6 ms·

On the flip side, we questioned a candidate the usual way with pertinent technical challenges and so on. Then when driving in a van to lunch (our habit was to d

On the flip side, we questioned a candidate the usual way with pertinent technical challenges and so on. Then when driving in a van to lunch (our habit was to do a social segment as well as technical) I asked some puzzle questions - add 6 feet to a rope around the world, stretch it out and how far off the ground would it be? and suchlike. He was charmed, we brainstormed some answers and had a fun lunch. Years later, now a senior Engineer at our place, he admitted he had been going to give us a miss that day, until that conversation in the car.

dekhn 4y ago
you would have lost me (principal engineer) with those questions.
- JoeAltmaier 4y ago
  Really? You don't like to socialize with peers, with puzzles or tricky problems? Enough to make you refuse to join a company? Discussion has gone off the rails here. Maybe I didn't make it clear - the puzzles were during casual conversation at lunch. Rebutting something I didn't say, is not fair.
  - pfooti 4y ago
    I think there's a pretty clear difference between chatting about interesting puzzles between friends and asking annoying puzzle questions in a job interview. The power dynamic is very different, although honestly I don't often like those socially either. They can be deployed to trip other people up, make them feel small, etc. Can cause social anxiety. As with most things, it depends a lot on the history you have with those people and the psychological safety you feel, so it depends? Definitely not with someone I just met and is interviewing me for a job. And FWIW I also don't interview anywhere there are questions like this.
  - enumjorge 4y ago
    Happy to chat about puzzles when we really are peers. In an interview setting that’s not the case. For some candidates there could be a lot riding on the outcome of that interview and grading them based on puzzles that don’t really reflect day-to-day work is IMO kind of rude.
  - nprateem 4y ago
    There's nothing clever in Googling some obscure fact just to feel intellectually superior in an interview. Red flag here too. Didn't you have anything more interesting/relevant to talk about?
  - spywaregorilla 4y ago
    Would have been a huge negative to me. I'm fine to chat with peers and discuss little riddles. That is not what's happening when you're interviewing me for a job position. You're not my peer. We're not having fun. There's a non-subtle implication that my ability to answer the riddle will impact whether or not I get the job. I would be very annoyed if someone asked a puzzle like this too. It's not a novel puzzle. It's mostly a gotcha where intuition meets math. I could blurt out the answer. But I would instead feel it more important to slowly reason out the answer and appear to discover it on the fly. Which is pretty bullshit. And I would think you're not very smart for thinking this is worth anyone's time. If I didn't know the puzzle and I failed to get the job I would be mad and it would stick out as something that penalized me unfairly.
    - gcommer 4y ago
      In every interview I've done, lunch was explicitly bracketed by "this is a free, casual lunch that won't affect your interview at all". And as an interviewer, I've never been asked to report on lunch chats. > You're not my peer. We're not having fun. Actually, most interviewers are your peers, and they typically know that you're under interview stress and are trying to help. If you can't take a break and de-stress during lunch, you're just hurting yourself.
      - site-packages1 4y ago
        The power dynamics at play makes someone spending time with me during an interview process where they have nothing to lose and can exert influence in the selection of me for a full time job offer decidedly _not_ my peer in that situation.
      - Jare 4y ago
        Neither have I, but unless I was asked to deliver my interview evaluation before the lunch, you can bet any particularly good or noticeably bad flags during lunch would go into it. Conversely, the couple times I had those "casual" lunches as a candidate, "I'm jetlagged" was a graceful way to lie out of the question why I wasn't eating much.
      - 4y ago
  - dekhn 4y ago
    Asking puzzle questions during lunch interview is absolutely not just socialization. In fact I remember as a kid my dad explaining how lunch interviews are culture tests and how to succeed them- but it's very unpleasant for me. Best lunch "interview" I ever had was at Noname at Google some 15 years ago, it was just a relaxed conversation where we discussed the fact that Google's chefs made and served consomme. I absolutely don't like solving puzzles with other people. On the other hand, I do enjoy writing code on my own, solving problems (not puzzles) and then sharing the results in a readable way with others. I do like to socialize with peers, but never playing games (I prefer to play games on the computer against NPCs). THe reason I don't like this is there are people who've asked me ludicrous puzzle questions before and they are proxies for 'people I wouldn't want to work with'.
  - elbigbad 4y ago
    imho this is really negative. Early in my career I would have been self-browbeaten into answering such an interview question disguised as “fun” lunch conversation, but I would have hated it and thought badly of your company. Power dynamic, not subtle implications about getting the job, gaslighting, etc. all lead to a bad look. At least normally when someone takes you out to the XYZ company “not part of the interview” lunch halfway through your eight hour interview loop and you chat small talk and background, there aren’t actual interview questions being thrown your way. Imagine going to lunch and the interviewer striking up a conversation with “how many manholes do you suspect there are in New York.”
