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posted by martyb on Friday November 02 2018, @12:36AM   Printer-friendly
from the pi(x)=substr("3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286208",1,x) dept.

Recently there was an article discussing how poorly today's Silicon Valley approaches the question of testing their information technology candidates' intelligence.

If you were a hiring manager, how would YOU test YOUR candidate's intelligence?

I was mulling this over recently, when, for unrelated reasons, I found myself researching algorithms to be used in calculating 'pi' (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Pi_algorithms).

As it so happens, there are currently 15 known algorithms for pi. At least one of the algorithms can be used to generate arbitrary digits of pi (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailey–Borwein–Plouffe_formula), and that might be relevant. (I'm not a mathematician, or a programmer, as such - I'm a sysadmin - but even those who are will likely be surprised to learn that such a thing is possible. For more information, please see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spigot_algorithm.)

And so I would ask my candidate to pretend that he was responsible for designing a library of math functions, and to offer me an opinion on which algorithm should be implemented, in our hypothetical library of routines, to calculate 'pi'.

Some prior experience in programming is required - you have to have written your own functions. No programming languages are required. No coding. Not even pseudo-code! No right answers. No wrong answers. Just pure thought.

You don't need to be a programmer to take this test and succeed. You don't need to do anything on a whiteboard. You just need to be somewhat mathematically inclined ... somewhat literate ... and, a nerd.

A real nerd. Not one of these fake Silicon Valley nerds. You need to have books on your shelves. Not DVDs.

Points for asking what the library will be used for. The value 22/7 might work great for roughing out the roof of a gazebo. Not so good for calculating orbits!

Points for implementing multiple algorithms and letting the user decide for themselves.

No time limit, no pressure ... but I would want to hear back from my candidates, within a day or two, via email.

Compare my test to the puerile tests involving balls, and strings, and calculating 2^64 in your head, in real time, and ask yourself which of these methods REALLY exposes intelligence?

Now, you're in charge.

What would you do?


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by legont on Friday November 02 2018, @02:08AM (3 children)

    by legont (4179) on Friday November 02 2018, @02:08AM (#756717)

    Intelligence is not the number one priority for an HR person - compliance is - and they do test for it.

    --
    "Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by GreatOutdoors on Friday November 02 2018, @02:41AM (2 children)

    by GreatOutdoors (6408) on Friday November 02 2018, @02:41AM (#756729)

    I agree that compliance is an important factor in hiring, but if you are hiring a technical person and they make a 100% provable argument that the answers which are presented are wrong, then compliance goes out the window. Getting things right as often as possible IS the primary focus of a technical person.

    --
    Yes, I did make a logical argument there. You should post a logical response.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @02:47AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @02:47AM (#756732)

      It's an important factor for HR drones (not persons, since they're more like robots than people) since they don't know what they're doing. Malfunctioning robots do not care about technical expertise.

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @06:10PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @06:10PM (#756974)

      I had the same sort of test -- and also a similar number of questions with wrong answers.

      Wrong answers verifiably wrong by anyone that chose to investigate to do so, even if initially no one issuing the test ever noticed or perhaps believed they were not the audience to really determine that.

      I wrote down my answers in the columns (it was all on paper--in a conference room set aside for me to take this and a personality and go over other materials). I provided some mild reference and also noted that I have seen some of the questions before, because these examples are availble on the internet and I fully expect that not everyone reading my answers knows why the answers are right or wrong.

      In the end, that wasn't got me the job, but it got their attention. They admitted to me later no one read any of the test. They'd just run it through a machine and take the scores. By writing on it, it got spit out for manual review. Then they investigated what I wrote, since if I was correct, it would mean that the pool of applicants so far has been judged on results that may be false.

      They determined I was right--but my ability to confidently point out issues under what was presumably a stressful context with no means to really ask for help or assistance (nor did I just wait for someone to show up to explain the issue) was one of the attributes they wanted that their personality test couldn't capture.

      The technical test was just to make sure I wasn't blowing smoke--but it revealed that anyone that memorized the answers from having seen them on the internet as part of some practice tests they ripped it out of--would have answered correctly and not said anything, and that some wrong answers may have been indicative the person was correct...

      The HR person in my case was a guy who admitted to me he had no idea what I had written but it looked good enough to hand to my future boss.

      I guess my saving grace there was that the HR person who went to grade it was not mindless--and that I think that reflects the culture since they hired me for not being mindless as well. (For the record, it was a good job; I only left due to a re-org that would have required my eventual moving or leaving anyway.) Otherwise, I too would have probably had those questions all marked wrong by a machine or mindless grader looking at an answer key for skill test relating to a job they knew nothing about.

      In contrast, it may have been a blessing in disguise you did not get that job. It sounds like a lot of drones worked there.