7 ms·

Also known as: http://wiki.c2.com/?FeynmanAlgorithm http://wiki.c2.com/?FeynmanAlgorithm In this case, Bezos saw firsthand how a brain teaser could be answered

• bitxbitxbitcoin 8y ago
  Maybe Amazon still asks these style of questions because Bezos is looking to hire those that are brighter than he was.
• deanCommie 8y ago
  Nope, that's not how tech interview coding problems work at all. They're not brain teasers, they are real life problems that can worked through iteratively, with some hints and guidance from the interviewer. Source: Am one of those types of tech interviewers at one of those types of tech companies
  • flashgordon 8y ago
    Except that is not how it ends up. Candidates who get/take hints are largely de-ranked over those who "solved 3 questions flawlessly without any inputs within an hour" as are those candidates who bring in an approach that the interviewers did not have in their mind. Source: Am one of those types of tech interviewers at one of those types of tech companies and also part of the HC having reviewed thousands of interview feedback!
    • deanCommie 8y ago
      If you're doing only technical questions, you're doing it wrong. Spend half the time on behavioural questions, and half on tech, and suddenly you'll find it easier to justify hiring a well rounded engineer who needed a couple of hints over an unblinking automaton who can solve questions flawlessly yet would struggle with any real-life ambiguity.
      • flashgordon 8y ago
        You are spot on. Most of these tech rounds are a mix of coding, behavioral and design rounds (even the lunch interview matters). But when judging on coding ability, I'd be cautious of rejecting candidates with real world experience but may not be able to afford a good month of dedicated leetcode practise.
  • jbob2000 8y ago
    The problem is you are going to use the hints and guidance as an excuse to cover up your biases. Guy who looks like a close friend? Yeah I had to give him a hint, but that’s ok. Guy who’s ugly and speaks with a stutter? I had to give that guy a hint, can’t belive he couldn’t figure it out on his own.
  • pfisch 8y ago
    Isn’t there a massive advantage if you have seen the question before though? I mean you just pretend like you haven’t and hit it out of the park. This isn’t theoretical, I have done this before in a real interview and it did work.
    • deanCommie 8y ago
      Your lack of ethics would likely reveal itself in other ways during the hiring process.
      • peteradio 8y ago
        Lol
      • mnm1 8y ago
        What does ethics have to do with answering interview questions? If he knows the answer from seeing the question before, that means he's a perfect candidate for the job. Are you seriously suggesting he should sabotage himself and ask for a question he doesn't know? That's beyond absurd. Frankly, it's stupid bordering on insane. What it isn't is unethical. Should the interviewee also ask for different questions on his final course exams because he knows the answers to the ones on the test from studying? What insanity!
  • decebalus1 8y ago
    > They're not brain teasers, they are real life problems that can worked through iteratively, with some hints and guidance from the interviewer. I spilled my tea from laughing. Yeah, just the other day I was asked a real life problem of finding out in which order I would burst some balloons for maximum monetary gain.
    • gammateam 8y ago
      And you answered Ripple, Eth, Bitcoin?
      • frandroid 8y ago
        For those downvoting this, replace "balloons" with "bubbles" in the parent comment to understand this great joke.
  • tracker1 8y ago
    Sorry, but unless I'm working on an actual database, I'm unlikely to need to solve btree (index/sort/resort/invert) type problems. I do have a decent understanding in principle, but generally am using a database layer that someone else wrote for these types of things.
• sp332 8y ago
  It depends. Sometimes you do just want to know if the person has seen the problem before. https://twitter.com/Hillelogram/status/962424380935598081 https://twitter.com/Hillelogram/status/962424380935598081 To summarize, linked list questions used to be a good test of "can you write C" and are now a bad test of "can you solve problems".
• anonytrary 8y ago
  > This one was bad enough that Bezos left the field, yet Amazon (like every other software company) still asks these style of questions of its engineering candidates. Maybe of their engineers and mathematicians, but as a software engineer, Amazon never asked me these types of questions. Software engineering is significantly different, however, so I wouldn't be surprised that they focused more on textbook fundamentals.
• zw123456 8y ago
  I love the Feynman Algo. I hold over 60 patents (not bragging) often times colleagues will ask me if I can teach them to be innovative. After being asked this question a number of times and giving it a lot of thought, the answer I give now is the following: "No, no one can teach you to be innovative or creative, you already are. Humans are the most innovative creatures in the history of this planet, innately, look at all we have created. All you need to do is to un-learn to not be creative. We are all constantly taught, either in school, the military, by our family or by our peers, our company we work for, whatever... to NOT be creative; to in effect comport. First un-learn that. It will unleash your creative/innovative abilities." Jeff Bezos may not be a physicist but somewhere along his path he learned to stop NOT being innovative.