  - msrenee 4y ago
    Well, I would have enjoyed that discussion. If the interviewer is capable of taking a break and having an engaging conversation about literally anything during an interview, that's a massive bonus in my mind. I don't need to hear about your plan to shake things up for the 10th time. If you can't see me as a person and not just a potential cog to make your department look better so that you get your bonuses, I don't want to work for you.
  - relaxing 4y ago
    > Really? You don't like to socialize with peers, with puzzles or tricky problems? No, we like to talk about normal stuff.
  - xtracto 4y ago
    Are managers that naive with regards to power imbalances with their peers/colleagues? I have seen people with similar insensitivity fail to understand why people in their teams dont like them: "but I treat them as if we are peers!! I like playing on the 'you are doing it wrong'games"!!
  - ThrowawayR2 4y ago
    > "You don't like to socialize with peers, with puzzles or tricky problems?" You have to remember that, after about 2010, the software industry is mostly comprised of people who are after a paycheck and their actual interest in computers, STEM, and other nerd activates is kind of minimal. It came as a shock to me too when I realized that the old shibboleths of being a hacker had become largely absent in the software industry.
    - dekhn 4y ago
      Well, if you're thinking I said what I said because I'm not a pre-2010 hacker with an interest in STEM or other nerd activities, you'd be completely wrong. I started hacking on UNIX systems in the late 1980s, got a PhD because I wanted to be a scientist, and only went to work at Google to get access to their computer farm (where I built what was the world's largest idle cycle harvesting system, for science, at the time) although the pay was quite nice! No, I said what I said because it's hard enough to be "on" during the coding interviews and also "on" during the culture tests, to also be "interested" in your puzzle. Wrong time, wrong place, wrong signal to send. Lunch interview (and the transport to it) is about learning about other people in a fairly non-competitive way.
  - CTmystery 4y ago
    Agree that the amount of entitlement in this thread is wild. People, ostensibly respected principal engineers, will turn down jobs because they are asked a puzzle question during lunch. I _hope_ we are fortunate enough for this attitude to be a possibility in the next decade.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - goodpoint 4y ago
    > You don't like to socialize with peers An interviewer is most certainly not a peer. > with puzzles or tricky problems Seeing a a middle school question as "tricky" it's a bit worrying.
  - sys_64738 4y ago
    > You don't like to socialize with peers No, I go to work for an employer and work with my peers. My peers are not my friends in most situations. Maybe for you that is the extent of your social life so you think peers have to be friends, but you mixing the two together is your work/life balance limitation being applied to those you want to hire.
cntainer 4y ago
add 6 feet to a rope around the world, stretch it out and how far off the ground would it be is this a technical puzzle/question? to me it reads like a middle school geometry question. it would be fun to discuss it with friends/colleagues but I wouldn't expect it during a software engineering interview
- ralfd 4y ago
  https://mathimages.swarthmore.edu/index.php/Rope_around_the_Earth https://mathimages.swarthmore.edu/index.php/Rope_around_the_... > Although finding the answer requires only basic geometry, even professional mathematicians find the answer strangely counter-intuitive. I guess the more a visual person you are the more counter-intuitive it is. That only 6 feet of rope is needed to widen the radius of Earth at every place at continents and oceans ect at a whole 1 feet seems crazy to me.
  - cntainer 4y ago
    sure, the answer might seem counter-intuitive but the method to find the answer is not, as long as you know the connection between a circle's circumference and its diameter I still fail to see how this is relevant for a technical interview, assuming that we're trying to hire a software engineer. Fun, but not relevant.
    - humbleMouse 4y ago
  - kelnos 4y ago
    Hah, I just did the math on this myself, found the answer to be 0.955 feet, and assumed I had done something wrong, or was off by a factor (or two or three) of ten. That is unexpected!
  - mlazos 4y ago
    It helps me to think about it in opposite terms. You're increasing the radius by ~1ft (radius around the whole earth), and 2pi is the linear relationship with circumference, so you'll get six ft. Thinking about it this way kind of ignores the fact the circle is huge. I'm not too visual of a person though.
edflsafoiewq 4y ago
Is that a puzzle? Isn't it just 2πr + d = 2π(r + d/2π)?
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  Yes, to both. It's very counter intuitive, and very easy to solve.
- drran 4y ago
  When stretched, the length of the rope will be two straight lines plus part of the circle. The length of the segment can be calculated using a formula for horizon. Then we can create an equation: (s arc distance to horizon for h)*2 + delta = (d straight Distance to horizon for h)*2, or d-s-delta/2=0. d=sqrt(h(2R+h)) km/m (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon#Approximation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon#Approximation ) s=R*arccos(R/(R+h)) (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon#Arc_distance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon#Arc_distance ) sqrt(h(2R+h))-R*arccos(R/(R+h))-delta = 0 6 foots is about 2 meters. sqrt(h(2*6371000+h))-6371000*arccos(6371000/(6371000+h))-2 = 0 h=306m
