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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)

#351

Post by tharkun__ »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #301
tharkun__ wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet the company chose to let themselves be represented by this person. It might also go the other way around, you are interviewed by someone that's awesome and you end up with another team that truly sucks. In that case bad luck but if they send a dick to interview you it is more likely that the rest of them are also gonna be dicks. I like companies where you actually interview with some of the people you will be…

I mean, this is all the surmise of the person writing the article. I'd like to draw your attention to the fact that the interviewer never actually did anything wrong in the actual event described. In terms of your idea that a single interviewer should turn you off from working for a company, possibly. Companies can be pretty big. I am skeptical that there are many medium or large companies that can prevent all negati…

Fair points though I was really only replying to your comment here, not the article any longer. I do agree that the article seems to "overanalyze" the situation, potentially there was literally nothing and he gave the 'wrong answer' for no good reason at all. Makes a nice article though I guess. FWIW I have experience with giving the "hard truth" in the "wrong situation" and I've come out unscathed, because I was very objectively correct and there was no way around it. Nothing pedantically debatable in my case, just "this is how the protocol works, not the way you say, no interpretation possible, look it up in the RFC". Not the actual example but like someone saying it's "SYN, ACK, ACK ACK" instead of "SYN, SYN ACK, ACK".

Companies can be large and in that case it's likely you will be encountering a fair number of people you won't like while there anyway. The question is whether you interview with "random interviewer of the day" (still bad if that's a bad apple but if the company is large you might take your chances while if the company is small, it's likely this is 'their best' or you will work closely with this person) or if you're actually interviewing with the team members you'll work with. If the company is large but you know you are interviewing with the team members you'll be working with and the feeling just isn't there or worse, then I think I'd take the possible false positive if I wasn't in a bind for a job.

At my current place for example I interviewed with a bunch of people in various rounds, from the typical HR stuff at the front, through various layers from CTO, my boss, our architect and then a sample of people from my immediate team. All of them very pleasant, had the best interview experience ever with the architect. We had a great discussion of pros and cons of various choices I made for the code I had to write, alternative approaches etc. Really awesome. Felt basically like a regular working session, no leetcode quizzing BS.

Previously I have interviewed with other companies where it just became clear after some time that the company and I were on very different terms with regards to how we think software development should work. A different interviewer might have been able to 'hide' some of it and I might have joined that company and been miserable.

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

#352

Post by Dylan16807 »

vladf wrote: post #149
pavpanchekha wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, you can use scheduling to make a non-amortized dynamic array. Your probably know this, but for other commenters who do not— Keep two arrays, of size n and 2n. Initially the first has capacity c = n/2 and the second has capacity 0. Reads go to the first array. When you append, append one element to the first array, and copy two elements to the second array. By the time the first array is full, it has be…

One thing I’ve always been curious about, can you guarantee worst case linear memory use with this setup while supporting pop() at the same time?

Easily! You can just make pop do the opposite of push. For example, if push copies two elements to the bigger array, make pop copy two elements to the smaller array.

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

#353

Post by planet-and-halo »

wtetzner wrote: post #350
planet-and-halo wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't this only affect inserts and deletes though? I mean I get your point, but on a read you can assume that a binary tree is balanced (by definition). Or am I missing something?

No, not all binary trees are balanced binary trees.

Ah got it, thanks.

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

#354

Post by BarryMilo »

Radim wrote: post #9

Heh. Happens all the time with tests and questionnaires, the choice is always frustrating: * "Does the author really mean what they are asking? Are the mistakes in the phrasing or corner cases intentional, meant to catch me, test my deep knowledge?" , or * "Is the author just not very good with logic / not thinking this through?" I go with the latter in "soft social" contexts. Never regretted it yet. This saved my hi…

Tests are actually one of the sturdier aspects of Psychology, epistemically speaking. It's one of the areas where reliability is actually testable.

That said improvised psychology is as bad as anything improvised, only people are generally more comfortable improvising it (and indeed commenting on it) without knowledge of their lack of knowledge, as opposed to fields that look more like science such as software engineering.

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

#355

Post by dcow »

whatshisface wrote: post #344
dcow wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure what I am wrong about, I’m simply pointing out that worse average case performance is sometimes desirable over better average case worse worst case performance. Context is everything. Also some things to note: a) game logic tends not to parallelize very well for various reasons, but even so it depends on the domain of the problem whether or not you can run a parallel algorithm on a linked list, b) if you…

I have never ever seen a linked list in a game, anywhere, serving any purpose.

Here’s one: https://github.com/assaultcube/AC/blob/40a29b51ee48c427cc20c...

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

#356

Post by sircastor »

JohnFen wrote: post #111
dijit wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This may be a little naive, but what if your expertise runs out before theirs? It’s not unthinkable that a candidate has more depth in a field than you do.

I remember asking a friend once if he could answer any Tolkien question, and he answered that he couldn’t answer everything, but the stuff he couldn’t answer, I didn’t know the right questions for.

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

#357

Post by [deleted] »

dmcginty wrote: post #190

I was in a job interview several years ago and I was given the following prompt: "You have a database containing locations with their corresponding latitudes and longitudes. We want to be able to input an arbitrary latitude and longitude and have the program return all locations within a radius from that point from the database." My initial reaction was to say "I would use a GIS library/API", but the interviewer want…

[deleted]

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

#359

Post by mhh__ »

steelframe wrote: post #247
pavpanchekha wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, you can use scheduling to make a non-amortized dynamic array. Your probably know this, but for other commenters who do not— Keep two arrays, of size n and 2n. Initially the first has capacity c = n/2 and the second has capacity 0. Reads go to the first array. When you append, append one element to the first array, and copy two elements to the second array. By the time the first array is full, it has be…

The primary thing I like about this approach vs. stopping to copy the entire array on expanding its capacity is cache hotness.

Evidence?

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

#360

Post by vladf »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #352
vladf wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I’ve always been curious about, can you guarantee worst case linear memory use with this setup while supporting pop() at the same time?

Easily! You can just make pop do the opposite of push. For example, if push copies two elements to the bigger array, make pop copy two elements to the smaller array.

I challenge you to try to implement it this way and test that (1) an arbitrary sequence of push/pop is valid and (2) doesn’t use more than linear space.
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