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They difficulty ratings are extremely subjective. Some of the yellows and reds enrichment/contests. Some of the reds are straightforward but tedious trial and
by hgsgm 3y ago
They difficulty ratings are extremely subjective. Some of the yellows and reds enrichment/contests. Some of the reds are straightforward but tedious trial and error. Then there is a yellow that requires physical and mathematical intuition about bicycle wheels.
Is this really how to get a quant job? A clever high schooler could solve these with hints. I can solve most, but I'm terrible at advanced calculus and statistics.
- alasdair_ 3y ago>Then there is a yellow that requires physical and mathematical intuition about bicycle wheels. I got this one "wrong" because I assumed it was possible for the bicycle to skid and so swing the back wheel out of alignment.
- gcanyon 3y agoThere is a type of bicycle that is sometimes used as an intermediate step to riding a unicycle -- it's basically a unicycle for the back wheel of the bike, with a pivoting bar attached to it with a standard front wheel at the end of it. Or you could describe it as a regular bicycle with a direct-drive, pivoting, rear wheel. All of which to say that it is a bicycle, and its wheels can make any track you like as long as the front and back tracks are a fixed distance apart.
- labster 3y agoI got the snowman one “wrong” because the problem didn’t say you couldn’t throw away excess snow. Maybe the lesson is that it’s hard to write word problems.
- nuclearnice1 3y agoGenerally, if you find a simplification that makes the problem trivial you’re interpreting it wrong and should reconsider.
- labster 3y agoIt’s funny because that’s the opposite of what you’d want in a new hire: you want the engineer to pick a trivial solution rather than over-designing everything, so they can solve more problems for your company.
- nuclearnice1 3y agoHa. Right. I guess it’s just one more way in which the interview is an anti pattern for the behavior we want in a coworker. Can I Google this? Sorry no. ChapGPT? Pretend it’s not available. Use a library? No no no. Ask for help? Thanks for coming in.
- the__alchemist 3y agoI gave up on that one after finding no non-trivial explanation that made sense to me. I guess in hindsight it makes sense the building material is just given in sphere radius, but that didn't click at the time. I couldn't make sense of the 100-m race one either. The only thing I could come up with is maybe the clock freezes/race ends when the first person finishes, and the scores are then done by distance to the finish line.