  - gshubert17 4y ago
    I think I found a small typo, where you have delta (instead of delta/2) in the third line. I believe it should be sqrt(h(2R+h))-R * arccos(R/(R+h))-delta/2 = 0 This can be solved for h given delta numerically, such as with a spreadsheet. Use caution here because this formula leads to a loss of significant digits from cancellation of nearly identical terms. For example, given R = 6378000 meters and trying h = 193 meters: the first (d) term is 49618.0 meters and the second (s) term is 49617.0 meters. The difference is 1.0 meter, which is the half delta we wanted. But there's been a loss of 4 significant digits (because the first 4 digits in each value are the same: 4961). The smaller the arc distance, the smaller the angle, the worse the relative error becomes. It's possible to analytically factor out sqrt(2hR) from both the d and s terms. In the first case, d = sqrt(2Rh+h^2) = sqrt(2Rh) * (1+h/4R) using Taylor series for (1+h^2/2Rh)^0.5 In the second case, I can derive one formula, but the coefficients aren't the same as my numerical best fit, which is s = sqrt(2Rh) * (1-5h/12R) Combining the two series versions for d and s, gives us this for delta, delta = 4h/3 * sqrt(2h/R) Finally, solving for h given delta, take the cube root of h^3: h^3 = (9R/32) * delta^2 Thus for a delta of 2 meters, I get height h = 192.88 meters.
akhmatova 4y ago
I asked some puzzle questions - add 6 feet to a rope around the world, stretch it out and how far off the ground would it be? I can only imagine being "charmed" by a question like if I was much younger in my career, eager to be seen as smart and in the company of like-minded folk. Nowadays... my focus is on solving problems... as in real problems, not made-up ones. Thankfully I haven't heard questions like this in years. But when I do, I take it as a sign that they probably don't have actual, meaty problems to work on, that is, requiring higher-level cognitive skills (and actual experience). Not to mention that this was supposed to be lunch, and here they are asking filter questions, but pretending it's just "casual conversation" when obviously it isn't. And so would probably pause for a second, and think of a way to tactfully end the interview, and thank the interviewer for their time.
- JoeAltmaier 4y ago
  Yeah it's easy to act all butt-hurt and be too good to even try. But how outrageous is it to imagine that folks who can solve such problems might be able to solve other problems?
  - sys_64738 4y ago
    A lot of people will find your questions obnoxious and irrelevant. Ask questions about the candidate's experience in past problems. Asking abstract questions to satisfy your own ego is a narcissistic trait.
  - anon2020dot00 4y ago
    That's not the point or context; No one likes "creative" interview questions is what people are saying like this is just a variation of brain teasers from 1990's Microsoft interviews.
  - anon2020dot00 4y ago
    Also, it's not about being too good to even try but about being old enough to no longer put-up with corporate non-sense; too much bullshit in a job to put up with as it is. Once you get to a certain age, you learn to prioritize real stuff rather than appearances.
drewcoo 4y ago
The rope question is more of a Fermi question[1]. Not that they aren't commonly called [2] puzzlers, but I think the distinction is useful. Fermis are about estimating, and that's an actual skill - innumeracy[3] is real. What I would call puzzle problems usually involve some trick to getting the answer. If you can't figure out the trick, you're stumped. If you know the trick, you barely have to think to crank out the answer. Optimally solving the example in the article is one of those. They weren't widely banned because they were too novel and charming. They were banned because "time to aha!" in any given instance doesn't tell you much about how someone solves problems. Also, because the bulk of the work at most jobs doesn't really resemble seeking "aha moments," these questions tend to select for people who thrive most on doing something other than the job at hand. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem [2] https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-hardest-interview-puzzle-question-ever/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-hardest-interview-puzzle-q... [3] https://innumeracy.net/category/estimation/ https://innumeracy.net/category/estimation/
- zamadatix 4y ago
  To me it definitely seems to be in the puzzler category based on those descriptions. The trick is realizing it's "just" asking you to solve the well known formula for radius to circumference, 2*pi*r=c, for c=6 would give r≈1 while you can ignore the rest of the information worded to trick you into thinking it's a complicated problem which would require a fancy solution. Of course if you're not dealing with geometry every day of your adult life it's more likely it leads to seeing what your general thought process is, such as "I'll fall back to Fermi Estimation to get a ballpark going".
freedomben 4y ago
Was this a situation in which you were asking the candidate while everybody else either already knew the answer and was listening to the candidate think? Or was it more like everybody was discussing (and explicitly or implicitly through discussion) admitting that they don't necessarily know the answer (while assumedly is an engineer in good standing on the team), and the group is working together to solve it? Because both situations seem equally plausible based on what you wrote, and if it's the first one then I agree with your detractors below that it's messed up. If it's the second situation then I would have loved it and been excited to join your team. It's very possible that the ambiguity of the situation is why there's such variance in reactions.
- JoeAltmaier 4y ago
  It was new to the group, if I recall.

