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I think a lot of these questions don't really reflect what someone will be doing in their real job. It's more of a "how much do you remember from your CS degree

I think a lot of these questions don't really reflect what someone will be doing in their real job. It's more of a "how much do you remember from your CS degree" test that has little relevance to your job duties of maintaining some monolithic Java based enterprise platform. I mean come on, Binary Trees? I know what a Binary tree is but I'd have to look up the definitions of all the traversal types because there's no way I'd be able to remember what Post/Pre/In Order traversals actually entail. And this question is an absolute abomination: - What is the next line in the following sequence: 1 11 21 Answer: it's 1211 and the next is 111221 That's a joke right? I'd personally answer 31 to this question.

Stormbringer 16y ago
It's to identify those that have 'architect potential'. If you pick the simple, easy to implement and blindingly obvious answer you don't make the cut, sorry. :D
- Deestan 16y ago
  "I can complicate this. I know I can!"
  - Stormbringer 16y ago
    Easy, just add a layer of indirection. Then carpet bomb it back into the dark ages with patterns. :D
deleted 16y ago
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cheald 16y ago
I hate being given questions with ambiguity and not enough context to answer them, and then getting it "wrong". It's fine if you want to test my thinking processes, but make the question about listing my assumptions and reasoning rather than expecting a single empirically-derived answer. The next item in the sequence could justifiably be 31, or 1111, or 121, or 0004, or 100. Given an ambiguous question, I'm going to take the less clever answer which is more readily supported by the most common assumptions (y = (x-1) * 10 + 1, as the problem appears to be presented as a numeric sequence and the entire world counts in base 10). In programming, any undocumented assumptions should be blindingly obvious. Anyone that works on a system with unobvious and undocumented assumptions is playing software Russian roulette. If the kind of person you want to hire is the kind of person who comes up with unobvious, esoteric solutions to problems, I'm not sure I want to be working on your software team anyhow.

Stormbringer 16y ago

It's to identify those that have 'architect potential'. If you pick the simple, easy to implement and blindingly obvious answer you don't make the cut, sorry. :D

Deestan 16y ago
"I can complicate this. I know I can!"
- Stormbringer 16y ago
  Easy, just add a layer of indirection. Then carpet bomb it back into the dark ages with patterns. :D

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

cheald 16y ago

I hate being given questions with ambiguity and not enough context to answer them, and then getting it "wrong". It's fine if you want to test my thinking processes, but make the question about listing my assumptions and reasoning rather than expecting a single empirically-derived answer. The next item in the sequence could justifiably be 31, or 1111, or 121, or 0004, or 100. Given an ambiguous question, I'm going to take the less clever answer which is more readily supported by the most common assumptions (y = (x-1) * 10 + 1, as the problem appears to be presented as a numeric sequence and the entire world counts in base 10). In programming, any undocumented assumptions should be blindingly obvious. Anyone that works on a system with unobvious and undocumented assumptions is playing software Russian roulette. If the kind of person you want to hire is the kind of person who comes up with unobvious, esoteric solutions to problems, I'm not sure I want to be working on your software team anyhow.