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An excerpt from the best rant about whiteboard interviews posted on the internet. Ever.
"Well, maybe your maximum subsequence problem is a truly shitty interview problem. You are putting your interview candidate in a situation where their employment hinges on a trivia question. — Kadane's algorithm! They know it, or they don't. If they do, then congratulations, you just met an engineer that recently studied Kadane's algorithm.
Which any other reasonably competent programmer could do by reading Wikipedia.
And if they don't, well, that just proves how smart the interviewer is. At which point the interviewer will be sure to tell you how many people couldn't answer his trivially simple interview question.
Find a spanning tree across a graph where the edges have minimal weight. Maybe one programmer in ten thousand — and I’m being generous — has ever implemented this algorithm in production code. There are only a few highly specific vertical fields in the industry that have a use for it. Despite the fact that next to no one uses it, the question must be asked during job interviews, and you must write production-quality code without looking it up, because surely you know Kruskal’s algorithm; it’s trivial.
Question: why are manhole covers round? Answer: they’re not just round, if you live in London; they're triangular and rectangular and a bunch of other shapes. Why is your interview question broken? Why did you just crib an interview question without researching whether its internal assumption was correct? Do you think that “round manhole covers are easier to roll" is a good answer? Have you ever tried to roll an iron coin that weighs up to 300 pounds? Did you survive? Do you think that “manhole covers are circular so that they don’t fall into manholes” is a good answer? Do you know what a curve of constant width is? Do you know what a Reuleaux triangle is? Have you ever even been to London?
If the purpose of interviewing was to play stump the candidate, I’d just ask you questions from my area of specialization. “What are the windowing conditions which, during the lapping operation on a modified discrete cosine transform, guarantee that the resynthesis achieves perfect reconstruction?” The answer of course is the Princen-Bradley condition! Everyone knows that’s when your windowing function satisfies the conditions h(k)2+h(k+N)2=1 (the lapping regions of the window, squared, should sum to one) and h(k)=h(2N−1−k) (the window should be symmetric). That’s fundamental computer science. So obvious, even a child should know the answer to that one. It’s trivial. You embarrass your entire extended family with your galactic stupidity, which is so vast that its value can only be stored in a double, because a float has insufficient range:"
Author: John Byrd
Src: https://quora.com/What-is-the-harde...3 -
Been programming one language or another since the 90s. So I have been exposed to a lot of things and worked on a lot of different systems. However I have never heard of Fizz Buzz before. I heard it was something they use to test people's programming skills during an interview. I figured I better look it up in case I get asked this during an interview. Of course I found a nice explanation on wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I was shocked. This is being used to test programmers for competency? This is so trivial a non programmer could write the pseudocode to solve this problem. Is the bar really this low?
I remember I didn't want to pay for the C programming class in college. So I bought a book on C++ and read it cover to cover and wrote a bit of code. I then tested out of the C course (didn't know C was much different than C++ then, I started with Pascal). I didn't do that great on the written test. However for the coding test I easily passed that. I formatted the text in nice rows and columns using the modulus operator. The instructor said: "I have never seen anybody make it look this nice." Then I was shocked because that is "just how you do it".
It just seems to me that if fizz buzz is hard, then this may not be the right field for you. Am I egotistical in that opinion? None of this programming stuff has ever been particularly difficult for me.2 -
Microsoft bought GitHub.
2 Ways it will go:
0. They will welcome it
They will make it bigger
And then kill it
1. They will welcome it
They will keep it running
It will be as good as before2
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