dekhn 4y ago

you would have lost me (principal engineer) with those questions.

JoeAltmaier 4y ago
Really? You don't like to socialize with peers, with puzzles or tricky problems? Enough to make you refuse to join a company? Discussion has gone off the rails here. Maybe I didn't make it clear - the puzzles were during casual conversation at lunch. Rebutting something I didn't say, is not fair.
- pfooti 4y ago
  I think there's a pretty clear difference between chatting about interesting puzzles between friends and asking annoying puzzle questions in a job interview. The power dynamic is very different, although honestly I don't often like those socially either. They can be deployed to trip other people up, make them feel small, etc. Can cause social anxiety. As with most things, it depends a lot on the history you have with those people and the psychological safety you feel, so it depends? Definitely not with someone I just met and is interviewing me for a job. And FWIW I also don't interview anywhere there are questions like this.
- enumjorge 4y ago
  Happy to chat about puzzles when we really are peers. In an interview setting that’s not the case. For some candidates there could be a lot riding on the outcome of that interview and grading them based on puzzles that don’t really reflect day-to-day work is IMO kind of rude.
- nprateem 4y ago
  There's nothing clever in Googling some obscure fact just to feel intellectually superior in an interview. Red flag here too. Didn't you have anything more interesting/relevant to talk about?
- spywaregorilla 4y ago
  Would have been a huge negative to me. I'm fine to chat with peers and discuss little riddles. That is not what's happening when you're interviewing me for a job position. You're not my peer. We're not having fun. There's a non-subtle implication that my ability to answer the riddle will impact whether or not I get the job. I would be very annoyed if someone asked a puzzle like this too. It's not a novel puzzle. It's mostly a gotcha where intuition meets math. I could blurt out the answer. But I would instead feel it more important to slowly reason out the answer and appear to discover it on the fly. Which is pretty bullshit. And I would think you're not very smart for thinking this is worth anyone's time. If I didn't know the puzzle and I failed to get the job I would be mad and it would stick out as something that penalized me unfairly.
  - gcommer 4y ago
    In every interview I've done, lunch was explicitly bracketed by "this is a free, casual lunch that won't affect your interview at all". And as an interviewer, I've never been asked to report on lunch chats. > You're not my peer. We're not having fun. Actually, most interviewers are your peers, and they typically know that you're under interview stress and are trying to help. If you can't take a break and de-stress during lunch, you're just hurting yourself.
    - site-packages1 4y ago
      The power dynamics at play makes someone spending time with me during an interview process where they have nothing to lose and can exert influence in the selection of me for a full time job offer decidedly _not_ my peer in that situation.
    - Jare 4y ago
      Neither have I, but unless I was asked to deliver my interview evaluation before the lunch, you can bet any particularly good or noticeably bad flags during lunch would go into it. Conversely, the couple times I had those "casual" lunches as a candidate, "I'm jetlagged" was a graceful way to lie out of the question why I wasn't eating much.
    - 4y ago
- dekhn 4y ago
  Asking puzzle questions during lunch interview is absolutely not just socialization. In fact I remember as a kid my dad explaining how lunch interviews are culture tests and how to succeed them- but it's very unpleasant for me. Best lunch "interview" I ever had was at Noname at Google some 15 years ago, it was just a relaxed conversation where we discussed the fact that Google's chefs made and served consomme. I absolutely don't like solving puzzles with other people. On the other hand, I do enjoy writing code on my own, solving problems (not puzzles) and then sharing the results in a readable way with others. I do like to socialize with peers, but never playing games (I prefer to play games on the computer against NPCs). THe reason I don't like this is there are people who've asked me ludicrous puzzle questions before and they are proxies for 'people I wouldn't want to work with'.
