3 ms·
I was once asked to write a function that, given the time, draw an analog clock. Given the nature of the position I was applying for, this wasn't an unreasonab
by banana_giraffe 5y ago
I was once asked to write a function that, given the time, draw an analog clock. Given the nature of the position I was applying for, this wasn't an unreasonable question.
I wrote something on a whiteboard. What followed was the most surreal discussion I've had in an interview. My function took into account the seconds, minutes and hour for the hour hand, and so on. Just like a normal clock would. The interviewer insisted this was wrong. I tried to tease out of him if we were talking about what to do if the specs made no sense, or if he wanted me to draw an unusual clock face. Nope. He just insisted I had no idea how clocks work. I spent the interview trying to understand what he was really asking of me as politely as I could while he spent the interview insisting I didn't know how something as basic as a clock works.
To this day I don't know what he really expected out of me. I wasn't surprised when I learned they didn't want to hire me. I doubt I would have wanted to work there after that interview.
- catillac 5y agoHaha amazingly there’s a chance I interviewed you, or you interviewed with my company when we were first rolling this out, or another company was also using the same question. I remember the idea was to make the analog like one of those analogs that didn’t move continuously but ticked at every sixty second interval. So it never needed to be in between minute ticks. Lots of us didn’t fully understand the question when we were giving it initially and it caused a lot of problems. I’m guessing you had the minute hand drawn as if it moved continuously since you mention seconds. Let me apologize for either myself or my company :)
- dcomp 5y agoFor the record. Most analog clocks have smooth motion for minute and hour (for the precision of the gearing). Its the second hand that ticks.
- marvin 5y agoI don't know much about clocks, but the Swiss railway clocks are by some considered a canonical example of an analog clock, and they behave the way GP describes. But all other analog clocks I've ever seen behave the way you describe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_railway_clock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_railway_clock
- eythian 5y agoInteresting, the one I have moves the minute hand about 5 times per minute or so, rather than being continuous.
- kseifried 5y agoAnd conversely there are clocks with smooth movement of the second hand, some
- kseifried 5y agoAnd conversely there are clocks with smooth movement of the second hand, something I prefer because then there's no annoying ticking noise.
- mcguire 5y agoI once interviewed with Boeing research and gave them the spiel about my PhD work on network protocols. They started asking me about Petri nets. I know nothing about Petri nets other than that they're another approach to distributed systems. I'm fairly sure I left them convinced I didn't understand my own research.
- CRConrad 5y ago"Damn, that guy knows nothing! He hadn't the faintest idea of how fishing nets work!"
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mynameisash 5y agoUgh. This reminds me of when I interviewed with Google some years ago. It's a somewhat long and boring story, but basically, it was a distributed map-reduce problem. I clearly stated my assumptions and asked for clarification/confirmation so we could disambiguate. The interviewer and I were very clear what he was asking and what I would be answering. So I proceed to answer the question, describing what I was doing and writing code, and at one point he stops me to say, "That won't work because X may not be the case." But X was one of the points of clarification up-front, so I called him out on it politely but firmly. I wasn't sure if it was [a] a language thing (he's a non-native English speaker with a fairly heavy accent), [b] an issue with experience (he was being reverse-shadowed in the interview), [c] him trying to test soft skills in some really bizarre way, or [d] some bullshit that won't fly. I have no real problem with a,b,c, though the more experienced engineer doing a reverse shadow should step in when things go amiss, so I fault that engineer for jumping in. But regardless, I was thoroughly nonplussed by the way Google runs interviews, and I've essentially sworn them off. It wasn't until Facebook that I found a company that I want to work for even less.
- benibela 5y agoBut everyone loves FAANG Where would you want to work?