61–70 of 166 posts
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My personal fav: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/rCszxibClKE
My favorite Ballmer practice is stack ranking. It completely screwed up the entire company. I worked on Windows Mobile at the time the iPhone came out. We were all shitting ourselves.
This sort of misses the forest for the trees, although neat application. Ballmer's argument is essentially about tail risk. Expected value is absolutely not a good way to make bets if you value survival, because you only get one shot. Same reason you wouldn't go all in every time you get a poker hand that's "expected" to win. Because you'll (very probably) be bankrupt in a few hands. Sure the mean is +$0.07 or whatev…
Where are you getting that from? As far as I can tell, he makes no such arguments in the interview. The problem, and his explanation of the answer, are phrased purely in terms of expected value of a single iteration of the game. And the twist is the adversarial selection of the number, not risk of ruin.
It'd be an awful example of tail risk anyway. With the obvious strategy the tail is extremely fat.
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Is this a perfect example of broken modern tech interviews? Balmer's question seems fair for the complexity of the answer he was expecting. As the interviewee you would presumably provide the (mathematically) wrong answer, but you'd show your thinking along the way, including a small demonstration of CS principles. Keep in mind that Balmer had a long career, so if he ever asked this question, it was probably back in…
The question seems like a mathematical one. What you're saying sounds to me like "your answer doesn't need to be correct, it just needs to sound reasonable". What you're filtering on with this question is good bullshitters. To me, the only reasonable to this question is "I don't know". I think even a mathematical genius like Terrence Tao would not be able to give you the answer to this on the spot. (Although I can al…
Which is exactly the same as “no” in this situation. If you were capable of proving the opposite I assume he would have been willing to hear you out.
> not be able to give you the answer to this on the spot
Realizing the most obvious strategy would be suboptimal if the game is adversarial is the first step of the correct answer though. If you didn’t know what to do next obviously the correct answer is “no, because I don’t know”.
Someone who is trying to absolve himself from making any decision ls is presumably not the sort of a person they were looking for.
Also would Balmer have been hiring for engineers to begin with?
I dont get this. If this is true, then he found a more efficient algorithm than binary search. Why are we not using it in CS?
moral of the story: you might be theoretically correct, but the other dude still has a net worth of 120bn and you don't. so who's the loser now?
It seems the real moral here is: The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this a perfect example of broken modern tech interviews? Balmer's question seems fair for the complexity of the answer he was expecting. As the interviewee you would presumably provide the (mathematically) wrong answer, but you'd show your thinking along the way, including a small demonstration of CS principles. Keep in mind that Balmer had a long career, so if he ever asked this question, it was probably back in…
Seems so. The broken tech interview idea stems from the idea that interview questions that do not pertain to the job will lead to hiring the wrong people. And, indeed, what Microsoft really needed in the 80s was people who truly understood memory management in C, not gamblers left to hack their way into something that kind of worked sometimes. Microsoft's need to correct that hiring mistake later set them back signif…
Presumably it wasn’t Ballmer who was asking questions like that?
If he was running the “business”, sales etc. part of the company.
All of the things you listed would have been less than worthless if they weren’t able to convince anyone to buy their products.
And this, friends, is the perfect example of why the modern tech interview process is pure insanity.
Well to be fair Steve Ballmer is a terrible leader and if he had to take the tech interviews he wouldn't have passed and Microsoft wouldn't have stagnated for 10 years, before Satya Nadella took over and brought the company back on its feet.
> Out of the 100 numbers, there are 32 that would require you to ask 6 questions to make a guess. Huh? I have 100 - (1+2+4+8+16+32) = 100 - 63 = 37, where 2^i numbers can be guessed after exactly i wrong guesses plus one correct guess.
(Also, since six bits will serve to identify 64 different numbers, it should be impossible to have more than 36 numbers that can't be identified that way.)
I'll update with boring manual data later.
---- update ----
That was wrong; using a naive guessing method, I found 37 values that require 7 guesses.
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agree about the EV stuff. it only makes sense over many draws and the problem states that he is thinking of "a number", that sounds like one game. that said, the problem screams binary search and you know your opponent is a computer person, so i guess the question is: if you make a bet that your opponent is making an adversarial choice that assumes you're going to do a vanilla binary search, can you improve your odds…
That is an interesting question. I suppose it's equivalent to the 'worst case' performance for binary search, which would be a relevant topic. Finding the optimal strategy in the case where the opponent _may_ be adversarial could be interesting. I don't imagine the odds improve compared to the base situation, but not sure
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Seems so. The broken tech interview idea stems from the idea that interview questions that do not pertain to the job will lead to hiring the wrong people. And, indeed, what Microsoft really needed in the 80s was people who truly understood memory management in C, not gamblers left to hack their way into something that kind of worked sometimes. Microsoft's need to correct that hiring mistake later set them back signif…
> Had they asked about the intricacies of C Presumably it wasn’t Ballmer who was asking questions like that? If he was running the “business”, sales etc. part of the company. All of the things you listed would have been less than worthless if they weren’t able to convince anyone to buy their products.
The candidate you actually want to hire will respond with something to effect of "That's dumb. Let's instead talk about X, which will be a far more appealing topic to both of us."