- elbigbad 4y ago
  imho this is really negative. Early in my career I would have been self-browbeaten into answering such an interview question disguised as “fun” lunch conversation, but I would have hated it and thought badly of your company. Power dynamic, not subtle implications about getting the job, gaslighting, etc. all lead to a bad look. At least normally when someone takes you out to the XYZ company “not part of the interview” lunch halfway through your eight hour interview loop and you chat small talk and background, there aren’t actual interview questions being thrown your way. Imagine going to lunch and the interviewer striking up a conversation with “how many manholes do you suspect there are in New York.”
- msrenee 4y ago
  Well, I would have enjoyed that discussion. If the interviewer is capable of taking a break and having an engaging conversation about literally anything during an interview, that's a massive bonus in my mind. I don't need to hear about your plan to shake things up for the 10th time. If you can't see me as a person and not just a potential cog to make your department look better so that you get your bonuses, I don't want to work for you.
- relaxing 4y ago
  > Really? You don't like to socialize with peers, with puzzles or tricky problems? No, we like to talk about normal stuff.
- xtracto 4y ago
  Are managers that naive with regards to power imbalances with their peers/colleagues? I have seen people with similar insensitivity fail to understand why people in their teams dont like them: "but I treat them as if we are peers!! I like playing on the 'you are doing it wrong'games"!!
- ThrowawayR2 4y ago
  > "You don't like to socialize with peers, with puzzles or tricky problems?" You have to remember that, after about 2010, the software industry is mostly comprised of people who are after a paycheck and their actual interest in computers, STEM, and other nerd activates is kind of minimal. It came as a shock to me too when I realized that the old shibboleths of being a hacker had become largely absent in the software industry.
  - dekhn 4y ago
    Well, if you're thinking I said what I said because I'm not a pre-2010 hacker with an interest in STEM or other nerd activities, you'd be completely wrong. I started hacking on UNIX systems in the late 1980s, got a PhD because I wanted to be a scientist, and only went to work at Google to get access to their computer farm (where I built what was the world's largest idle cycle harvesting system, for science, at the time) although the pay was quite nice! No, I said what I said because it's hard enough to be "on" during the coding interviews and also "on" during the culture tests, to also be "interested" in your puzzle. Wrong time, wrong place, wrong signal to send. Lunch interview (and the transport to it) is about learning about other people in a fairly non-competitive way.
- CTmystery 4y ago
  Agree that the amount of entitlement in this thread is wild. People, ostensibly respected principal engineers, will turn down jobs because they are asked a puzzle question during lunch. I _hope_ we are fortunate enough for this attitude to be a possibility in the next decade.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- goodpoint 4y ago
  > You don't like to socialize with peers An interviewer is most certainly not a peer. > with puzzles or tricky problems Seeing a a middle school question as "tricky" it's a bit worrying.
- sys_64738 4y ago
  > You don't like to socialize with peers No, I go to work for an employer and work with my peers. My peers are not my friends in most situations. Maybe for you that is the extent of your social life so you think peers have to be friends, but you mixing the two together is your work/life balance limitation being applied to those you want to hire.

