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> Or did they actually expect someone to work it out on the spot ? My hope is that they'd hope a candidate would be able to identify the connection to run leng
by mattgreenrocks 14y ago
> Or did they actually expect someone to work it out on the spot ?
My hope is that they'd hope a candidate would be able to identify the connection to run length encoding within the pattern.
Why do these puzzles emerge at big companies? It looks like a sort of institutional power trip emerges: "if you want to work with us, you need to be real good, and these are the sorts of problems we want you to think we deal with every day!" Except in most cases, they aren't, and there are plenty of mediocre folks already employed there. But the institution NEEDS to believe it only hires the best, and one way to perpetuate that belief is to haze new applicants more and more. All it really produces is candidates who are very lucky, or very compatible with the existing culture.
Hiring is hard, and puzzles are a fail-fast mechanism that is terrible, but produces some sort of results, so it gets used.
- johnmw 14y agoI think Cletus gave a good answer to why these questions are used in interviews in this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5264510 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5264510 In short, if you can't write a simple FizzBuzz program, then you are probably not a good developer. Questions like these are good for being a quick way to separate programmers from those who cannot program at all. But I agree - as someone who sucks at puzzles under pressure, questions like 'what's next after 111221?' seems like a totally retarded question to me.
- mattgreenrocks 14y agoFizzBuzz is a legitimate litmus test for a candidate. It probably becomes a bit gauche once you get a bit of experience, however. In that case, I'd expect some sort of domain-specific technical question with some hand-holding to get the candidate talking. The idea is to coax the candidate into the problem.