3 ms·

It's a good interview question for the same reason any question is: it allows you to see how the interviewee thinks and approaches a problem (if they haven't se

by pushrax 12y ago

It's a good interview question for the same reason any question is: it allows you to see how the interviewee thinks and approaches a problem (if they haven't seen it before). If they have seen it before, you can see how well they can externalize their knowledge.

kasey_junk 12y ago
Not all questions are good interview questions. For any question you ask, you need to know A) why are you asking it? B) what does it bias your hiring pipeline towards/against? C) what is a good answer to the question? D) how would a perspective employee come to that answer? and most importantly E) given limited resources available to hiring, are there better questions I could be asking. This is a question that is trivial to answer if you remember basic dynamic programming examples. It is nearly impossible to come up with the "right" answer without it. I'm trying very hard to understand what sort of hiring situation would be interested to know if someone understood basic dynamic programming (without knowing more advanced topics) or could suss it out on their own.
- pushrax 12y ago
  For sure, it's definitely not the ideal interview problem. My intended argument was just that it's not an unfair interview problem. As an aside, I don't think it's that unlikely to come up with a dynamic programming solution without prior knowledge of the general problem class. It's a pretty intuitive idea.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - kasey_junk 12y ago
    Really? I'd think the intuitive solution is the greedy solution to the problem, which is incorrect. Now we have to ask ourselves a few things A) which of us is correct about which is more intuitive and B) does being intuitively good at the knapsack problem imply anything about being intuitive at dynamic programming and C) does being intuitively good at dynamic programming or the knapsack problem have any correlation between good hires.
tptacek 12y ago
People say this about every kind of bad interview question. It's actually hard to come up with any interview question you can't say it about. So, you'll need a better reason.

by pushrax 12y ago

kasey_junk 12y ago

Not all questions are good interview questions. For any question you ask, you need to know A) why are you asking it? B) what does it bias your hiring pipeline towards/against? C) what is a good answer to the question? D) how would a perspective employee come to that answer? and most importantly E) given limited resources available to hiring, are there better questions I could be asking. This is a question that is trivial to answer if you remember basic dynamic programming examples. It is nearly impossible to come up with the "right" answer without it. I'm trying very hard to understand what sort of hiring situation would be interested to know if someone understood basic dynamic programming (without knowing more advanced topics) or could suss it out on their own.

pushrax 12y ago
For sure, it's definitely not the ideal interview problem. My intended argument was just that it's not an unfair interview problem. As an aside, I don't think it's that unlikely to come up with a dynamic programming solution without prior knowledge of the general problem class. It's a pretty intuitive idea.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- kasey_junk 12y ago
  Really? I'd think the intuitive solution is the greedy solution to the problem, which is incorrect. Now we have to ask ourselves a few things A) which of us is correct about which is more intuitive and B) does being intuitively good at the knapsack problem imply anything about being intuitive at dynamic programming and C) does being intuitively good at dynamic programming or the knapsack problem have any correlation between good hires.

tptacek 12y ago

People say this about every kind of bad interview question. It's actually hard to come up with any interview question you can't say it about. So, you'll need a better reason.