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I am pretty sure they did, unless he got hired at some VP/Distinguished Engineer level. And to be clear: If you are unable to solve these common algorithmic qu

I am pretty sure they did, unless he got hired at some VP/Distinguished Engineer level. And to be clear: If you are unable to solve these common algorithmic questions that companies like Microsoft ask, then that's not the right place for you to work. This is a tangent, but there are literally thousands of companies that won't require you to solve these problems. The thing is, at Microsoft & co. you don't just do this in an interview. You do it at your job too. We do foundational work in many teams and we need to solve algorithmic problems practically every week. If you are unable to code yourself out of a DP problem or scared of NP completeness and approximation algorithms, then maybe find a different job instead of complaining about the interview process?

whoisjuan 6y ago
> I am pretty sure they did Lol! I'd bet my year salary they didn't.
- esyir 6y ago
  Well, you might want to check guido's twitter before making that bet.
  - whoisjuan 6y ago
    What exactly am I supposed to check in his Twitter?
    - esyir 6y ago
      Whoops, mismatched your reply to the wrong branch of the comment tree
- fayyazkl 6y ago
  Every body is asked some thing close enough. At higher levels, often focus is not on coding, but enough depth of design where a person of such profile might end up educating the interviewer - while satisfying their requirements. That being said, ability to solve coding problems efficiently (not necessarily spit A* graph algo in sleep), but a decent close to real life coding challenge is fair game.
adamnemecek 6y ago
You really don't do it at your job.
- paganel 6y ago
  I’m taking a cheap shot here, but the people maintaining Skype at MS certainly don’t do it. And there are such examples at other big companies.
jzebedee 6y ago
He was hired as a Distinguished Engineer.
ithkuil 6y ago
Yes, they hired him at Distinguished Engineer level.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
lcfcjs 6y ago
It wouldn't be such a problem if developers actually needed to know these ridiculous "algorithmic questions" to do their job. There are Youtube videos that you can memorize to get through the interview, its not difficult. You are acting like on an elite few can work for an awful company like Microsoft.
JackFr 6y ago
> unless he got hired at some VP/Distinguished Engineer level. Google or Wikipedia can tell you who Guido van Rossum is.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  I believe the "unless" was about the position he was hired for, not about who he is.
andi999 6y ago
Everybody needs to invert B-trees before breakfast
echelon 6y ago
I wholeheartedly disagree. 1. This is Guido van Rossum. If I were him and asked to solve puzzles, I'd tell the hiring company to fuck off. 2. These quizzes aren't so bad, but the pressure and stakes make it incredibly stressful. There's no standard, and often times the interviewer is the one that sucks. > We do foundational work in many teams and we need to solve algorithmic problems practically every week. If you are unable to code yourself out of a DP problem or scared of NP completeness and approximation algorithms, then maybe find a different job instead of complaining about the interview process? I'm pretty sure your opinion here is not that of your employer.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- nostrademons 6y ago
  Counterpoint: When I was leaving Google the first time, I asked my skip lead (who was employee #48 there, ended up running all of Search, and was previously a core HotSpot engineer at Sun) why he chose to work at a small startup when, coming off of HotSpot in 1999, he could work anywhere. He replied "Aside from them being one of very few companies with an engineer-centric culture, they were the only company that required I interview. Everybody else was willing to hire me on the spot." For some personality types - and particularly the ones likely to do world-class work - being challenged is a positive sign. It means that the employer does their due diligence, and they will mostly be working with other people who react positively to a challenge.
  - Alex3917 6y ago
    > It means that the employer does their due diligence, and they will mostly be working with other people who react positively to a challenge. To me, due diligence would be more like using software that someone has created. If it feels snappy then they're good enough at algorithms for the kind of software that they create, if it doesn't then maybe it's worth looking into whether or not there's a good reason for that. Like if you apply for a job at the NYT, I doubt they make you do a timed writing test with people staring at you and asking you questions in the middle. They probably just read some of the previous work you've done.
