5 ms·
I laughed at this: > The firm recently generated buzz in the talent industry > when it said it had done away with the notorious brain > teaser component
by jmillikin 13y ago
I laughed at this:
> The firm recently generated buzz in the talent industry
> when it said it had done away with the notorious brain
> teaser component of its interviews after statistics
> showed the ability to ace them had no correlation with
> success at the company.
Brain teasers have (to my knowledge) never been used in Google interviews. They're an urban legend which used to be said about Microsoft, and will no doubt be said about whatever big companies come next.
Journalists: "$COMPANY gives all its new employees wedgies!"
$COMPANY: "We do not think giving employees wedgies is useful."
Journalists: "$COMPANY generates buzz by doing away with wedgies!"
- brown9-2 13y agoI think what is always left out of these snippets in articles is what job roles they are referring to when they talk about the interviews. Sounds like these teasers have never been used in software engineer interviews but have been used for product management or others.
- lpolovets 13y agoIt's been a long time since my interview (2005), but I had a couple of brain teasers during my my interview. Not as many as I had at Microsoft, but definitely some. I specifically remember being asked the Two Eggs question (http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/july22012/ http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/july22012/).
- jmillikin 13y agoThe two eggs question seems fair to ask an engineer. It's an optimization problem, and could just as easily be rephrased in real world terms (e.g. branching in a hard-realtime microcontroller). The solution can be arrived at through math and reasoning. Typically, trick questions are things like "how many golf balls fit in a bus", "you've been shrunk and dropped in a blender" , or the infamous "why are manhole covers round". These supposedly test the candidate's creativity, but actually just test whether the candidate has read a book of riddles recently.
- sbisker 13y agoGoogle definitely asked me "how many ping pong balls fit in an airplane" straight up back in 2007. Then again I like Fermi problems. :)
- sanderjd 13y agoMan, I don't necessarily think they should be used in technical interviews, but I really don't get the aversion to these kinds of questions - stuff like this is so much fun to think about and debate! I personally think manhole covers should be human-cross-section-from-above-shaped.
- jrockway 13y agoI disagree with your categorization of "how many golf balls fit in a bus" as a trick question. That's a normal estimation problem that's highly relevant to a software engineer's daily work. (Rephrase the question as "how many users can you serve with one CPU core". Capacity planning is an entire department's worth of work.)
- philwelch 13y agoPlease tell me you guys do capacity planning with more than just vague numbers you pull out of your ass, a whiteboard, and some guy staring at you making subjective judgments of the number you come up with.
- tomkarlo 13y agoYes, but we don't expect someone to use actual numbers in response to a hypothetical question in an interview. The question is intended to see if you could figure out which numbers you'd really need to figure out the right estimate. Often, the specific result of an estimate is less interesting than the user's understanding of what drives that estimate, because it determines if they understand the levers they can pull to change the outcome in the real world.
- philwelch 13y ago
- enjo 13y agoI had a couple as well, back in '08 or so.
- cromwellian 13y agoPre-2007 I think they were used. I know people who got interviewed in the 04-07 era and got asked teaser questions.