Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

IBM's Asshole Test

johnpublic.mataroa.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 604 posts

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#111

Post by [deleted] »

tomatowurst wrote: post #88
Flankk wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking from experience or from the ass? In my experience a startup is all consuming.

tarsnap is a one man show and he's not building a startup. he could've easily worked at Google, take advantage of the rising stock prices AND continue work on his SaaS. Lot of us do exactly that because it doesn't make sense to leave a good paying job at a large company to take on tremendous risk at as you said, consuming endeavour with small probability of success (+90% failure rate). I don't get why people are so u…

[deleted]

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#112

Post by lekevicius »

bumper_crop wrote: post #47
cperciva wrote: post #31

When I interviewed at Google in 2006, one of the interviewers asked me to write code for solving a particular problem. I replied along the lines of "ok I need to think about this, it's not obvious how to solve it" and started thinking. Time ticked away. Five minutes. Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. The interviewer started reminding me that he needed me to write some code and if there wasn't anything for him to copy dow…

> Why interviewers were all transcribing the whiteboard rather than taking photos I have no clue. It makes it easier to reason about the code. It's the difference between typing out the answer from Stack Overflow, v.s. copy pasting it. At least for me, writing the code down at the speed the candidate does triggers the error checking part of my brain.

> between typing out the answer from Stack Overflow, v.s. copy pasting it

Thanks to co-pilot, these are approaching being one and the same (:

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#113

Post by vkou »

cperciva wrote: post #31

When I interviewed at Google in 2006, one of the interviewers asked me to write code for solving a particular problem. I replied along the lines of "ok I need to think about this, it's not obvious how to solve it" and started thinking. Time ticked away. Five minutes. Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. The interviewer started reminding me that he needed me to write some code and if there wasn't anything for him to copy dow…

> (Why interviewers were all transcribing the whiteboard rather than taking photos I have no clue.)

Because they have to transcribe it anyways, and because it's hard to read blue on white, or green on white in a photo.

Also, if some part of your handwriting is illegible, or you've made some ambiguous errors, or whatever, the interviewer can ask you what you meant, instead of having to make an after-the-fact assumption, long after you've left.

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#114

Post by crate_barre »

That’s one way to look at it. The other way is to determine confidence. Either way, these are character traits and filtering for one or the other is unfortunate. Teams should mimic villages, everyone is there. Everyone. The shy, the arrogant, the nice, etc. There will be flawed people in a village, but that is a village. Not utopia.

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#115

Post by banana_giraffe »

f0e4c2f7 wrote: post #66
cperciva wrote: post #31

When I interviewed at Google in 2006, one of the interviewers asked me to write code for solving a particular problem. I replied along the lines of "ok I need to think about this, it's not obvious how to solve it" and started thinking. Time ticked away. Five minutes. Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. The interviewer started reminding me that he needed me to write some code and if there wasn't anything for him to copy dow…

This story strikes me as pretty funny. As if he might say "damn, I was hoping you knew. We've been working on this one for weeks!"

I once walked into an interview where some code was already written on a whiteboard. It was presented to me as a "find the problem with the code" sort of puzzle, and I pointed out the one big logic problem with it's algorithm and wrote a quick fix.

The interviewer responded with "hold on", and grabbed a colleague, pointed at the whiteboard, and the colleague said "yes! that'll fix it!" and ran off.

I was offered the job that I was clearly qualified for, but I declined. I often wondered how many candidates it took them to fix their bug.

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#116

Post by throwaway6532 »

drchiu wrote: post #85
Victerius wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take this with a pinch of salt, but I read an anecdote on Reddit a long time ago about a corporation in New York (I think it was a bank) where an executive was looking for a new VP/Director/something. He found a potential candidate and invited him to a one-on-one lunch. When the candidate placed his order, the executive discreetly told the waiter to bring the wrong order for the candidate. The point was to see how th…

Interesting. Honestly, I'm the guy who would just "roll with it" and eat whatever was brought to me because I honestly can't bring the energy to arguing with the waiter. But having hired people and other professionals, I almost always hire the person who would assert themselves and demand the right thing be done. Why? Well, I recognize that I don't like to be "that guy". So I hire people who can do it for me. It has…

As "that guy" it's somewhat refreshing to hear this. I think the key is really self-awareness and understanding of group dynamics enough to help you get the balance of individuals right.

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#117

Post by caf »

krono wrote: post #96
f0e4c2f7 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This story strikes me as pretty funny. As if he might say "damn, I was hoping you knew. We've been working on this one for weeks!"

Near the beginning of a class, Professor Neyman wrote two problems on the blackboard. Dantzig arrived late and assumed that they were a homework assignment. According to Dantzig, they "seemed to be a little harder than usual", but a few days later he handed in completed solutions for both problems, still believing that they were an assignment that was overdue. Six weeks later, an excited Neyman eagerly told him that…

There's a lesson there too about how solving problems is often easier once you know it can be solved.

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#118

Post by betamike »

krono wrote: post #96
f0e4c2f7 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This story strikes me as pretty funny. As if he might say "damn, I was hoping you knew. We've been working on this one for weeks!"

Near the beginning of a class, Professor Neyman wrote two problems on the blackboard. Dantzig arrived late and assumed that they were a homework assignment. According to Dantzig, they "seemed to be a little harder than usual", but a few days later he handed in completed solutions for both problems, still believing that they were an assignment that was overdue. Six weeks later, an excited Neyman eagerly told him that…

Hah! This reminded me of a similar story:

"In 1951, David A. Huffman and his MIT information theory classmates were given the choice of a term paper or a final exam. The professor, Robert M. Fano, assigned a term paper on the problem of finding the most efficient binary code. Huffman, unable to prove any codes were the most efficient, was about to give up and start studying for the final when he hit upon the idea of using a frequency-sorted binary tree and quickly proved this method the most efficient.[5]

In doing so, Huffman outdid Fano, who had worked with Claude Shannon to develop a similar code. Building the tree from the bottom up guaranteed optimality, unlike the top-down approach of Shannon–Fano coding."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huffman_coding#History

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#119

Post by Victerius »

krono wrote: post #96
f0e4c2f7 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This story strikes me as pretty funny. As if he might say "damn, I was hoping you knew. We've been working on this one for weeks!"

Near the beginning of a class, Professor Neyman wrote two problems on the blackboard. Dantzig arrived late and assumed that they were a homework assignment. According to Dantzig, they "seemed to be a little harder than usual", but a few days later he handed in completed solutions for both problems, still believing that they were an assignment that was overdue. Six weeks later, an excited Neyman eagerly told him that…

When I started reading my brain went straight to Von Neumann. Now I really want to read a fanfic about a story where John Von Neumann is invited to a Google interview.

Re: IBM's Asshole Test

#120

Post by Bahamut »

eej71 wrote: post #67

Decades ago, in the days before uber, my employer would fly in candidates from college campuses as part of an onsite interview. The candidate would fly in the night before and we relied on a taxi service to bring the candidate to the hotel. Then in the morning the same service would bring them to the onsite and of course bring them back to the airport at the end. It was a whole curated process. Little did the candida…

I've heard of airline companies doing similar when interviewing flight attendants - United will fly you to Newark to interview, but often there will be people shadowing candidates to see how they behave during their travels and that feedback is taken into account when evaluating candidates.
Post reply on HN