ownagefool 6y ago
From his twitter profile: """ Python's BDFL-emeritus, Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft, Computer History Fellow. Opinions are my own. He/him. """
strikelaserclaw 6y ago
"Hello Guido thanks for coming in, we would like you to open up visual studio code and create a sudoku solver that can solve this partially filled out board"
- speedgoose 6y ago
  Time to use prolog to get your revenge on the interviewers.
  - Cactus2018 6y ago
    A Sudoku Solver in APL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmT80OseAGs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmT80OseAGs
    - jodrellblank 6y ago
      More appropriately, in Prolog (by Markus Triska) https://youtube.com/watch?v=5KUdEZTu06o https://youtube.com/watch?v=5KUdEZTu06o
      - speedgoose 6y ago
        Very nice, and I can understand this one.
      - cgh 6y ago
        Thanks for this link. I took a course on logic programming in school and it made a big impression. I found Prolog to be pretty mindblowing at the time and I'm happy to see it still is.
kop316 6y ago
I think this was in response to this: https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768 https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768
orthonormel 6y ago
His Twitter actually says "Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft"
kodah 6y ago
This comment really just drives home the nail of how awful the state of interviewing, and especially the mental state of some interviewers, in this industry with a backhoe bucket. I really just want to thank you for putting this useless mentality on display.
- whymauri 6y ago
  I know it's not Microsoft, but D. E. Shaw asked Larry Summers math puzzles when he interviewed there. At the time, he was the president of Harvard University. I think it's my favorite example of how crazy some interview processes can get, lol.
  - creddit 6y ago
    I’m not sure what’s crazier to me: asking someone to demonstrate a live proficiency of an abstract skill that is only tangentially related to that actual day-to-day activities of a role or just assuming that because someone has some high credential that they would be good in a given role.
    - user5994461 6y ago
      DE Shaw is a financial company filled with maths guys, doing statistical analysis and modeling all day. A math puzzle is the most normal question you could be asked there. The real question is why Larry Summers is going to a quant interview? Did he apply for a quant role?
      - whymauri 6y ago
        They hired him as a managing director.
    - dddbbb 6y ago
      For many roles at a hedge fund, being able to do mathematics quickly and intuitively is a valuable skill. Not sure why an economist applying for an MD job would need to be tested on that, though.
maxioatic 6y ago
Wow, so much salt. It was a joke.
- LeifCarrotson 6y ago
  You should have left "/s" at the end of your comment, it's really hard to distinguish between a joke and stupidity on the Internet.
  - AQuantized 6y ago
    To me this undermines any humour the comment may had to begin with.
  - chippy 6y ago
    They did add a /s to the end. The user you were replying to wrote the comment that the stupid comment was replying to!
  - maxioatic 6y ago
    It is there. At the end of the line.
- xapata 6y ago
  In that case, it was an unnecessary joke and not helpful to the conversation.
  - maxioatic 6y ago
    Sorry, I'll refrain from humor from now on?
    - xapata 6y ago
      Seems reasonable.
    - vamos_davai 6y ago
      Go to reddit if you want to make average IQ humor.
ponker 6y ago
You must be injecting crack directly into your frontal lobe if you think that the creator of the world's third most important programming language being asked an algorithms question (unlikely) and failing it (entirely possible) means that he's unqualified to do "foundational work." I had a Nobel Prize winner as a physics professor in college who got three successive different wrong answers when attempting a freshman physics problem in office hours. That doesn't mean that physics isn't the right place for him to work.
- jrib 6y ago
  > third most important programming language not going to debate that, but I'm curious, what do you rank as #1 and #2?
  - phkahler 6y ago
    The tiobe index lists Java and C in those spots.
    - dkarlovi 6y ago
      That's fair, I guess.
    - fermigier 6y ago
      Python is number 2 now, according to https://www.techrepublic.com/article/python-overtakes-java-to-become-the-second-most-popular-programming-language/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/python-overtakes-java-t... :) We should not give too much importance to this, but the fact is that Python is now ranked consistently #1, #2 or #3 in sufficiently many rankings to consider it seriously.
