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Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

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Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#221

Post by rwallace »

moduspol wrote: post #219
Klonoar wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of those moments where citing a source (that experiment) would be incredibly useful...

I wish my Googling skills were stronger, but alas, they are not. I remember one of the other key takeaways was that the manager role was treated more favorably--specifically that they apologized they could only offer some (reasonable) amount of relocation assistance while none was even offered in the developer role. It was theorized that managers were seen as an "in group" among other managers, but that was obviously…

I think it was a blog post by Michael O Church, though I don't have the reference to hand.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#222

Post by ndvgfts34 »

mabbo wrote: post #122
jfasi wrote: post #7

As someone who does both a lot of interviewing (at Google) and gives a lot of advice on interviewing to people just starting out, this rhymes with my intuition about why some people get into interviews: even without the use of brainteasers (which, for the record, are not used at Google), the interview process is hard . People rarely come out of it without at least a twinge of frustration of humiliation. I'm not immun…

> (which, for the record, are not used at Google) I interviewed maybe 3 or 4 years ago at Google. Definitely got some questions that were not remotely programming related, but were just hard problems that probably were awesome if you already knew the answer. I recall one was something along the lines of "You're making a bet in the final round of Jeopardy. Presume that your opponent is going to bet optimally given you…

That doesn't sound like differential equations, it sounds like discrete math.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#224

Post by RhodesianHunter »

pmiller2 wrote: post #189
spitfire wrote: post #105

Hunter and Schmidt did a meta-study of 85 (now 100, with the follow up) years of research on hiring criteria. [1] There are three attributes you need to select for to identify performing employees in intellectual fields. - General mental ability (Are they generally smart) Use WAIS or if there are artifacts of GMA(Complex work they've done themselves) available use them as proxies. Using IQ is effectively illegal[2] i…

What sort of meaningful work sample test can you do in 3 hours?

"Here is the almost complete skeleton of a project in your preferred language (presumably, the one you're applying to use full time), finish it by implementing this vital piece of business logic."

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#225

Post by [deleted] »

framebit wrote: post #69

I had one of these brainteaser questions in an interview once, and I liked my mathematician friend’s answer to it the best. Q: Given infinite setup time and infinite money, how would you fill the inside of a 747 with ping pong balls as quickly as possible? A: Define the inside of the plane as the exterior. Now, by definition, all ping pong balls are inside the plane. QED.

[deleted]

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#226

Post by samangan »

framebit wrote: post #69

I had one of these brainteaser questions in an interview once, and I liked my mathematician friend’s answer to it the best. Q: Given infinite setup time and infinite money, how would you fill the inside of a 747 with ping pong balls as quickly as possible? A: Define the inside of the plane as the exterior. Now, by definition, all ping pong balls are inside the plane. QED.

Infinite setup time: In the vacuum of space, as t -> infinity, eventually random quantum fluctuations will spontaneously create a 747 full of ping pong balls.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#227

Post by goostavos »

bsder wrote: post #203
jfasi wrote: post #7

As someone who does both a lot of interviewing (at Google) and gives a lot of advice on interviewing to people just starting out, this rhymes with my intuition about why some people get into interviews: even without the use of brainteasers (which, for the record, are not used at Google), the interview process is hard . People rarely come out of it without at least a twinge of frustration of humiliation. I'm not immun…

> I have a pet theory that when people interview they bring this buried frustration into the room with them and use the interviewing process to play the part of the people they feel humiliated them. That's a very rare individual. I've been on both sides of the desk a lot, and I don't think I've ever run into anybody like that. The much simpler explanation is that being an interviewer is hard and takes work and practi…

My FANG corp matches on points 1 & 2. Occasionally you'll find people who request 3. However, in my experience, that is by far the exception.

After doing my fair share of interviews and sitting through a ton of debriefs, I'm pretty convinced that getting hired boils down entirely to the loop you get. Some poor bastards get the wrong people -- people who either want to prove their smartness, or simply have out dated ideas -- and that's that. Didn't use inheritance in your system design? Well you got Bob instead of Joe. Bob loves old school OOP and thinks composition is a character flaw. If you got Joe, you'd be in, but... alas.

No amount of "calibration" solves bias.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#228

Post by repsilat »

ElysianEagle wrote: post #34

I realize that the study was specifically talking about brainteasers, but I wonder if irrelevant algorithm questions have a similar motivation? I was once asked at an interview at a FAANG company to come up with an algo for finding the longest palindromic subsequence (!). At another I was asked to get all partitions of an integer ( https://www.whitman.edu/mathematics/cgt_online/book/section0... ). I'm pretty certain…

> an algo for finding the longest palindromic subsequence (!)

Not irrelevant to my professional career, to be honest. There have been a few situations where being able to see a tricky, unfamiliar problem and after some thought say, "oh, we can use a DP algo for that" has saved a large amount of future headache.

Only a small fraction of people on the team need to have that skill (more in some teams than others, too) so I don't think it's a great thing to test for (much less require), but it's actually a pretty valuable skill in my experience.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#229

Post by twelvechairs »

commandlinefan wrote: post #130
8_hours_ago wrote: post #123

I recently interviewed at Apple and one interviewer caused me to decide to never work there. I was put into a conference room and had 8 people over 6 hours come in and interview me one after another. Each person asked me about my background and then jumped into a whiteboard coding problem. Most of the interviewers were understanding of the fact that writing code on a whiteboard is nothing like writing code on a compu…

> Some jobs require performance under pressure, but programming is not one of them. In fact, programming under pressure is the leading cause of programming disasters. It's the exact opposite of what a rational employer should want.

No jobs are performed best under pressure. Or at least past the body's ability for a brief surge (adreneline etc.). But it happens in every occupation because overall more will be produced by pushing people than letting them pace themselves...

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#230

Post by ItsMe000001 »

bfrydl wrote: post #151
framebit wrote: post #69

I had one of these brainteaser questions in an interview once, and I liked my mathematician friend’s answer to it the best. Q: Given infinite setup time and infinite money, how would you fill the inside of a 747 with ping pong balls as quickly as possible? A: Define the inside of the plane as the exterior. Now, by definition, all ping pong balls are inside the plane. QED.

My answer: I use my infinite resources to become benevolent dictator of Earth. With my endless wealth I prevent climate change, provide the basic needs of every person on the planet, educate the world, and set up a global system of sustainable reproduction. I have infinite resources so I assume it's not eugenics or something dystopian, but more a collective human understanding of responsibility. Finally, with our fut…

> when there is nothing left to learn,

I only logged in to comment on this :-)

This won't happen, ever. That's because new things to learn are being created all the time!

For example, when there was no horse there was no horse riding. When there was no computer there was no programming. Just two infinitesimal examples to demonstrate what I mean.

Knowledge of "basics of the universe" such as quantum theory are of no use to a "higher order" being such as ourselves when almost all of us apart from a few physicists work on much higher planes. The matter and energy of the universe is constantly being rearranged to create more and more and higher higher order problems, you will _never_ run out of new ones. First we create the problem, than we solve it, creating new ones (and the whole universe does it too, and biological stuff especially) :-)

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