3 ms·

> A technical interview has an uncanny resemblance to the trier social stress test [39], a procedure used for decades by psychologists and is the best known “go

by kevbin 6y ago

> A technical interview has an uncanny resemblance to the trier social stress test [39], a procedure used for decades by psychologists and is the best known “gold standard” procedure [1] for the sole purpose of reliably inducing stress. > The trier social stress test involves having a subject prepare and then deliver an interview-style presentation and perform mental arithmetic, all in front of an audience. > … rather than avoiding unwanted stress, technical interviews may be inadvertently designed with the sole purpose of inducing it. 39: https://www.karger.com/Article/Abstract/119004 https://www.karger.com/Article/Abstract/119004

madhadron 6y ago
I mean, that's what the interview format was designed to do. Schockley decided that how he should hire engineers was to stress them and ask them brain teasers. He had no basis but his own opinion, but he had to hire fast because none of his colleagues from Bell Labs were willing to work with him again. Then a bunch of his engineers all quit because he was such a terrible boss and founded Fairchild Semiconductor. We've at least abolished the brain teaser part in most cases.
- gfxgirl 6y ago
  We really haven't though. I've been going through the leetcode questions and I'd say > 30% are basically brain teasers and either you've seen the answer or related answer before or you haven't. If you're lucky and have some magical insight then maybe you solve it. Otherwise you look up the answer, possibly implement it yourself to try to cement it in your mind, and now if you're lucky it's added to your internal list of known solutions. To give just one example, I don't think I'd have ever solved the "find the largest rectangle" in a bitmap. Certainly not in a 45 minute interview. The brute force solution is O(N^3 * M^3). Me, I couldn't think of any spatial structures that would make the problem all that much smaller. For any structural solution it seems to be the degenerate case still ends up using too much space and too much time. But, there's an optimal "magic" solution is O(N*M). If you happen to know it or have seen then then you bang it out. If you haven't it's arguably just luck that you'll have the insight during your interview. I've seen several others of the same vane. Given 4-24 hours and a debugger to help my thoughts and directly my mistaking assumptions I might solve some of them but in 45 minutes on a whiteboard, it's just a lucky role of the dice that I've seen something similar before. The Jan 2021 google foobar was similar. I didn't figure it out nor did a friend of mine. We both spent 3-4 days. I bought it up with another friend. His first solution was wrong. When I pointed out why he was like "Oh yea, this the XYZ-algo" (meaning he didn't solve it, he just had read the solution before). The wikipedia page for the arguably obscure algo basically showed the exact same example as the foobar one.

by kevbin 6y ago

madhadron 6y ago

I mean, that's what the interview format was designed to do. Schockley decided that how he should hire engineers was to stress them and ask them brain teasers. He had no basis but his own opinion, but he had to hire fast because none of his colleagues from Bell Labs were willing to work with him again. Then a bunch of his engineers all quit because he was such a terrible boss and founded Fairchild Semiconductor. We've at least abolished the brain teaser part in most cases.

gfxgirl 6y ago
We really haven't though. I've been going through the leetcode questions and I'd say > 30% are basically brain teasers and either you've seen the answer or related answer before or you haven't. If you're lucky and have some magical insight then maybe you solve it. Otherwise you look up the answer, possibly implement it yourself to try to cement it in your mind, and now if you're lucky it's added to your internal list of known solutions. To give just one example, I don't think I'd have ever solved the "find the largest rectangle" in a bitmap. Certainly not in a 45 minute interview. The brute force solution is O(N^3 * M^3). Me, I couldn't think of any spatial structures that would make the problem all that much smaller. For any structural solution it seems to be the degenerate case still ends up using too much space and too much time. But, there's an optimal "magic" solution is O(N*M). If you happen to know it or have seen then then you bang it out. If you haven't it's arguably just luck that you'll have the insight during your interview. I've seen several others of the same vane. Given 4-24 hours and a debugger to help my thoughts and directly my mistaking assumptions I might solve some of them but in 45 minutes on a whiteboard, it's just a lucky role of the dice that I've seen something similar before. The Jan 2021 google foobar was similar. I didn't figure it out nor did a friend of mine. We both spent 3-4 days. I bought it up with another friend. His first solution was wrong. When I pointed out why he was like "Oh yea, this the XYZ-algo" (meaning he didn't solve it, he just had read the solution before). The wikipedia page for the arguably obscure algo basically showed the exact same example as the foobar one.