I'd bump them. Anybody whose problem-solving methodology doesn't including gathering pertinent data early in the process isn't somebody I want "solving" problems for me.

Re: Ask HN: What's your speciality, and what's your "FizzBuzz" equivalent?

#35

Post by aaronem »

solox3 wrote: post #11

Working for a web company. Our favourite JS question is, "What happens if you do this?" var func = function func () { // blah };

It looks to me like what happens is exactly what you'd expect, i.e., you end up with a function defined under the name "func", just as you would with any other function name. Is there something I'm missing?

Re: Ask HN: What's your speciality, and what's your "FizzBuzz" equivalent?

#37

Post by aaronem »

YesThatTom2 wrote: post #6

I have been unable to think of one for Linux system administrators. :-(

I've seen a good one -- actually got asked it in a phone screen I did last year:

"How would you recursively delete all files with extension 'mp3' in a given directory tree?"

The (simplest) correct answer (I know) is

    find /path/to/wherever -name "*.mp3" -exec rm -fv {} \;
Maybe that's more of a pons asinorum, I suppose, but then isn't a pons asinorum precisely what a fizzbuzz question is meant to be?

Re: Ask HN: What's your speciality, and what's your "FizzBuzz" equivalent?

#39

Post by atroyn »

snorkel wrote: post #26
austenallred wrote: post #7

I'm a marketer, and have yet to find a way to judge a marketer's competence better than: "Here's this app, here's what it does. How would you increase downloads?" A quick brainstorm session shows you how they approach the situation, what tricks they have in their bag, and what methods they feel confident using (or if they're just BSing). Interestingly enough, 50% of the time people answer "SEO," which is among the wo…

There's a difference between marketing and product design. A marketer should know how to get qualified leads for lowest cost to your app, and then it's your product manager who should worry about making the best impression with new users.

This is really a false dichotomy. Many apps can market themselves by 'baking in' sharing, and I don't mean just a 'tweet/like/pin' button on every other page.

These two functions are not separate.

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