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from the prove-Fermat's-last-theorem-using-only-a-protractor-and-straight-edge dept.
Saw this discussion on Reddit, and thought it might be of interest here, too (as such things perennially are):
I've been a successful software engineer for 10 years at various startups and small businesses. I do a lot of contracting on the side too. I've recently had cause to start looking for work again.
What the hell is up with these interview questions? They don't really have much to do with the ins and outs of clean code, architecture or collaboration. I had hoped they'd stop with this bullshit already. There's a lot of companies that promise 'No whiteboard interviews' like Triplebyte, only for that to be a complete and total lie.
They're more like annoying riddles I'd find in an Sierra adventure game or D&D. I'm just not very good at these types of 'riddle questions'. I know they always wind up having to do with binary trees, graph algorithms or something like that, but the dress-up and time constraints are unrealistically stressful.
I honestly wasn't very good at these questions when I'd graduated and I'm still not good at them now. How screwed am I? Are companies willing to hire based on projects and seeing live code?
I'm always careful to speak with my employers and convince them to write a 'portfolio' clause in my contract that allows me to keep code for the purpose of seeking further employment.
I really don't want to spend 3 months of my life learning how to solve riddles just to get another job.
I also suck at these kinds of questions, despite having designed and written a lot of software and systems. What say you, Soylentils, are these kinds of interview questions necessary to find good software engineers?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bob_super on Tuesday March 07 2017, @10:46PM (11 children)
When I interview people, if I asked a technical question that is not basic-must-know, you don't need to give me a final answer.
I'm interested in where you start, how you think you'd get closer, and how you behave when you don't know.
If you could come up with the answer right there, that wouldn't be a negative, for sure.
But giving me an answer you know doesn't tell me how you handle problems that don't have obvious solutions. And that's what i want to pay you for.
But don't ask me, I only deal with engineers, not code monkeys...
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday March 07 2017, @11:25PM
I had some interviews conditioned by passing a test on codility.com - here's their programmers [codility.com] page if you want to have a taste (tl;dr - online practicals, code/compile/run/test in a browser).
The interface is not conducive to the "where you start, how you think you'd get closer, and how you behave when you don't know." type of interaction. Because debugging is a PITA when you use a Web browser as an IDE, it's more likely the candidate will try solving the problem in her/his own environ and copy/paste the solution (if one is found).
A good programmer may be valuable in some circumstances, but yes, "programmer" and "software engineer" are two different things.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Snotnose on Wednesday March 08 2017, @12:22AM (9 children)
This. When I ask you how many golf balls fit into an olympic sized swimming pool I don't care what the answer is. Hell, I don't know the answer.
I want to see how you approach the problem. How big is the pool? Helifino. Assume 50m x 25m. How big is a golf ball? 2" diameter? How do sphere's pack? Hellifino, assume it's 2/3 of a cube. How do you convert inches to meters? That one I know, 2.5 cm to an inch. But you aren't expected to know that either.
Now just crank the numbers and get a result. Hell, I'm gonna stop you halfway through all that anyway, you get steps 1-3 right there's no point in continuing.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 08 2017, @01:46AM (1 child)
I'd ask on StackOverflow.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 08 2017, @07:10AM
Someone already did. [stackoverflow.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 08 2017, @02:08AM
There's no point in all that. Set the requirement that you're using the type of golf balls that float and your answer is: zero golf balls will fit into a filled swimming pool no matter how large the pool.
(Score: 2) by mojo chan on Wednesday March 08 2017, @11:36AM (4 children)
This is actually an unsolved problem I think. If I recall, there is no mathematical way to calculate the optimal arrangement of spheres packed into a given space at the moment. You can either brute force it or give an estimate, but knowing exactly and then filling the volume in the best possible way is apparently a very tough nut to crack.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
(Score: 5, Funny) by VLM on Wednesday March 08 2017, @01:55PM (1 child)
That's the difference between an engineer and a scientist, in that its extremely easy to solve if you only feed a feasibility study within an order of magnitude. I bet you can get a lot better than order of magnitude accuracy if you assume a cubical ball.
Also its very "engineer" to spec asymmetric error bars. I know darn well that assuming cubical balls will pack looser than actual spheres so I'm not giving tolerances of plus or minus some number, its totally going to be an error bar of plus some qty minus zero as a tolerance.
Its also totally engineer to fire right back at the questioner. "you just trying to store crap to recycle? run the balls thru a shredder and compactor and you'll fit considerable more in the pool, only finance knows if the shredder and compactor are economically worth the extra storage, or maybe you trying to estimate raw material storage space to manufacture a semi full of balls?" "you trying to make a ghetto fluidized bed reactor? you know you can't pack the balls so tight they can't move, because thats not a fluidized bed that's at best a percolation study"
If you piss off an engineer you'll get stupid answers like "You never told me I couldn't use a really big compactor to squeeze all the air out so the answer is just the ratio of volumes" or "You never said I couldn't use a sealed thermal depolymerization tank of infinite PSI rating in which case the number of balls inserted is theoretically as infinite as the pressure tank PSI rating, and once the black hole forms I can really start shoveling them in"
Also its very "engineer" to ask how much they're willing to pay to get the answer. I know one obvious way but its going to be a large expense report. Or the hours I'd have to put in to simulate that on a computer would be expensive but if the space shuttle can't launch until I get the exact integer answer, well, pay up sucka that answer ain't gonna be cheap.
Oh and another very "engineer" response is to start talking about QA/QC I guarantee those balls, if used, are no longer round nor constant diameter and if you want an integer answer its going to be expensive and no amount of handwaving by the mathematicians about sphere packing matter if the "balls" are only vaguely spherical. In fact it would be a fascinating solid state surface physics experiment to introduce just a couple dopant impurity not perfectly round balls and then implement entire transistorized circuits via the non-round dislocations. Kinda like building a CPU out of redstone in minecraft, totally useless while being totally cool.
(Score: 2) by art guerrilla on Saturday March 11 2017, @02:27PM
um, you never cut open a golf ball when a kid ? ? ?
all that wound rubber can expand to a lot more volume than the intact ball...
just sayin'...
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday March 08 2017, @03:09PM (1 child)
I think I read about a decade ago that mathematicians had finally proven the optimal way to stack spheres.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by butthurt on Wednesday March 08 2017, @11:04PM
Yes: conjectured in 1611, proven in 1998.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler's_conjecture [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday March 09 2017, @04:52PM
The correct answer was: "it is forbidden to throw golf balls in the pool".
Account abandoned.