4 ms·
Come on, this is like the easiest problem you could have gotten during Google's, Microsoft's or Facebook's phone screening interview. If you can't figure it out
by bitL 12y ago
Come on, this is like the easiest problem you could have gotten during Google's, Microsoft's or Facebook's phone screening interview. If you can't figure it out in 10 minutes, then you should forget about working there.
I miss the old times when these puzzlers were asked during interviews. My theory is that you can recognize an excellent place of work with a great future when they actually ask you these sorts of questions as it attracts certain kind of excellent and creative people. I could see the "interestingness" of companies being shifted as they abandoned these questions, first Microsoft (picked up by Google), then Google (picked up by Facebook), like they were passing some kind of "greatness" token (MS->G->FB).
I was told at Google that I solved two problems like this during an interview that nobody solved before me in 15 minutes (one led to a super complicated math formula and dynamic programming, the other I solved optimally but differently to their solution, and provided an optimality proof based on discrete calculus). It was the greatest and most challenging interview in my life. I miss it, all interviews nowadays are just boring as hell :-/
- DarkTree 12y agocool.
- eddd 12y agoWhat did you exactly prove during this interview? That you know to write readable code? That you are know to code in team? Did you write any test case during this inteview? Any docs?
- bitL 12y agoI proved that my solution had optimal time complexity using discrete calculus, for a highly non-trivial problem that requires to come up with unexpected ideas under huge stress. They saw my own open-space real-time software 3D rendering engine with texturing and shading (C++/Asm) at SourceForge already, they saw my own SQL server (many students at my first university were ripping it off for their own class projects in the next years so it was a mistake to make it open) as well as other projects I did prior to that interview so they were familiar with my coding style and quality. Also, before that while working at SUN I did some work on a test suite with 10,000s of tests, many of them for SUN's own compliance with one of their standards, making sure it was executing on a distributed cluster every day for every branch they had in order to ship the best quality to customers. Many of these tests were for obscure cluster failure cases using custom bleeding-edge test frameworks. So the answer is no, I didn't write any test at Google interview, it wasn't required. How can you prove you can code in a team during an one-on-one interview? At best you can give hints that you are willing to discuss stuff and change your progress on input from the interviewer and explore if there is any sort of chemistry between you two, which is about all you can do. I really hate this kind of nitpicking, averaging everyone to a "normal" level, trying to find something wrong in someone because she or he goes against (IMO) lazy typical stereotype. Enjoy your mediocrity! Are there still hackers on HN?
- twistedpair 12y agoI hope your answers are meant to be a mockery of such interviewers and their class pets.