5 ms·

Alternately, the interviewer should recognize that their question is flawed & move on. I’ve had candidates nail a 30 minute discussion question with a 2 minute

Alternately, the interviewer should recognize that their question is flawed & move on. I’ve had candidates nail a 30 minute discussion question with a 2 minute nonobvious answer. Shit happens: you’re not the smartest person in the room that day.

dijit 6y ago
It should go without saying that as an interviewer; I am never the smartest person in the room. I am a person with different experiences and I need to find if you’re a fit- not if you’re unintelligent. If you got to me, you’re not unintelligent.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  Most interviewers though aren't actually any good at it and very often don't like not being the smartest person in the room.
  - lmilcin 6y ago
    Whether you are interviewer or interviewee, putting your ego before the goal of the interview is just going to waste the time of both parties. I can't hire a person that can't restrain their ego for the duration of the interview and an interviewer that is focusing on anything else than figuring out if the candidate is right person for the job is causing disservice to everybody.
    - sukilot 6y ago
      The thing to remember is that in some companies the interviewer doesn't care about hiring and is only their because they were forced to.
- dhosek 6y ago
  I guess it depends on where you're doing the interviewing. I've had surprisingly unintelligent people get to me in the interviewing stages. It amazes me how many developers, experienced even, who can't write a simple recursive function. And we're not even looking at, "can you come up with a recursive function as a solution to this problem?" we're looking at "write a recursive function to calculate the factorial" as the question.
  - joefourier 6y ago
    How often do recursive functions come up in your daily programming life? For me they're rare enough that it makes sense that many otherwise competent developers draw a blank when asked to write one in the context of a high-stress interview. They may look clever, but they're often not the ideal solution compared to a simpler to understand, and often easier to optimise iterative solution. I write plenty of DSP, GPGPU programming, and computer vision, and I can't honestly remember the last time I wrote a recursive function.
    - dekhn 6y ago
      They come up about once a year for me. That's about how often I have to write a tree traversal.
      - sukilot 6y ago
        Why traverse a tree recursively and risk blowing your stack?
        dekhn 6y ago
        Hmm, let's see. The last time I blew the computer's stack due to tree recursion was in 1995 (it was six levels deep). Since then, I've never seen a stack overflow due to tree recursion (presumably because none of the trees I've operated on were deeper than the hardware stack, and I switched from C to Python where the stack is far, far deeper). If I were writing a server that needed better memory requirements, I could certainly transform my code if desired.
        mlyle 6y ago
        You'd sure need a pretty tiny stack and/or an unbelievable amount of context on stack to worry too much about this. If our per-callstack frame is 10k bytes, and we can spend 1 megabyte of stack on recursion (both are pessimistic).. we can go 100 levels deep. Which means we can expect to run into problems when there are more than ~5E29 elements. This assumes we don't write the recursion in a way that the compiler can elide it entirely with tail-call optimization. I'm not a huge fan of recursion, but let's not resort to too much hyperbole in our arguments against it. :P
- lmilcin 6y ago
  Tell this to my candidates:) I have interviewed couple candidates that were offended by the fact that I am asking hard questions that I know answers to. This resulted in remarks like "I have never seen this question on the Internet" or "So what is the answer to this question anyway?" or "If I knew questions would be this hard I would not bother to come". Somebody explain to people that it doesn't matter how hard the questions are but how the candidates compare. I am fully prepared that the candidates study questions that are available on the Internet, I want to see how they deal with something that requires a bit more than couple hours of effort and rote memorization.
  - mushi 6y ago
    Is this because you were interviewing candidates who were incapable of saying “I don’t know?” That’s a good filter during any interview.

dijit 6y ago

It should go without saying that as an interviewer; I am never the smartest person in the room. I am a person with different experiences and I need to find if you’re a fit- not if you’re unintelligent. If you got to me, you’re not unintelligent.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
Most interviewers though aren't actually any good at it and very often don't like not being the smartest person in the room.
- lmilcin 6y ago
  Whether you are interviewer or interviewee, putting your ego before the goal of the interview is just going to waste the time of both parties. I can't hire a person that can't restrain their ego for the duration of the interview and an interviewer that is focusing on anything else than figuring out if the candidate is right person for the job is causing disservice to everybody.
  - sukilot 6y ago
    The thing to remember is that in some companies the interviewer doesn't care about hiring and is only their because they were forced to.
dhosek 6y ago
I guess it depends on where you're doing the interviewing. I've had surprisingly unintelligent people get to me in the interviewing stages. It amazes me how many developers, experienced even, who can't write a simple recursive function. And we're not even looking at, "can you come up with a recursive function as a solution to this problem?" we're looking at "write a recursive function to calculate the factorial" as the question.
- joefourier 6y ago
  How often do recursive functions come up in your daily programming life? For me they're rare enough that it makes sense that many otherwise competent developers draw a blank when asked to write one in the context of a high-stress interview. They may look clever, but they're often not the ideal solution compared to a simpler to understand, and often easier to optimise iterative solution. I write plenty of DSP, GPGPU programming, and computer vision, and I can't honestly remember the last time I wrote a recursive function.
  - dekhn 6y ago
    They come up about once a year for me. That's about how often I have to write a tree traversal.
    - sukilot 6y ago
      Why traverse a tree recursively and risk blowing your stack?
      - dekhn 6y ago
        Hmm, let's see. The last time I blew the computer's stack due to tree recursion was in 1995 (it was six levels deep). Since then, I've never seen a stack overflow due to tree recursion (presumably because none of the trees I've operated on were deeper than the hardware stack, and I switched from C to Python where the stack is far, far deeper). If I were writing a server that needed better memory requirements, I could certainly transform my code if desired.
      - mlyle 6y ago
        You'd sure need a pretty tiny stack and/or an unbelievable amount of context on stack to worry too much about this. If our per-callstack frame is 10k bytes, and we can spend 1 megabyte of stack on recursion (both are pessimistic).. we can go 100 levels deep. Which means we can expect to run into problems when there are more than ~5E29 elements. This assumes we don't write the recursion in a way that the compiler can elide it entirely with tail-call optimization. I'm not a huge fan of recursion, but let's not resort to too much hyperbole in our arguments against it. :P
lmilcin 6y ago
Tell this to my candidates:) I have interviewed couple candidates that were offended by the fact that I am asking hard questions that I know answers to. This resulted in remarks like "I have never seen this question on the Internet" or "So what is the answer to this question anyway?" or "If I knew questions would be this hard I would not bother to come". Somebody explain to people that it doesn't matter how hard the questions are but how the candidates compare. I am fully prepared that the candidates study questions that are available on the Internet, I want to see how they deal with something that requires a bit more than couple hours of effort and rote memorization.
- mushi 6y ago
  Is this because you were interviewing candidates who were incapable of saying “I don’t know?” That’s a good filter during any interview.