    - webmaven 6y ago
      > The tiobe index lists Java and C in those spots. That list is ranking languages by current popularity, though, rather than 'importance'. I'd define 'importance' as more along the lines of "amount of havoc created if all software written using that language were broken/deleted at once".
coldtea 6y ago
>I am pretty sure they did, unless he got hired at some VP/Distinguished Engineer level No way they even considered doing it... That's for people out of college...
- fayyazkl 6y ago
  Thats certainly invalid. People with 20 years of experience or more, are asked questions based upon the role they are interviewing for. If you are applying for a principal or higher engineer role and your job involves coding, you are asked coding questions. May be not just focused on a complex bookish algorithm only, but rather more close to a real life distributed programming / synchronization problem etc. for example.
Thaxll 6y ago
I know we're talking about FANG itw but come on you really think people like Guido needs to do any of that? They probably don't do "regular" itw, they go to a restaurant with some important people and that seels the deal.
cannabis_sam 6y ago
Why the fuck would CS graduates be afraid of DP problems, NP-completeness or approximation algos??? That’s literally the table stakes of our profession. The problem is rewarding rote memorization in a whiteboard interview, at the expense of actual understanding, and ability to research the problem.
- AI_WAIFU 6y ago
  Because unlike in the real world, you can't just google the solution or look it up in a textbook during an interview.
- mayank 6y ago
  > that’s literally the table stakes of our profession Table stakes for what exactly?
  - cannabis_sam 6y ago
    Computer science graduates...? Like I said in the comment.
  - kristianov 6y ago
    For sudo scientists.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Why the fuck would CS graduates be afraid of DP problems, NP-completeness or approximation algos??? That’s literally the table stakes of our profession. If the profession being discussed is "academic work in Computer Science", sure. If it is "software development", those things absolutely are not really "table stakes". If it is "software engineering", then I don't think there is broad consensus on what that profession even is, much less what table stakes in it are.
  - cannabis_sam 6y ago
    Are you seriously claiming Guido van Rossum was hired for software development/engineering..? I don’t understand the context switching here.
paulnechifor 6y ago
> NP completeness Programmer here. It's true. I deal with NP completeness every day.
__s 6y ago
Hi, I'm a programmer for Microsoft. I didn't have to answer silly algorithm questions for them to hire me. I'm nowhere close to VP/Distinguished Engineer level (that said, my path to being hired did involve writing a sudoku solver, but that wasn't in an interview for a position at Microsoft)
- FeistySkink 6y ago
  Perhaps you could share your story to show that not all is dire like HN would make it seem.
  - __s 6y ago
    Every story is unique. I was responding to a comment that was making sweeping claims My story likely isn't replicable, but everyone has to find their way I interviewed for Citus a couple weeks before they announced being acquired. I found out about the acquisition on Hacker News before having received an offer. They were able to get me in without going through the hiring process again Initially I'd be moving to San Francisco but I wasn't eligible for any visas as I don't have a post secondary education. Staying in Canada's worked out Some examples of things working out here: I was asked to implement some parsing, & well that's not so hard when you've written a Lua parser a year beforehand: https://github.com/serprex/luwa/blob/master/rt/astgen.lua https://github.com/serprex/luwa/blob/master/rt/astgen.lua (an astute reader will notice I don't handle precedence here, which is pretty important for arithmetic parsing. That's because I opted to implement shunting yard during codegen phase) What value does this story give a reader? I only think it'd serve to continue an argument about how not everyone is so lucky, which isn't the original argument of "unless you're VP/Distinguished Engineer, not even Guido van Rossum gets to skip whiteboarding"
deeeeplearning 6y ago
>We do foundational work in many teams and we need to solve algorithmic problems practically every week. Keep telling yourself that as you fix mindless bugs in some Advertising platform lol.
nxmnxm99 6y ago
LOL what an obnoxious comment.
atraac 6y ago
> The thing is, at Microsoft & co. you don't just do this in an interview. You do it at your job too. Oh so that's why the Azure Portal UI is such garbage. Their frontend developers are just busy solving knapsack problems...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