cntainer 4y ago

add 6 feet to a rope around the world, stretch it out and how far off the ground would it be is this a technical puzzle/question? to me it reads like a middle school geometry question. it would be fun to discuss it with friends/colleagues but I wouldn't expect it during a software engineering interview

ralfd 4y ago
https://mathimages.swarthmore.edu/index.php/Rope_around_the_Earth https://mathimages.swarthmore.edu/index.php/Rope_around_the_... > Although finding the answer requires only basic geometry, even professional mathematicians find the answer strangely counter-intuitive. I guess the more a visual person you are the more counter-intuitive it is. That only 6 feet of rope is needed to widen the radius of Earth at every place at continents and oceans ect at a whole 1 feet seems crazy to me.
- cntainer 4y ago
  sure, the answer might seem counter-intuitive but the method to find the answer is not, as long as you know the connection between a circle's circumference and its diameter I still fail to see how this is relevant for a technical interview, assuming that we're trying to hire a software engineer. Fun, but not relevant.
  - humbleMouse 4y ago
- kelnos 4y ago
  Hah, I just did the math on this myself, found the answer to be 0.955 feet, and assumed I had done something wrong, or was off by a factor (or two or three) of ten. That is unexpected!
- mlazos 4y ago
  It helps me to think about it in opposite terms. You're increasing the radius by ~1ft (radius around the whole earth), and 2pi is the linear relationship with circumference, so you'll get six ft. Thinking about it this way kind of ignores the fact the circle is huge. I'm not too visual of a person though.

edflsafoiewq 4y ago

Is that a puzzle? Isn't it just 2πr + d = 2π(r + d/2π)?

marcosdumay 4y ago
Yes, to both. It's very counter intuitive, and very easy to solve.
drran 4y ago
When stretched, the length of the rope will be two straight lines plus part of the circle. The length of the segment can be calculated using a formula for horizon. Then we can create an equation: (s arc distance to horizon for h)*2 + delta = (d straight Distance to horizon for h)*2, or d-s-delta/2=0. d=sqrt(h(2R+h)) km/m (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon#Approximation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon#Approximation ) s=R*arccos(R/(R+h)) (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon#Arc_distance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon#Arc_distance ) sqrt(h(2R+h))-R*arccos(R/(R+h))-delta = 0 6 foots is about 2 meters. sqrt(h(2*6371000+h))-6371000*arccos(6371000/(6371000+h))-2 = 0 h=306m
- gshubert17 4y ago
  I think I found a small typo, where you have delta (instead of delta/2) in the third line. I believe it should be sqrt(h(2R+h))-R * arccos(R/(R+h))-delta/2 = 0 This can be solved for h given delta numerically, such as with a spreadsheet. Use caution here because this formula leads to a loss of significant digits from cancellation of nearly identical terms. For example, given R = 6378000 meters and trying h = 193 meters: the first (d) term is 49618.0 meters and the second (s) term is 49617.0 meters. The difference is 1.0 meter, which is the half delta we wanted. But there's been a loss of 4 significant digits (because the first 4 digits in each value are the same: 4961). The smaller the arc distance, the smaller the angle, the worse the relative error becomes. It's possible to analytically factor out sqrt(2hR) from both the d and s terms. In the first case, d = sqrt(2Rh+h^2) = sqrt(2Rh) * (1+h/4R) using Taylor series for (1+h^2/2Rh)^0.5 In the second case, I can derive one formula, but the coefficients aren't the same as my numerical best fit, which is s = sqrt(2Rh) * (1-5h/12R) Combining the two series versions for d and s, gives us this for delta, delta = 4h/3 * sqrt(2h/R) Finally, solving for h given delta, take the cube root of h^3: h^3 = (9R/32) * delta^2 Thus for a delta of 2 meters, I get height h = 192.88 meters.

