3 ms·

The golden nugget for me was the suggestion to ask the candidate to teach you something. I'm terrible at operating under pressure and generally need to take my

The golden nugget for me was the suggestion to ask the candidate to teach you something. I'm terrible at operating under pressure and generally need to take my time with any problem I'm given. Unless you actually work in an environment where it's critical find the optimal solution to a large constraint search problem in 30 minutes or the tower blows up I don't see what the difference is to taking a couple of hours to find the solution. The only way I'd be able to do that is if I'd seen the exact problem before a couple of days ago and can recall the solution from memory. For problems I haven't encountered before I need a pad of paper and make a lot of mistakes before getting to the right answer. I'm just slow, deliberate and not well equipped to win at Jeopardy. It's not my bag. But if you asked me to teach you something I could go on for hours on procedural generation algorithms, pseudo-random number algorithms, neat tricks from old languages, compilers, macros... yadda yadda.

vonmoltke 11y ago
> Unless you actually work in an environment where it's critical find the optimal solution to a large constraint search problem in 30 minutes or the tower blows up I don't see what the difference is to taking a couple of hours to find the solution. Not to mention, if this scenario is frequent enough that you really need to screen for it in interviews there is probably something fundamentally wrong with the way you are running your business.
- agentultra 11y ago
  And yet it's bewilderingly common to use it as a low-pass filter. The reason I like the suggestion is that it asks the candidate to show you how something works which seems like it would demonstrate their ability to understand a topic, how they approach it, and importantly whether they can communicate what they know in a way that other people can understand. I'm more interested in whether a candidate can write a decent bug report and form a coherent patch than how many puzzle solutions they've memorized to slip through my filters.

vonmoltke 11y ago

> Unless you actually work in an environment where it's critical find the optimal solution to a large constraint search problem in 30 minutes or the tower blows up I don't see what the difference is to taking a couple of hours to find the solution. Not to mention, if this scenario is frequent enough that you really need to screen for it in interviews there is probably something fundamentally wrong with the way you are running your business.

agentultra 11y ago
And yet it's bewilderingly common to use it as a low-pass filter. The reason I like the suggestion is that it asks the candidate to show you how something works which seems like it would demonstrate their ability to understand a topic, how they approach it, and importantly whether they can communicate what they know in a way that other people can understand. I'm more interested in whether a candidate can write a decent bug report and form a coherent patch than how many puzzle solutions they've memorized to slip through my filters.