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I get frustrated because I am pretty horrible (in my mind) at these kind of math puzzles ("Given N numbers , [N<=10^5] we need to count the total pairs of numbe
by swanson 15y ago
I get frustrated because I am pretty horrible (in my mind) at these kind of math puzzles ("Given N numbers , [N<=10^5] we need to count the total pairs of numbers that have a difference of K. [K>0 and K<1e9]..."). My frustration is compounded when I know that I won't really need to write this kind of Project Euler-style programs in 90% of jobs.
Your company is a web app, I can write web apps; why am I solving problem sets from undergrad Discrete Math to demonstrate competence? Why not have the tasks be like "Use AJAX to pull down a users last 10 tweets and display them on a web page"?
Maybe it's because the only samples are generic and not submitted by the companies, but I was hoping for a bit more relevance to the intended job duties than yet-another-interview-puzzle.
- rvivek 15y agoHi Swanson, totally agree to your comment. We're going live in a week's time where hackers can solve real-world problems. Mind dropping an e-mail to team@interviewstreet.com ? Would get back to you once it's live.
- swanson 15y agoThanks, I didn't actually read the TC post all the way though (I just went to your site directly) so I missed the part where you addressed this in the article. Glad to see you understand my perspective.
- rvivek 15y agoYes, thanks swanson
- dfguo 15y agothat would be really cool. that part of the skill sets is rather needed to actually get something to work. great job.
- killedbydeath 15y agoThat is not necessarily a math puzzle. Sounds more like a programming task formalization using math notation if you take the brute force search approach. Using math concepts helps too phrase interview questions in a non-ambiguous way, like "write a function printing all prime numbers in the range 2 <= n <= 1000".
- ap22213 15y agoAgreed. But more, is there any evidence that these types of technical tests actually select for better employees?
- endtime 15y agoWell, circumstantially, there are companies like Google and Microsoft who spend a lot of time on these types of tests. It's not an original suggestion that they aren't effective, so I have to assume that Google et al have considered this...and yet they're still using them.
- Jd 15y agoAt least it is better than getting asked questions about the O-notation of the solution you've just whiteboarded. There has to be a better way...
- archangel_one 15y agoWhat's wrong with that? Big-O notation is fairly universally relevant so it seems not unreasonable to expect a programmer to be able to talk about it a little. I've seen exactly that be a strong indicator in the past - a candidate not being able to recognise that the code he'd written ran in O(n^2) was a significant negative sign.
- Jd 15y agoI'm not sure how relevant it is to the work that many web application programmers do every day, which fairly rarely involves algorithm optimization. I understand that there are lots of optimization heavy jobs out there, but I'm not really sure that it is important for many of us (esp. since there are lots of great developers out there without a Comp Sci training). To the downvoters: Do you disagree? If so please tell me why.