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I was asked to crack a program in a job interview

erenyagdiran.github.io

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Re: I was asked to crack a program in a job interview

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that's the IP address of Google Public DNS, not Google.com per se.

I beleive the exact question was: "show me an IP being used by microsoft or google" Are you really asserting that a google owned, and google operated service is not using the IP with which I access it?

127.0.0.1!

Easy question

Re: I was asked to crack a program in a job interview

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an effective strategy from the employer's side, but what about the applicant who is asked to spend hours on some test for every job he/she applies for? Are you paying these applicants for the time they spend jumping through these hoops? And if your "technical grilling" fails to identify strong candidates, you're obviously asking the wrong questions or, at the very least, not asking the right ones.

As a candidate, I'd much rather they ask; I find that companies that don't ask for code are almost by definition unlikely to ask the right questions. If you must screen candidates for skillset, the less you have to rely on a proxy for that skillset the better off you are. As an employer, I find code samples irreplaceable, and I'm comfortable screening out candidates who decline to take the challenge out of principle…

I agree, but the OP does raise a good point that employers need to manage how long it will take to answer the questions for a qualified applicant.

Re: I was asked to crack a program in a job interview

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why you're getting downvoted, but debugging a "crack me" app while running as root is probably a bad idea. Even if this is inside a VM, it might give the wrong message to someone wanting to try this for themselves.

You could also attack the VM: http://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-93/pr...

Given this, what is the best first step? Best we can tell, he was running root in a VM that was running as an ordinary user. What more can be done, aside from running it on a throwaway machine? Running on a cloud instance, perhaps?

Re: I was asked to crack a program in a job interview

#235
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found that your job post determines the types of candidates you get. If you describe a really hard programming job, people self select out. If you describe an easy one, everyone applies. iOS developer? Floodgate. Crypto expert? Trickle.

Same experience here. We have an offering for normal java development with high performance aspects - tons of applications. Our monitoring/devops position? Few and far between.

Hehe. I was in DevOps and it was intellectually challenging but not really an exciting gig. I find more excitement in creating new tools for the public consumer over locking down servers, building scripts, setting up automation testing and doing configuration management. I do recognize that all of that is critical to being able to scale your operation but I'd rather have someone else do it than myself. That being said, I would still do it, if no one else knows what they're really doing--I just wouldn't apply for a job with DevOps in the title.

Re: I was asked to crack a program in a job interview

#236
post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Let the person know that (a) the computer is in working condition (i.e. no drivers are missing) (b) the network works (i.e cables are good, switch is good, DHCP is enabled, etc.) So you lie to them? I don't understand what the point of this test is. My first inclination is to open up a term and ping google but I would be pretty annoyed that your "first-wave" test involved actively lying to a candidate.

Every day, I have QA, tech support, my boss, and other developers tell me something that is not actually true, or simply omits any of the relevant information necessary to fix the problem. This is something you live with on a daily basis in a technical job involving complex systems that not everyone understands the entirety of. If you can't solve a problem with only some information, and some of it incorrect, then ho…

You are looking at this like it is a single-variable problem. This "test" should be easily solvable by a candidate. It is also a very bad one if it involves lying to the candidate. These two factors are not mutually exclusive.

Re: I was asked to crack a program in a job interview

#237
This reminds of this quora post. A nice one for beginners like me. The guy reverse engineered Sublime Text to remove the nagware of registration.

https://ericjang.quora.com/Reverse-Engineering-Apps-a-Step-b...

PS- You should buy ST, it is one of the best code editors out there in the market.

Re: I was asked to crack a program in a job interview

#238
post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but B5Geek's is a pretty entry-level thing. I've encountered whiteboard tests where you have to recreate an algorithm that someone spent their PhD thesis creating. It seems like a good way to find "geniuses", but it just isn't practical. In a lot of ways, it's a matter of identity crisis for software developers. We're all, industry included, not quite sure whether we're mechanics, carpenters, architects or scie…

I've taken a whiteboard test that asked me to come up with an algorithm that was difficult for me. I got the job even though my solution was horribly inefficient (and I knew it), and the interviewer later told me that the point wasn't to see what algorithm I knew - it was to see if I acted like an ass when I didn't know stuff.

> it was to see if I acted like an ass when I didn't know stuff

Surely there's more efficient ways of evaluating that.

Re: I was asked to crack a program in a job interview

#239

This is Intro to Systems homework at UChicago (the course is heavily based on CMU's equivalent.) You're given a personalized binary that asks for a series of passwords to complete each level. If you get a password wrong, it phones home to a server run by the professor and decrements your grade. The point is to teach you to reason about assembly using GDB. You can pretty trivially set a breakpoint at the phoning-home…

How did it identify you as a student? Couldn't you alter the routine to bomb someone else's grade?

The binary is tailored, in the beginning it does some identity check. In CMU, as I remembered, you have to login to the school's cluster using your own account to actually diffusing the bomb.

Re: I was asked to crack a program in a job interview

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. Testing for sysadmins is easier: you're after a way of thinking . So a competence test ("can you do what you claimed?") with a freeform "keep notes on your thinking along the way" is quite informative. You still need to interview, of course. I confess I don't know how I'd apply this to developers. They pass fizzbuzz, OK - what do you do next?

> I confess I don't know how I'd apply this to developers. They pass fizzbuzz, OK - what do you do next? I know what I would do, just have a 10 minute conversation with them about technology. I can easily figure out just where a person is in regards to their development as a programmer just by listening to them talk about what they're paying attention to in the tech landscape. If they don't blink when I mention Hacke…

Not infallible - I could talk tech near-perfectly (I am a native speaker of BS), but I am most definitely not a coder pretty much at all - but a good start.
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