I solved it! They reached out about a day later (edit: and asked for a copy of my resume) and showed me a couple of job listings I'd be a good fit for. They wanted me to relocate which was kind of a buzzkill, but it was fun getting to talk with one of their engineers about how they've set up most of their projects. They were super nice, but it does take a while to hear back from them.
A regex crossword from LinkedIn Engineering
31–40 of 41 posts
Re: A regex crossword from LinkedIn Engineering
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
I received the same stat.
Same here. It's probably a hard coded message. You'd think the hacker news post would skew it a bit if it was realtime. Either that or they have a really massive data set on it that's hard to skew.
That "solved" content is loaded from "static-sites" location [1], so most certainly hard-coded.
[1] (spoiler alert, do not read the slug of this URL) https://engineering.linkedin.com/content/dam/static-sites/en...
Re: A regex crossword from LinkedIn Engineering
#33Usually crossword answers make sense. This ended up just looking like a jumble of letters.
The jumble of letters made sense in the context of the regex problems.
The first regex crossword I ever saw — https://gregable.com/p/regexp-puzzle.html — also was sort of a jumble of letters, but it actually encoded a secret message (I don’t want to say more — spoilers)
Re: A regex crossword from LinkedIn Engineering
#34LinkedIn thought, "We have a problem, not enough good devs." Then they thought, "Hey, let's recruit using a regex puzzle!" Now they have two problems. (With apologies to jwz.)
Re: A regex crossword from LinkedIn Engineering
#35LinkedIn thought, "We have a problem, not enough good devs." Then they thought, "Hey, let's recruit using a regex puzzle!" Now they have two problems. (With apologies to jwz.)
Point/joke taken, but let me play devil's advocate: anyone very familiar with regular expressions probably has a lot of experience as a developer. Is s/he a good developer? That's harder to say. But s/he definitely does have some passion for solving puzzles, at least.
I'd even argue that LinkedIn doesn't really even need amazing developers. As far as code goes, they're only really solving problems that have been solved for decades. Infrastructure is another matter, but I doubt they're doing anything insane on that front either.
Re: A regex crossword from LinkedIn Engineering
#36To up the ante, it would be a fairly good challenge to write a computer program that solves this puzzle efficiently.
Another commenter mentioned having written a program that solves it (though not necessarily efficiently).
I think that's what distinguishes the truly excellent/"lazy" coders from the head-down, 9-to-5 types.
Re: A regex crossword from LinkedIn Engineering
#37If you enjoyed that, there's plenty more where that came from at https://regexcrossword.com/
The linked in one was so easy that I felt compelled to play some harder ones - you definitely cost me a couple hours of productivity today - I've played through a couple dozen of these things...
So, thanks, and also no thanks ;)
Re: A regex crossword from LinkedIn Engineering
#38This was fun, thanks! Solved it in about 10 minutes.
Re: A regex crossword from LinkedIn Engineering
#39Solved this puzzle last time and LinkedIn basically told me "we won't actually interview you unless you have 2-4 years of industry experience" new grads be warned.
Re: A regex crossword from LinkedIn Engineering
#40Solved this puzzle last time and LinkedIn basically told me "we won't actually interview you unless you have 2-4 years of industry experience" new grads be warned.
I really don't understand what the point of creating these puzzles and then failing to disclose that you'll reject, out-of-hand, an entire subset based on such hidden criteria. It feels like firms want anyone else, but themselves to train junior|entry-level|new grads or only accept new grads with the requisite level of moxie who have had the luxury of time and money to have trained themselves or been able to establish businesses.
Some people had to work whatever job(s) they could find or had family issues to deal with and go to school at the same time. Are they less qualified because of it?