The good news is it just gets harder the older you get. You know you’re already on strike two when you walk in the door. You know just muddling through isn’t good enough for someone who should clearly be senior. You better knock this thing out of the park and do it faster than everyone else.
GO!
yea on some level i realize that. i may have written about it before, but i flamed out of what appeared to be a practically guaranteed job offer in an interview with the CEO that I was assured would be introductory and non-technical and he asked me right out the gate “how would you go about figuring out how many ping pong balls could fit in a 747?” to which I burst out in laughter because I thought he was kidding. he got immediately angry and said he was serious, to which I replied “I wouldn’t.” then, he was like “pretend this interview depends on it” and then I was annoyed so I walked through it.
ended up not getting the job, obviously, but knowing what I know now I was very obviously spared.
And yet if you hire someone you pretty much know in the first week or two (with rare exceptions) if they’re worth a crap or not. Seems like there has to be some way to work that into a hiring process.
On my last round I’m sitting there in these interviews thinking, “if you idiots would just hire me for a week you’d realize what you have.”
Laughing at the CEO in a job interview. Bold move Cotton.
lol that isn’t even a lateral thinking problem, it just reduces to “how would you determine the internal volume of a 747” to which the answer is like “look at the specs or talk to Boeing”.
I wonder if the puzzle question fell out of favour in part because the only reasonable answer to any of them now is “I would google that shit”.
I think the problem is that given that programming changes so fast, the major skill you’re looking for is ability to learn quickly, adapt, grasp new concepts, fit into a team and that those things are impossible to assess in an interview when people can grind 500 hours of leetcode to prepare.
The old-school puzzle problem interviews at least recognised the problem of the looks-good-on-paper applicant who is bad at the above, even if their solution was ineffective.
funny enough I did throw these out there to which he said “that isnt helpful for showing me how you think” to which all I could say was something like “this is how I think” and it looked like he just wanted me to know how to calculate the volume of something, which I gave him. lol. I was probably doomed the moment I laughed.
god i need to remember that company’s name so badly right now and i cant. i want to see where their product is at now, the description of their problem sounded insanely stupid to me even at that time, and my skills have grown considerably since.
frequent theme in more recent interviews which I’ve completely DGAF’d my way through has been: engineering teams/principals love me and the moment I talk to a decision maker manager type person it goes down in flames. I need to work on that.
Just estimate like 70 rows, 6 wide, figure out a seat width and distance between seats longitudinally, add in a couple of aisles. The numbers don’t matter at all.
So now we have diameter and length of a tube. Volume of a cylinder is length*pi*r2 (I think). Figure out if he wants ping pong balls in the cargo area or not. And add a fudge factor for the little upstairs part that makes a bump on the plane.
Convert to cubic inches. Say you think a ping pong ball takes up 1 cubic inch. Done.
yea of course which is what I gave him almost exactly that, he even tried to throw little gotchas now and then which I dismantled, but the crux of the issue I sensed was I did not show proper fealty to super important mister c level executive which I am probably at this point completely incapable of doing anymore. I’m very seriously considering pursuing a startup idea I’ve had lately - I have the connections, I think, and I think I know enough about it and how to make a proper investor deck that I could generate at least enough seed funding to get out of this stupid corporate environment for a while, I completely hate it.
It’s such a spectacularly bad example though because the internal dimensions of a 747 are publicly available information and anyone who is like “fuck it I’ll just make wild-ass guesses and multiply numbers together, YOLO” is an idiot.
Like you’re saying though, the actual way the merit of an answer to the question is judged is by how well it communicates to the interviewer “this Big Boy Interviewing Technique that you read about is indeed very clever, thank you for the question, you are very smart”.
I was part of a technical interview for another team last week where the interview lead completely winged it. He didn’t do any prep with anyone else beforehand and in the interview it’s obvious he’s completely winging the interview.
It gets to his portion of the interview and he goes on this spiel about how the position is solving problems where you might not immediately know the answer and then he asks him one of those lateral thinking question but he’s trying to remember it so he phrases it in a way that’s incomprehensible.
The interviewee looks confused and asks him if he could repeat his question.
The guy repeats it but mangles it in a different way so now everyone’s confused. After a bit of this the guy gives up and says let’s move on and then says
“say you run a query and you get a very basic error message(I can’t remember the error message now just that it was so basic that it was obvious he thought of the first thing that came to mind), what would you do to find out what’s wrong with your query?”