  • amrx431 8y ago
    > All you need to do is to un-learn to not be creative Can you please elaborate on this? What exactly are we trying to unlearn. I have never been able to think creatively and this has cause me self respect issues.
    • js8 8y ago
      I don't have any patents, but I believe the key is to continue to look at the world like a child would. Be curious and playful (in the domain you want to create in), experiment. Try to figure out things on your own before reading the manual or other learning materials; then learn the existing theory and compare notes. Try to formulate useful heuristics for yourself. Do not reject learning or experimenting with things that seem only tangential to what you are doing. Innovation is hard. In addition, you have to balance all this against "productivity", such as being focused on a specific problem, getting things done and finishing up.
    • gregsadetsky 8y ago
      I’m not the GP, but I feel like “unlearning” often relates to the need to feel certain. When looking for a solution, is the path straight? Or is it curvy, full of alternatives that appear strange at first? Staying with the strangeness is part of the unlearning. :) Take a look at these cards[0] for their fun (and creative!) prompts to look at problems (and the world?) differently. To look in different places, in different ways. To juxtapose and separate. Take a look at some books (typically grouped under “creativity” on amazon), such as “The Artist’s Way”, or “Steal like an Artist”. “Bird by Bird” is another book I’ve enjoyed. Some things/tricks/ideas/perspectives will click while others won’t. It’s ok to pick a path. Some tricks will work best at one time or another. That’s also fine — part of the unlearning is accepting that too. Best of luck and feel free to reach out! [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies
• gnulinux 8y ago
  Honestly I don't understand this mass hysteria about programming questions. If you go over any algorithms textbook you'll see all the algorithms that will ever be asked by any company in the world, ever. One time I was interviewing for Google, in the very last phase, and apparently this was one of the hardest question they ask. The question was just asking me to implement MaxFlow algorithm (of course not directly). I don't think there is any textbook in the world that won't go over maximum flow. Besides, usually they don't need you to solve the problem in entirety but to show them you can make some progress on the problem.
  • peteretep 8y ago
    > If you go over any algorithms textbook you'll see all the algorithms that will ever be asked by any company in the world, ever. So where’s the value as a primary interview technique? Is selecting for people who can read a textbook that helpful?
    • flunhat 8y ago
      I imagine it selects for people who want the job at a FAANG company so badly that they spend a lot of time reading algo textbooks and grinding Leetcode. I guess this is also a proxy for other character traits, like grit, pattern recognition, learning from mistakes, and so on.
    • whatshisface 8y ago
      They're looking for a repeatable, fair baseline cut for basic competency and motivation, and "has this person ever read a compsci textbook" is a fair proxy for that.
    • candiodari 8y ago
      Nope. The main determinants of effectiveness are 2 things: 1) general intelligence 2) conscientiousness (how much effort you put into what you do) Don't you think asking applied textbook problems is an excellent way to test for both at the same time ? If you are smart, then what is the problem with going through an algorithm textbook, listening to Youtube explanations when you can't follow and just spending your evenings for 3 weeks or so. Frankly, if you get to chapter 5 out of 20, you've probably seen what you will be asked, so you could easily stop after one week and still easily pass the interview bar. And if that's too much effort, why should they assume you'll put in effort once you get hired ? They'll be expecting more than one week's worth of effort from you. Furthermore, Google actually tracks how well it's questions work, how the resulting hires perform. If there really was no correlation there, they'd have changed it (also they've documented it in Laszlo's book, well at this point books) I bet it would measure even better if they told you a week beforehand that the question would involve some obscure, not super easy but not super difficult algorithm, but one that they can reasonably assume you've never seen before and then asked you to apply it on the interview.
• plandis 8y ago
  > This one was bad enough that Bezos left the field, yet Amazon (like every other software company) still asks these style of questions of its engineering candidates. FWIW Amazon does experiment with different interview formats. They used to (still do?) interviews where you get a laptop and spend the day working on a simple problem where interviewers will ask you questions about why you did the things you did.
• segmondy 8y ago
  Not the same thing, the point is that you have had enough exposure to different things that you can solve problems. The reason software company asks those questions is that if you are familiar with your data structures (lists, stack, queues, trees) your algorithms (sorting, searching) you can pretty much give a reasonable answer to most of those questions.
• akhilcacharya 8y ago
  The difference is it’s more common for someone to be able to derive it in a SWE interview.
• mabbo 8y ago
  As an interviewer at Amazon, the brain teaser style questions aren't loved or taken very seriously. There's always some of that, sure, but usually it's a problem with a bunch of ways to solve it, not just one. Some are better than others. And it's nice if you get the best one. But that's not what I personally care much about- it's how you communicate it, how your pseudocode looks, how well you've thought through the problem, how well you can explain the solution. There's also usually interviews focused on design. The problem may be easy, but the challenge is in how you'll solve it to handle (m|b|tr)illions of inputs.