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I had to give a wrong answer to get the job (2017)

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Re: I had to give a wrong answer to get the job (2017)

#111

Post by JohnFen »

dijit wrote: post #46
chasing wrote: post #6

A job interview is also you judging the company and people you’re applying to join. If you feel the team lead can’t handle you answering questions honestly because it might reveal one of his or her blind spots, that’s not a great sign.

Ironic, as I almost always interview for the opposite. I don't really care what you currently know because software development paradigms can be learned with relative ease for a motivated and intelligent individual who already knows something. So instead I: 1) Poke around their CV/Resume. Just ensuring that they have the stuff they say to a basic level (some people just spam keywords) 2) Get them to a point where the…

Exactly this. When I interview people, I also consider it a HUGE red flag if I can't get the interviewee to say "I don't know" at some point.

Re: I had to give a wrong answer to get the job (2017)

#112

Post by mauvehaus »

mnw21cam wrote: post #89
LegitShady wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was taking a firearms safety course and there was a true/false section on a test. I can’t recall what the question was specifically but it was about which laws something fell under and the main issue was the word ‘or’ - when used as a logical OR the answer was True. When used as a sort of common day ‘or’ the answer was probably false. I put false without thinking. I had everything else on the test right and part of…

What other meaning of the word "or" is there?

In common usage, "or" is usually taken to mean exclusive or (XOR). Logical OR is non-exclusive. In most cases you can infer which is meant from context or it doesn't actually matter (much).

On a test for a gun license, it could get a little squishy as there are likely questions about the law (which only sometimes aligns with common sense) translated into lay English (which lacks the degree of precision you would likely find in the actual legal phrasing).

From Reddit ELI5:

"Cream or Sugar, in coffee is OR it means one the other or both

Fish or Chicken, for dinner is XOR it means one or the other not both."

https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4v6dcd/c...

Re: I had to give a wrong answer to get the job (2017)

#113

Post by hitekker »

don-code wrote: post #13

I was once in this position, but decided to continue through with the "right" answer anyway. Even though the interviewer was adamant that he was right (as, of course, was I), we briefly stopped the interview and made some Google searches to get to the truth. I could ostensibly argue that I got the job not by telling the interviewer what he wanted to hear, but by doubling down on the right answer and showing that I ha…

I’ve seen people go through the pipeline with “no hires” from interviewers because of small differences of opinion. In your case, I’d wager that the disagreeing interviewers feedback may have just been discarded.

Re: I had to give a wrong answer to get the job (2017)

#114

Post by ghaff »

kevstev wrote: post #99
unbalancedevh wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And giving a response like this is still a good indication of people skills -- Do you know how to present a controversial opinion in a way that encourages people to accept it, or do you ram it down people's throats?

Yeah I think this is way overblown- The way to approach this is "Well typically MVC is presented as such and people think its represented in typical architectures as blah blah blah, but from an actual theory perspective what actually happens is that blah blah blah..." You cover both bases, give the blogspam answer that most view is the "right" one, but also show that you have a much deeper understanding. My favorite…

Or "MVC is often thought of as mapping to the three tiers although that's a bit of a simplification that doesn't fully capture the mapping."

And there are essentially always nuances. So that's not really a controversial statement. At which point, the tech lead can accept the answer as pretty much what they were looking for or can probe further if it's actually the nuances they're interested in.

Re: I had to give a wrong answer to get the job (2017)

#115

Post by mnw21cam »

mauvehaus wrote: post #112
mnw21cam wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What other meaning of the word "or" is there?

In common usage, "or" is usually taken to mean exclusive or (XOR). Logical OR is non-exclusive. In most cases you can infer which is meant from context or it doesn't actually matter (much). On a test for a gun license, it could get a little squishy as there are likely questions about the law (which only sometimes aligns with common sense) translated into lay English (which lacks the degree of precision you would like…

Let's just imagine (for the sake of an argument) that you're just about to be given a roadside alcohol breath test by a police officer, but in this universe having just eaten fish or chicken can cause a false positive. The officer asks you if you had eaten fish or chicken recently. In fact, you had both fish and chicken in your last meal an hour ago (don't ask). You should answer "yes".

Most cases where "or" is taken to mean xor are actually asking for a choice, expecting one of the options as an answer. If the "or" is part of a question expecting a yes/no answer, then it is much harder to justify it being an xor.

Re: I had to give a wrong answer to get the job (2017)

#117

Post by svachalek »

mauvehaus wrote: post #112
mnw21cam wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What other meaning of the word "or" is there?

In common usage, "or" is usually taken to mean exclusive or (XOR). Logical OR is non-exclusive. In most cases you can infer which is meant from context or it doesn't actually matter (much). On a test for a gun license, it could get a little squishy as there are likely questions about the law (which only sometimes aligns with common sense) translated into lay English (which lacks the degree of precision you would like…

I imagine they could ask questions like, "should you point the barrel at the ground or check the chamber for a bullet?" and you might say "or?" NO stop you need to do both, while the expected answer is YES you idiot you need to do both. Sometimes you just can't win.

Re: I had to give a wrong answer to get the job (2017)

#118

Post by chaps »

Hah, I'm way too stubborn to give a wrong answer. Once had an interview where the interviewer asked me how to identify open connections on a linux host. Told him my go-to was `lsof -i` because fuck yeah, `lsof`. He told me no, the answer was `netstat`, which I took as a fun opportunity to explain why I prefer `lsof -i` over netstat. They still thought I was wrong and I got the impression that they took it as a challenge against their authority.

I did not get a callback.

Re: I had to give a wrong answer to get the job (2017)

#119

Post by bialpio »

fogof wrote: post #98

One thing this reminds me of is the use of "Compute the nth Fibonacci number" as an interview question. The interviewer may expect you to show off your knowledge of dynamic programming by memoizing the function. But you take a risk if you implement the matrix exponentiation algorithm [1], which is actually optimal in that it only uses O(log(n)) arithmetic operations. I had an interviewer once who seemed a bit skeptic…

Is it really sublinear though? The data that the algorithm accepts is a number n, the size of the data is thus m=log(n), so the algorithm runs in O(m) time -> linear in terms of data size. I vaguely recall there was some nuisance related to this (pseudopolynomial algorithms ring a bell), but haven't interviewed in a while so may be misremembering it.

Re: I had to give a wrong answer to get the job (2017)

#120

Post by AlexanderTheGr8 »

fogof wrote: post #98

One thing this reminds me of is the use of "Compute the nth Fibonacci number" as an interview question. The interviewer may expect you to show off your knowledge of dynamic programming by memoizing the function. But you take a risk if you implement the matrix exponentiation algorithm [1], which is actually optimal in that it only uses O(log(n)) arithmetic operations. I had an interviewer once who seemed a bit skeptic…

Technically, you can calculate the nth Fibonacci number in O(1) with the golden number.
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