The poor interviewee looks even more annoyed and confused because there’s an obvious answer but it’s so basic it can’t be a part of an interview so he matter of factly but hesitantly says
“I’d google it”
The lead, seeing that his question hasn’t opened the interviewee’s mind to us, squints at him and says
“But what would you type in Google?”
The interviewee who’s now both even more annoyed and confused says matter of factly
"I would google, “what is very basic error?”
I had to turn off my camera and mic because I was laughing so hard.
Sufficed to say the guy didn’t accept the offer.
oh my god I swear I’ve been in less extreme versions of this a few times lately. I can’t hide my annoyance and usually just tank the rest of it on purpose.
can anyone with better knowledge of the telecomm industry explain this behavior to me? my networking knowledge is a little meh
I live in a crummy neighborhood that only has spectrum as a provider. I have been topped at 200 mb/s with what I suspect is either a failing router or network problems in my neighborhood. My neighbors are also all having issues, so I suspect the network is having trouble. We have frequent 2-6 hour outages. Just reeks of infrastructure issues but I don’t know what could cause that.
Anyway, I get an email I’ve “become eligible” (first of all, what?) to get a 400 mb/s upgrade for an additional +$20/month. Sick. I was gonna do it but then realized they were gonna ship equipment next week and I might not be home - so, I decided to call them to delay shipment.
Well after a while I finally get to the right person for that and she wants to confirm the 400 mb upgrade and I was like wait, is there a faster one than that? And she immediately got weird like “this one is very good” and I was like “I understand - but is there a better one?” And she said well, yes, technically, but I have to check something first and frequently disappears every now and again, probably talking to a super.
She comes back and is still kind of hemming and hawing like “well, I think I can get you on that, but this is going to double your bill” and I was like “ok? can I do it then?” and then disappeared again and I’m on hold still.
why the fuck is a telecomm company downselling me right now? are the infra issues since the shift to work from home really placing that much strain on their networks? or is this just batshit incompetence?
they’re gonna sell me a 1 gb connection, it sounds like it’s either a beta thing or they are trying not to sell these.
In more lol leetcode news this perfectly sums up the “problem”
This solution took me 30 seconds:
Which would get me “rejected” or asked for a different solution by all interviewers. This one took me ~10 minutes.
and its fucking slower.
adding
if (hash[el] > Math.floor(nums.length / 2)) {
break;
}
in the update condition apparently makes it 1 ms faster than solution #1 
I prefer the second one - much more readable - you can reconstruct the question from the code.
You could also more easily incorporate additional conditions without having to completely refactor - ‘a majority element may not exist’ for example.
Are you supposed to consider such factors when answering these?
Probably not.
If I was interviewing and posed this I’d probably add the sort of code I was expecting … maybe even ask for both … 1. a well structured & readable function for a library and 2. the fastest by whatever means. That would show me quite a bit.
I remember years ago there was some competition for the smallest webpage with a fully functioning shopping cart and the winner came in at ~630 bytes. Wouldn’t want to maintain it though.
I work with a developer who would code something like this exactly to spec, and then have to COMPLETELY REDESIGN THE SYSTEM when it turns out that say, under certain conditions, we may want to send a user to a different page after logging in.
“Well nobody said that up front!” Dude, it’s a fucking website. How many websites have one and only one post-login landing page for all conditions, including deep-linking that requires login?
So the solution? Put the code that renders the header as logged in state in two places now instead of one, with the need to add it to any other potential landing page.
Actually I think he’s just not a very good developer. I eventually redesigned it so the header state wasn’t triggered by the freaking landing page. It wasn’t that hard. But to ask him beforehand it was going to be like moving the great pyramid.
He’s got one site where the header still shows the non-logged in state for like a half second after login. It drives me nuts. I feel like Big Bird with Snuffleupagus in that no one else on our team seems to notice it. But that site is 100% his baby. So I don’t bring it up.
I would never pay for an upgrade with the same provider if they can’t reliably deliver a lower speed. If your issues are between the exchange and your home(s) then a better modem/plan is unlikely to improve things. So be prepared to start complaining the moment your connection drops or doesn’t get the promised speeds.
Seems I always have at least 1 dev on my team where I feel like this too. Some guy that can’t be trusted with anything remotely complicated. The type where for about half their work it takes longer for me to explain to them how they fucked up than it would have for me to just do the job right myself in the first place.
It always feels like nobody else sees it. Though my team did just move from one group to another and it send like my new manager and the principal engineer we’re working closely with might be seeing it.