whoisjuan 6y ago

> I am pretty sure they did Lol! I'd bet my year salary they didn't.

esyir 6y ago
Well, you might want to check guido's twitter before making that bet.
- whoisjuan 6y ago
  What exactly am I supposed to check in his Twitter?
  - esyir 6y ago
    Whoops, mismatched your reply to the wrong branch of the comment tree
fayyazkl 6y ago
Every body is asked some thing close enough. At higher levels, often focus is not on coding, but enough depth of design where a person of such profile might end up educating the interviewer - while satisfying their requirements. That being said, ability to solve coding problems efficiently (not necessarily spit A* graph algo in sleep), but a decent close to real life coding challenge is fair game.

adamnemecek 6y ago

You really don't do it at your job.

paganel 6y ago
I’m taking a cheap shot here, but the people maintaining Skype at MS certainly don’t do it. And there are such examples at other big companies.

jzebedee 6y ago

He was hired as a Distinguished Engineer.

ithkuil 6y ago

Yes, they hired him at Distinguished Engineer level.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

lcfcjs 6y ago

It wouldn't be such a problem if developers actually needed to know these ridiculous "algorithmic questions" to do their job. There are Youtube videos that you can memorize to get through the interview, its not difficult. You are acting like on an elite few can work for an awful company like Microsoft.

JackFr 6y ago

> unless he got hired at some VP/Distinguished Engineer level. Google or Wikipedia can tell you who Guido van Rossum is.

AnimalMuppet 6y ago
I believe the "unless" was about the position he was hired for, not about who he is.

andi999 6y ago

Everybody needs to invert B-trees before breakfast

echelon 6y ago

I wholeheartedly disagree. 1. This is Guido van Rossum. If I were him and asked to solve puzzles, I'd tell the hiring company to fuck off. 2. These quizzes aren't so bad, but the pressure and stakes make it incredibly stressful. There's no standard, and often times the interviewer is the one that sucks. > We do foundational work in many teams and we need to solve algorithmic problems practically every week. If you are unable to code yourself out of a DP problem or scared of NP completeness and approximation algorithms, then maybe find a different job instead of complaining about the interview process? I'm pretty sure your opinion here is not that of your employer.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
nostrademons 6y ago
Counterpoint: When I was leaving Google the first time, I asked my skip lead (who was employee #48 there, ended up running all of Search, and was previously a core HotSpot engineer at Sun) why he chose to work at a small startup when, coming off of HotSpot in 1999, he could work anywhere. He replied "Aside from them being one of very few companies with an engineer-centric culture, they were the only company that required I interview. Everybody else was willing to hire me on the spot." For some personality types - and particularly the ones likely to do world-class work - being challenged is a positive sign. It means that the employer does their due diligence, and they will mostly be working with other people who react positively to a challenge.
- Alex3917 6y ago
  > It means that the employer does their due diligence, and they will mostly be working with other people who react positively to a challenge. To me, due diligence would be more like using software that someone has created. If it feels snappy then they're good enough at algorithms for the kind of software that they create, if it doesn't then maybe it's worth looking into whether or not there's a good reason for that. Like if you apply for a job at the NYT, I doubt they make you do a timed writing test with people staring at you and asking you questions in the middle. They probably just read some of the previous work you've done.