akhmatova 4y ago

I asked some puzzle questions - add 6 feet to a rope around the world, stretch it out and how far off the ground would it be? I can only imagine being "charmed" by a question like if I was much younger in my career, eager to be seen as smart and in the company of like-minded folk. Nowadays... my focus is on solving problems... as in real problems, not made-up ones. Thankfully I haven't heard questions like this in years. But when I do, I take it as a sign that they probably don't have actual, meaty problems to work on, that is, requiring higher-level cognitive skills (and actual experience). Not to mention that this was supposed to be lunch, and here they are asking filter questions, but pretending it's just "casual conversation" when obviously it isn't. And so would probably pause for a second, and think of a way to tactfully end the interview, and thank the interviewer for their time.

JoeAltmaier 4y ago
Yeah it's easy to act all butt-hurt and be too good to even try. But how outrageous is it to imagine that folks who can solve such problems might be able to solve other problems?
- sys_64738 4y ago
  A lot of people will find your questions obnoxious and irrelevant. Ask questions about the candidate's experience in past problems. Asking abstract questions to satisfy your own ego is a narcissistic trait.
- anon2020dot00 4y ago
  That's not the point or context; No one likes "creative" interview questions is what people are saying like this is just a variation of brain teasers from 1990's Microsoft interviews.
- anon2020dot00 4y ago
  Also, it's not about being too good to even try but about being old enough to no longer put-up with corporate non-sense; too much bullshit in a job to put up with as it is. Once you get to a certain age, you learn to prioritize real stuff rather than appearances.

drewcoo 4y ago

The rope question is more of a Fermi question[1]. Not that they aren't commonly called [2] puzzlers, but I think the distinction is useful. Fermis are about estimating, and that's an actual skill - innumeracy[3] is real. What I would call puzzle problems usually involve some trick to getting the answer. If you can't figure out the trick, you're stumped. If you know the trick, you barely have to think to crank out the answer. Optimally solving the example in the article is one of those. They weren't widely banned because they were too novel and charming. They were banned because "time to aha!" in any given instance doesn't tell you much about how someone solves problems. Also, because the bulk of the work at most jobs doesn't really resemble seeking "aha moments," these questions tend to select for people who thrive most on doing something other than the job at hand. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem [2] https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-hardest-interview-puzzle-question-ever/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-hardest-interview-puzzle-q... [3] https://innumeracy.net/category/estimation/ https://innumeracy.net/category/estimation/

zamadatix 4y ago
To me it definitely seems to be in the puzzler category based on those descriptions. The trick is realizing it's "just" asking you to solve the well known formula for radius to circumference, 2*pi*r=c, for c=6 would give r≈1 while you can ignore the rest of the information worded to trick you into thinking it's a complicated problem which would require a fancy solution. Of course if you're not dealing with geometry every day of your adult life it's more likely it leads to seeing what your general thought process is, such as "I'll fall back to Fermi Estimation to get a ballpark going".

freedomben 4y ago

Was this a situation in which you were asking the candidate while everybody else either already knew the answer and was listening to the candidate think? Or was it more like everybody was discussing (and explicitly or implicitly through discussion) admitting that they don't necessarily know the answer (while assumedly is an engineer in good standing on the team), and the group is working together to solve it? Because both situations seem equally plausible based on what you wrote, and if it's the first one then I agree with your detractors below that it's messed up. If it's the second situation then I would have loved it and been excited to join your team. It's very possible that the ambiguity of the situation is why there's such variance in reactions.

JoeAltmaier 4y ago
It was new to the group, if I recall.