> –anything Let me show you my collection of cat whiskers, it's right there in my tinfoil hat.
That would be a very useful reply. It would effectively communicate to me whether you would make a good hire.
The Most Revealing Job Interview Question
221–230 of 242 posts
Re: The Most Revealing Job Interview Question
#222Split the pile of application in two halves. Throw one of the halves in the trashcan. Hiring people with bad luck isn't good for business.
While often given as a joke, this is effectively what many of these "best interview question" posts really are:
Find any random old way to save time and effort in the interviewing process, then come up with some clever-sounding rationalization.
Re: The Most Revealing Job Interview Question
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
>here he was engaging in geek-shaming. No, he was making a joke about Fight Club. But if you are determined to feel persecuted, I'm sure you can find a way. The anime club at my workplace meets weekly in a conference room to use one of our projectors. Several coworkers have figurines or wallscrolls in their offices. And yes, this is in America.
Hi. I did recognize the joke about Fight Club at the time. But please do trust me, the tone and context made it a mild form of geek-shaming. His effective statement was, "Yeah, I liked that stuff too when I was a kid." Further instances included people, starting with the same man, explicitly stating that they preferred the X-Box 360 to the Nintendo Wii because the Wii is childish. This was around the time "Elder Scro…
I had never expected my coworkers to share my out-of-work hobbies, but I had expected that if the topic came up in casual conversation, I wouldn't be labeled childish or immature for what I like doing outside of work
That sounds reasonable. But I wonder if it's always true that you can't label anyone? What if someone mentioned that they spent all weekend doing a :) Would you not label them as childish? (I'm not saying anime is childish)
More to the point, I think it's fine to express disinterest or even dislike other peoples hobbies etc, as long as it's done in a non-hurtful way. I don't think that's labeling people. It's just finding common ground. It's a way to stop people from going on about things you know you have zero interest in hearing about.
Re: The Most Revealing Job Interview Question
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
Edit: I think I hold exclusively controversial hobbies / books / opinions. I would love this question so much if I ever saw it in an interview. Controversial topics seem to be perfectly suited to this question. Original: The point of an interview is two-fold: the company is looking to find a good match for an open position, and the candidate is looking for work. Neither of you wants to enter an agreement that will tu…
> It is a reasonable position that if you have no interests, or hobbies, or any read books at all that you are comfortable talking about with your employer, that you are likely a poor fit for the company. Really? I dunno--I always saw employment as more of a business transaction, and I don't give a damn about the personal lives of those I do business with.
"Really? I dunno--I always saw employment as more of a business transaction, and I don't give a damn about the personal lives of those I do business with"
Well, I think communication is affected by personality "type". So people more "similar" communicate more effectively. If someone is not comfortable talking about anything except work, that says a lot about that person. If what it says is good or bad is another question, but to me it sounds like a boring human being ;)
Re: The Most Revealing Job Interview Question
#225Re: The Most Revealing Job Interview Question
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi. I did recognize the joke about Fight Club at the time. But please do trust me, the tone and context made it a mild form of geek-shaming. His effective statement was, "Yeah, I liked that stuff too when I was a kid." Further instances included people, starting with the same man, explicitly stating that they preferred the X-Box 360 to the Nintendo Wii because the Wii is childish. This was around the time "Elder Scro…
I had never expected my coworkers to share my out-of-work hobbies, but I had expected that if the topic came up in casual conversation, I wouldn't be labeled childish or immature for what I like doing outside of work That sounds reasonable. But I wonder if it's always true that you can't label anyone? What if someone mentioned that they spent all weekend doing a :) Would you not label them as childish? (I'm not sayin…
There's friendly environments, and there's professional environments. You can label freely in a friendly environment, but you have to actually get to know someone socially to create that. You don't label in a professional environment.
Re: The Most Revealing Job Interview Question
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the perspective of theoretical computer science, the interviewer was correct. I'll try to sketch out why. ------------------ 1. In the initial probing for the upper bound, there is no point to grow faster than 2x each time If we double the probe each time, we'll find the upper bound in O(log N) time. Then, we'll need O(log N) additional time to find the real answer. That makes the entire algorithm O(log N). Supp…
Given that is a theoretical question that you are attempting to fit into an actual algorithm to ostensibly solve a real problem, doesn't the actual performance of the algorithm matter? I can see that within the context of theory of computer science there may not be a difference between the speed of the two algorithms, since both are "asymptotically optimal" (a term I'm not sure I entirely grok), yet within virtually…
I made a python script to time the different approaches:
https://gist.github.com/3839551
AFAICT, the parent and the interviewer is right because both methods run in roughly the same time because the time of the binary search is orders of magnitude greater than the upper bound finding part. I might have made one or more mistakes though.
Re: The Most Revealing Job Interview Question
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given that is a theoretical question that you are attempting to fit into an actual algorithm to ostensibly solve a real problem, doesn't the actual performance of the algorithm matter? I can see that within the context of theory of computer science there may not be a difference between the speed of the two algorithms, since both are "asymptotically optimal" (a term I'm not sure I entirely grok), yet within virtually…
I made a python script to time the different approaches: https://gist.github.com/3839551 AFAICT, the parent and the interviewer is right because both methods run in roughly the same time because the time of the binary search is orders of magnitude greater than the upper bound finding part. I might have made one or more mistakes though.
If I have time later today I'll extend your snippet, but my inclination is that the differences in speed become apparent only with very large numbers. I still suspect my algorithm is about 40-50% faster if you start with a googol.
Re: The Most Revealing Job Interview Question
#229Hmm, I'm not sure I like the idea of intentionally trying to steer the candidate off on a tangent. It feels like a trap. In an interview, the interviewer literally has all the power, and saying "no" or refusing to answer a question posed by the interviewer seems rather difficult. This would be doubly hard for me since I like to teach (both my parents are teachers and I love to explain things to people so that they ca…
The interviewer does not have all the power. Any good interviewer knows this, and finding out whether the candidate knows this can be indicative of the candidates maturity, perspective, confidence, and leadership abilities. Not every position requires these, but some do.
Re: The Most Revealing Job Interview Question
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the perspective of theoretical computer science, the interviewer was correct. I'll try to sketch out why. ------------------ 1. In the initial probing for the upper bound, there is no point to grow faster than 2x each time If we double the probe each time, we'll find the upper bound in O(log N) time. Then, we'll need O(log N) additional time to find the real answer. That makes the entire algorithm O(log N). Supp…
Given that is a theoretical question that you are attempting to fit into an actual algorithm to ostensibly solve a real problem, doesn't the actual performance of the algorithm matter? I can see that within the context of theory of computer science there may not be a difference between the speed of the two algorithms, since both are "asymptotically optimal" (a term I'm not sure I entirely grok), yet within virtually…
This was my conclusion, that although the two approaches had the same average big O time, my intuition said it was somewhat faster to start from some number larger than 0.
In retrospect, I might have mentioned this and then gave the interviewer's preferred answer in code, just to keep things simpler.