3 ms·

I don't have a single clue how many fashion items are on sale at a given time, not because I'm incapable of estimating it (even though I've never heard of Fermi

I don't have a single clue how many fashion items are on sale at a given time, not because I'm incapable of estimating it (even though I've never heard of Fermi problems before), but simply because I have no field knowledge about online store business. Give me a day to think/research if you really want to make sure I'm the right guy for the job, because in the real life, I have the luxury of not being forced to come up with an answer in 3 minutes in a job interview (that would very well change the course of my life). With all respect, I think all your questions are irrelevant and are definitely not a good metrics for hiring/filtering out candidates. For all means ask them about clustered/non-clustered (to use MSSQL's terminology) indices or stuff like that, but don't put them in a position like this one (they don't know the answer, but given a few days they can give you a pretty accurate estimation).

pooriaazimi 14y ago
Just another rant: I have a very big problem with such estimations. It's a bad analogy, I know, but I want to use it just for the heck of it: Such of estimations (how many would view a newspapers webpage on a given time - completely glossing over its popularity: is it a good local newspaper, or one that is just going out of business? for all we know, a very good local newspaper might get 1/5th of page views that BBC gets (it has a vocal community that tend to comment on stories)) just remind me of those stupid VCs that helped create the Color iOS app. What was it? 100M dollars just for the domain (color.com) or something like that. I'm sure they've used the same kind of estimations: Facebook gets xxx hits per second. We'll be a premium social network and everyone would want to be on our network just like they did on Facebook when it was a harvard-only club, etc. so we could be a 5 billion dollar company in 9 months so a 100M dollar domain name is justifiable.
yummyfajitas 14y ago
I don't expect you to know the answer. I expect you to tell me how you would research it. An answer I like: "I'd search on amazon and a few other top fashion sites to get per-vendor count, as well as some of the lower end." At that point I'd tell them that ShopBop and Net-a-porter are two typical bigger sites, and they each have about 20-50k items. I'd also point out there is a longer tail of much smaller sites. If your answer is 3M or 20M to my 10M, I don't much care. This isn't a question with a definite answer, it's a question about whether you can think on your feet and get started on poorly defined problems. With me, it's a good sign if I'm asking you the poorly defined questions with unclear answers. If I reach this point, I've already decided you probably know how to code, and I want to determine if you can figure out what to code.
- pooriaazimi 14y ago
  > If I reach this point, I've already decided you probably know how to code, and I want to determine if you can figure out what to code. Well, if that's the case, then it could be a good question. However, you didn't state or emphasize that in your blog post and from what I've heard, many companies ask such unrelated questions first to filter out completely hopeless candidates and then get to the real interview (technical questions), so I assumes this is what you meant, and I don't owe you an apology ;-)

pooriaazimi 14y ago

Just another rant: I have a very big problem with such estimations. It's a bad analogy, I know, but I want to use it just for the heck of it: Such of estimations (how many would view a newspapers webpage on a given time - completely glossing over its popularity: is it a good local newspaper, or one that is just going out of business? for all we know, a very good local newspaper might get 1/5th of page views that BBC gets (it has a vocal community that tend to comment on stories)) just remind me of those stupid VCs that helped create the Color iOS app. What was it? 100M dollars just for the domain (color.com) or something like that. I'm sure they've used the same kind of estimations: Facebook gets xxx hits per second. We'll be a premium social network and everyone would want to be on our network just like they did on Facebook when it was a harvard-only club, etc. so we could be a 5 billion dollar company in 9 months so a 100M dollar domain name is justifiable.

yummyfajitas 14y ago

I don't expect you to know the answer. I expect you to tell me how you would research it. An answer I like: "I'd search on amazon and a few other top fashion sites to get per-vendor count, as well as some of the lower end." At that point I'd tell them that ShopBop and Net-a-porter are two typical bigger sites, and they each have about 20-50k items. I'd also point out there is a longer tail of much smaller sites. If your answer is 3M or 20M to my 10M, I don't much care. This isn't a question with a definite answer, it's a question about whether you can think on your feet and get started on poorly defined problems. With me, it's a good sign if I'm asking you the poorly defined questions with unclear answers. If I reach this point, I've already decided you probably know how to code, and I want to determine if you can figure out what to code.

pooriaazimi 14y ago
> If I reach this point, I've already decided you probably know how to code, and I want to determine if you can figure out what to code. Well, if that's the case, then it could be a good question. However, you didn't state or emphasize that in your blog post and from what I've heard, many companies ask such unrelated questions first to filter out completely hopeless candidates and then get to the real interview (technical questions), so I assumes this is what you meant, and I don't owe you an apology ;-)