4 ms·

A classically terrible interview question. Solving riddles in realtime is almost never a real job skill. _Maybe_ in an incident, but you’d be relying on tooling

by tyre 3mo ago

A classically terrible interview question. Solving riddles in realtime is almost never a real job skill. _Maybe_ in an incident, but you’d be relying on tooling and experience, not an intern. Same with leetcode at startups. It makes no sense. You’re almost certainly not going to do algorithms work. It’s only relevant if you’re looking for people willing to grind bullshit, which is certainly some jobs, but, again, you’re almost never doing this under arbitrary time pressure with someone watching over your shoulder judging and not helping. My advice: if you encounter this, don’t work there. If a company doesn’t value testing relevant skills for candidates, don’t expect leadership to be strong critical thinkers once you get there.

coolThingsFirst 3mo ago
Classical algorithms kind of thinking is similar to ML research.
arcfour 3mo ago
The speed with which I can remember some obscure AIX partitioning-related fact during an incident, for example, is orders of magnitude faster than the speed with which I would figure out which of 12 marbles is slightly heavier than the others.
- xelxebar 3mo ago
  > I can remember some obscure AIX partitioning-related fact Now you have my attention. I'd love to read about some of these trivia.
  - prewett 3mo ago
    Not the GP, but I have one non-partioning AIX trivia I discovered by accident. Turns out that malloc(0) returns NULL on AIX, but non-null on Linux, SunOS, and Irix. (I was surprised multiple ways on that one!)
    - shakna 3mo ago
      That one has bitten me more than once
    - doubled112 3mo ago
      Sometimes I think "it's a UNIX system, I know this" but I've been caught by subtle differences before too. killall is very different between Linux and Solaris, for example. I would rather have not found this out on a client machine for the first time.
      - pjmlp 2mo ago
        Another AIX different that caughts folks off guard, it uses COFF primarly, and its dynamic library models is closer to Windows, OS/2, Symbian, than classical UNIX with ELF. Including the existence of import libraries, linker export files, and lazy dynamic loading of symbols.
    - mjevans 3mo ago
      Now that you know, can you conceptualize reasons why each pattern might be a correct preference? Among those reasons, which would you prefer as a system? ^^^ THAT is how an Interview Question should work around this factoid.
  - arcfour 2mo ago
    Gah, I can't remember what the specific trivia was now (ironically), just that some disk wasn't mounting and something in the fstab stuck out to me that I then looked up in the manpages and confirmed was wrong. (I wasn't even the AIX guy, I was just the sysadmin of an app that ran on AIX.)
jameshart 3mo ago
This was an internship interview over a decade ago. Nothing wrong with a brain teaser interview question under those circumstances. What would you rather ask an internship candidate? They don’t have work experience or real world skills.
- Waterluvian 3mo ago
  I’d be unsurprised if an interviewer who thinks that trivia isn’t a goofy waste of time also believes that young people don’t have real world skills. But a good interviewer would probably spend time getting to know the candidate’s character. Something I’ve learned from years of mentoring teens and raising kids is that there are qualities you cannot teach, and they’re enormously more valuable than any technical skills. I’m confident I can teach just about anyone any of the skills Microsoft employees find themselves milling away at. But I can’t teach that fire a 10th grader has where they go home and spend their entire weekend figuring out how to make their idea work in Java, even though they barely understand programming, and then swarm you at the door next week to proudly show it. That’s the kind of quality you seek to find in an interview. All the other stuff can be taught to anyone.
  - jameshart 2mo ago
    Doesn’t “enthusiasm to try and tackle somewhat abstract puzzling questions” act as a reasonable proxy for some of those attributes?
    - ThrowawayR2 2mo ago
      It does; the old school hackers, the people who built the computer and software industry, loved logic puzzles / brainteasers and elegant, high performance solutions to coding challenges. Most of the pushback is from dull corporate programmers (no shame in that, so am I) who want to claim that they are hackers for the clout but aren't. Ironic that a site named Hacker News is almost entirely devoid of true hackers.
      - Waterluvian 2mo ago

by tyre 3mo ago

coolThingsFirst 3mo ago

Classical algorithms kind of thinking is similar to ML research.

arcfour 3mo ago

The speed with which I can remember some obscure AIX partitioning-related fact during an incident, for example, is orders of magnitude faster than the speed with which I would figure out which of 12 marbles is slightly heavier than the others.

xelxebar 3mo ago
> I can remember some obscure AIX partitioning-related fact Now you have my attention. I'd love to read about some of these trivia.
- prewett 3mo ago
  Not the GP, but I have one non-partioning AIX trivia I discovered by accident. Turns out that malloc(0) returns NULL on AIX, but non-null on Linux, SunOS, and Irix. (I was surprised multiple ways on that one!)
  - shakna 3mo ago
    That one has bitten me more than once
  - doubled112 3mo ago
    Sometimes I think "it's a UNIX system, I know this" but I've been caught by subtle differences before too. killall is very different between Linux and Solaris, for example. I would rather have not found this out on a client machine for the first time.
    - pjmlp 2mo ago
      Another AIX different that caughts folks off guard, it uses COFF primarly, and its dynamic library models is closer to Windows, OS/2, Symbian, than classical UNIX with ELF. Including the existence of import libraries, linker export files, and lazy dynamic loading of symbols.
  - mjevans 3mo ago
    Now that you know, can you conceptualize reasons why each pattern might be a correct preference? Among those reasons, which would you prefer as a system? ^^^ THAT is how an Interview Question should work around this factoid.
- arcfour 2mo ago
  Gah, I can't remember what the specific trivia was now (ironically), just that some disk wasn't mounting and something in the fstab stuck out to me that I then looked up in the manpages and confirmed was wrong. (I wasn't even the AIX guy, I was just the sysadmin of an app that ran on AIX.)

jameshart 3mo ago

This was an internship interview over a decade ago. Nothing wrong with a brain teaser interview question under those circumstances. What would you rather ask an internship candidate? They don’t have work experience or real world skills.

Waterluvian 3mo ago
I’d be unsurprised if an interviewer who thinks that trivia isn’t a goofy waste of time also believes that young people don’t have real world skills. But a good interviewer would probably spend time getting to know the candidate’s character. Something I’ve learned from years of mentoring teens and raising kids is that there are qualities you cannot teach, and they’re enormously more valuable than any technical skills. I’m confident I can teach just about anyone any of the skills Microsoft employees find themselves milling away at. But I can’t teach that fire a 10th grader has where they go home and spend their entire weekend figuring out how to make their idea work in Java, even though they barely understand programming, and then swarm you at the door next week to proudly show it. That’s the kind of quality you seek to find in an interview. All the other stuff can be taught to anyone.
- jameshart 2mo ago
  Doesn’t “enthusiasm to try and tackle somewhat abstract puzzling questions” act as a reasonable proxy for some of those attributes?
  - ThrowawayR2 2mo ago
    It does; the old school hackers, the people who built the computer and software industry, loved logic puzzles / brainteasers and elegant, high performance solutions to coding challenges. Most of the pushback is from dull corporate programmers (no shame in that, so am I) who want to claim that they are hackers for the clout but aren't. Ironic that a site named Hacker News is almost entirely devoid of true hackers.
    - Waterluvian 2mo ago