ownagefool 6y ago

From his twitter profile: """ Python's BDFL-emeritus, Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft, Computer History Fellow. Opinions are my own. He/him. """

strikelaserclaw 6y ago

"Hello Guido thanks for coming in, we would like you to open up visual studio code and create a sudoku solver that can solve this partially filled out board"

speedgoose 6y ago
Time to use prolog to get your revenge on the interviewers.
- Cactus2018 6y ago
  A Sudoku Solver in APL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmT80OseAGs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmT80OseAGs
  - jodrellblank 6y ago
    More appropriately, in Prolog (by Markus Triska) https://youtube.com/watch?v=5KUdEZTu06o https://youtube.com/watch?v=5KUdEZTu06o
    - speedgoose 6y ago
      Very nice, and I can understand this one.
    - cgh 6y ago
      Thanks for this link. I took a course on logic programming in school and it made a big impression. I found Prolog to be pretty mindblowing at the time and I'm happy to see it still is.

kop316 6y ago

I think this was in response to this: https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768 https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768

orthonormel 6y ago

His Twitter actually says "Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft"

kodah 6y ago

This comment really just drives home the nail of how awful the state of interviewing, and especially the mental state of some interviewers, in this industry with a backhoe bucket. I really just want to thank you for putting this useless mentality on display.

whymauri 6y ago
I know it's not Microsoft, but D. E. Shaw asked Larry Summers math puzzles when he interviewed there. At the time, he was the president of Harvard University. I think it's my favorite example of how crazy some interview processes can get, lol.
- creddit 6y ago
  I’m not sure what’s crazier to me: asking someone to demonstrate a live proficiency of an abstract skill that is only tangentially related to that actual day-to-day activities of a role or just assuming that because someone has some high credential that they would be good in a given role.
  - user5994461 6y ago
    DE Shaw is a financial company filled with maths guys, doing statistical analysis and modeling all day. A math puzzle is the most normal question you could be asked there. The real question is why Larry Summers is going to a quant interview? Did he apply for a quant role?
    - whymauri 6y ago
      They hired him as a managing director.
  - dddbbb 6y ago
    For many roles at a hedge fund, being able to do mathematics quickly and intuitively is a valuable skill. Not sure why an economist applying for an MD job would need to be tested on that, though.

maxioatic 6y ago

Wow, so much salt. It was a joke.

LeifCarrotson 6y ago
You should have left "/s" at the end of your comment, it's really hard to distinguish between a joke and stupidity on the Internet.
- AQuantized 6y ago
  To me this undermines any humour the comment may had to begin with.
- chippy 6y ago
  They did add a /s to the end. The user you were replying to wrote the comment that the stupid comment was replying to!
- maxioatic 6y ago
  It is there. At the end of the line.
xapata 6y ago
In that case, it was an unnecessary joke and not helpful to the conversation.
- maxioatic 6y ago
  Sorry, I'll refrain from humor from now on?
  - xapata 6y ago
    Seems reasonable.
  - vamos_davai 6y ago
    Go to reddit if you want to make average IQ humor.

ponker 6y ago

You must be injecting crack directly into your frontal lobe if you think that the creator of the world's third most important programming language being asked an algorithms question (unlikely) and failing it (entirely possible) means that he's unqualified to do "foundational work." I had a Nobel Prize winner as a physics professor in college who got three successive different wrong answers when attempting a freshman physics problem in office hours. That doesn't mean that physics isn't the right place for him to work.

jrib 6y ago
> third most important programming language not going to debate that, but I'm curious, what do you rank as #1 and #2?
- phkahler 6y ago
  The tiobe index lists Java and C in those spots.
  - dkarlovi 6y ago
    That's fair, I guess.
  - fermigier 6y ago
    Python is number 2 now, according to https://www.techrepublic.com/article/python-overtakes-java-to-become-the-second-most-popular-programming-language/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/python-overtakes-java-t... :) We should not give too much importance to this, but the fact is that Python is now ranked consistently #1, #2 or #3 in sufficiently many rankings to consider it seriously.
  - webmaven 6y ago
    > The tiobe index lists Java and C in those spots. That list is ranking languages by current popularity, though, rather than 'importance'. I'd define 'importance' as more along the lines of "amount of havoc created if all software written using that language were broken/deleted at once".

