5 ms·
I tend to find problems like this one, where the brute force solution is straightforward and then you can improve it by using a special data structure, easy. Th
by blt 9y ago
I tend to find problems like this one, where the brute force solution is straightforward and then you can improve it by using a special data structure, easy. The ones I struggle with are the puzzle-like ones, where solving the problem depends on having some single flash of insight.
- angarg12 9y agoConversely, if you just happen to know the answer because you saw it before, it feels a little bit like cheating. Quite honestly, I wonder how useful those kind of questions are to test someone's capacity to do the job.
- aaronbrethorst 9y agoTotally useless.
- blt 9y agoYeah, I do not think they are very useful. I know a lot of people, myself included, who perform worse than their true ability during interviews. It can be an anxiety thing, but also some people just prefer to take their time and deliver solutions in writing vs. work things out in real time on a whiteboard. I think a good alternative is to give the candidate a nontrivial project that should take around 8 hours, and pay them a day's wage to do it.
- speedplane 9y agoThat's better, but probably still not exactly indicative of real-world work... so much of on-the-job work is teamwork. Perhaps you could interview a group of candidates together and as a group assign a project that you know no one person could finish on their own, but would be manageable broken up. The people that form groups and work well together could presumably bubble up.
- blt 9y agoBut then if one candidate is an asshole, they ruin it for everyone...
- aaronbrethorst 9y agoI really like this approach. It’s not like you’re paid a salary to whiteboard pseudo code algorithms, after all.
- speedplane 9y agoDidn't Google do a massive study on this and determine these tests weren't effective in determining success on the job? It was a long article, but I remember they found success was more a function of the proper team more than anything else. You can take the same 20 people, and have them fail miserably or succeed depending on how you divided them up on projects. Sort of an obvious, but not so obvious result.