ITA Software's Hiring Puzzles
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ITA Software's Hiring Puzzles
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Re: ITA Software's Hiring Puzzles
#2I'm curious, how useful to people think these kinds of puzzles are in hiring?
Re: ITA Software's Hiring Puzzles
#3Dunno if they are good for hiring, but some look fun to try for a little hobbying.
Re: ITA Software's Hiring Puzzles
#4Yesterday someone mentioned the Sling Blade Runner problem from their archives and I can't stop thinking about it.
* http://www.itasoftware.com/careers/puzzle_archive.html?catid...
* http://stuffthathappens.com/blog/2007/10/03/sling-blade-runn...
I'm in the middle of writing a web-based anagram server and there's some similarities in both these problems. You have a dictionary that you iterate through recursively to find a solution. For anagram, the solution is usually found with 3-5 recursions (100 word list, 3 recursions: 100^3 calculations - not a big deal for desktop software, too slow for web-app). For Sling Blade Runner, your goal is to keep increasing the depth of the recursion as much as possible so it's actually impossible to go through 100^200 calculations.
Does anyone have any idea if these problems could be better tackled by converting them to map-reduce problems? I'd like to play with Amazon's mapreduce service.
Edit: Neat. I came across: http://blog.xebia.com/2009/07/02/thinking-mapreduce-with-had...
Re: ITA Software's Hiring Puzzles
#5Yesterday someone mentioned the Sling Blade Runner problem from their archives and I can't stop thinking about it. * http://www.itasoftware.com/careers/puzzle_archive.html?catid... * http://stuffthathappens.com/blog/2007/10/03/sling-blade-runn... I'm in the middle of writing a web-based anagram server and there's some similarities in both these problems. You have a dictionary that you iterate through recursively to f…
Are you looking to pre-generate the results or generate them dynamically? I think MapReduce will only be effective for the former.
Re: ITA Software's Hiring Puzzles
#6I'm curious, how useful to people think these kinds of puzzles are in hiring?
To use a recent movie quote: "If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball."
ITA's business is all about dealing with fiendishly clever transforms on small-ish sets of data, and the results are needed Right Now. Most of the hiring puzzles revolve around that theme.
Much like any other company giving these kinds of problems, it's not about bringing out that cleverness every day, but it's about figuring out who has the ability to think in that way, along with the persistence to work on the problem until it's done.
Re: ITA Software's Hiring Puzzles
#7I'm curious, how useful to people think these kinds of puzzles are in hiring?
To use a recent movie quote: "If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball." ITA's business is all about dealing with fiendishly clever transforms on small-ish sets of data, and the results are needed Right Now. Most of the hiring puzzles revolve around that theme. Much like any other company giving these kinds of problems, it's not about bringing out that cleverness every day, but it's about figuring out who has…
I agree with the concept, but at some point it became trivia, which kills the point.
Re: ITA Software's Hiring Puzzles
#8I'm curious, how useful to people think these kinds of puzzles are in hiring?
They produce more false negatives than false positives. If you aren't in a hurry to grow, thats a good thing. Even "cheating" (memorizing the techniques) to the point of being able to solve a problem on site (which is part of the interview) is not trivial.
Re: ITA Software's Hiring Puzzles
#9Yesterday someone mentioned the Sling Blade Runner problem from their archives and I can't stop thinking about it. * http://www.itasoftware.com/careers/puzzle_archive.html?catid... * http://stuffthathappens.com/blog/2007/10/03/sling-blade-runn... I'm in the middle of writing a web-based anagram server and there's some similarities in both these problems. You have a dictionary that you iterate through recursively to f…
Are you looking to pre-generate the results or generate them dynamically? I think MapReduce will only be effective for the former.
There are no map-reduce implementations that work in real-time? I thought Google search worked like that. I do want it to work dynamically.
Re: ITA Software's Hiring Puzzles
#10I'm curious, how useful to people think these kinds of puzzles are in hiring?
They produce more false negatives than false positives. If you aren't in a hurry to grow, thats a good thing. Even "cheating" (memorizing the techniques) to the point of being able to solve a problem on site (which is part of the interview) is not trivial.
What do you mean by false negative?