coldtea 6y ago

>I am pretty sure they did, unless he got hired at some VP/Distinguished Engineer level No way they even considered doing it... That's for people out of college...

fayyazkl 6y ago
Thats certainly invalid. People with 20 years of experience or more, are asked questions based upon the role they are interviewing for. If you are applying for a principal or higher engineer role and your job involves coding, you are asked coding questions. May be not just focused on a complex bookish algorithm only, but rather more close to a real life distributed programming / synchronization problem etc. for example.

Thaxll 6y ago

I know we're talking about FANG itw but come on you really think people like Guido needs to do any of that? They probably don't do "regular" itw, they go to a restaurant with some important people and that seels the deal.

cannabis_sam 6y ago

Why the fuck would CS graduates be afraid of DP problems, NP-completeness or approximation algos??? That’s literally the table stakes of our profession. The problem is rewarding rote memorization in a whiteboard interview, at the expense of actual understanding, and ability to research the problem.

AI_WAIFU 6y ago
Because unlike in the real world, you can't just google the solution or look it up in a textbook during an interview.
mayank 6y ago
> that’s literally the table stakes of our profession Table stakes for what exactly?
- cannabis_sam 6y ago
  Computer science graduates...? Like I said in the comment.
- kristianov 6y ago
  For sudo scientists.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> Why the fuck would CS graduates be afraid of DP problems, NP-completeness or approximation algos??? That’s literally the table stakes of our profession. If the profession being discussed is "academic work in Computer Science", sure. If it is "software development", those things absolutely are not really "table stakes". If it is "software engineering", then I don't think there is broad consensus on what that profession even is, much less what table stakes in it are.
- cannabis_sam 6y ago
  Are you seriously claiming Guido van Rossum was hired for software development/engineering..? I don’t understand the context switching here.

paulnechifor 6y ago

> NP completeness Programmer here. It's true. I deal with NP completeness every day.

__s 6y ago

Hi, I'm a programmer for Microsoft. I didn't have to answer silly algorithm questions for them to hire me. I'm nowhere close to VP/Distinguished Engineer level (that said, my path to being hired did involve writing a sudoku solver, but that wasn't in an interview for a position at Microsoft)

FeistySkink 6y ago
Perhaps you could share your story to show that not all is dire like HN would make it seem.
- __s 6y ago
  Every story is unique. I was responding to a comment that was making sweeping claims My story likely isn't replicable, but everyone has to find their way I interviewed for Citus a couple weeks before they announced being acquired. I found out about the acquisition on Hacker News before having received an offer. They were able to get me in without going through the hiring process again Initially I'd be moving to San Francisco but I wasn't eligible for any visas as I don't have a post secondary education. Staying in Canada's worked out Some examples of things working out here: I was asked to implement some parsing, & well that's not so hard when you've written a Lua parser a year beforehand: https://github.com/serprex/luwa/blob/master/rt/astgen.lua https://github.com/serprex/luwa/blob/master/rt/astgen.lua (an astute reader will notice I don't handle precedence here, which is pretty important for arithmetic parsing. That's because I opted to implement shunting yard during codegen phase) What value does this story give a reader? I only think it'd serve to continue an argument about how not everyone is so lucky, which isn't the original argument of "unless you're VP/Distinguished Engineer, not even Guido van Rossum gets to skip whiteboarding"

deeeeplearning 6y ago

>We do foundational work in many teams and we need to solve algorithmic problems practically every week. Keep telling yourself that as you fix mindless bugs in some Advertising platform lol.

nxmnxm99 6y ago

LOL what an obnoxious comment.

atraac 6y ago

> The thing is, at Microsoft & co. you don't just do this in an interview. You do it at your job too. Oh so that's why the Azure Portal UI is such garbage. Their frontend developers are just busy solving knapsack problems...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]