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Admin
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Your making quite a generalization there. Not all companies are after workers who have no soul. Most will settle for consistantly hiring competent but not earth shattering workers.
And not every company can afford to take on poor hires. Try running a business yourself, and you'll see the costs that even one hiring mistake can bring.
Its a tool. It is potentially an effective tool. Your problem with it seems to be that it allows them to hire workers consistantly. You feel, that its an attempt to fit workers into easily replacable molds.
But besides a negative bias, you don't have much proof that such a reliable measure is bad for either the companies or the workers. Instead, having the ability for the market to accurately measure competency can only improve the standing for those with more of it.
If you had a stupid question along the lines of "If you could be any animal, what would you be?" which you found was an accurate predicter of how much you would enjoy working somewhere, would you have the same hesitation about asking it in an interview? If you wouldn't ask it, why not?
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I've thought of another "riddle" to ask when giving job interviews. It goes something like: "Have you ever posted a comment on Worse Than Failure?"
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Speechless...!
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Man, gotta say, props for being big enough to learn from being wrong, and for remaining cool despite some people being rude.
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Isn't that precisely what's at the heart of debugging? Your program crashes, your user is staring at you, and at the moment, you don't know what's going on.
You can get all self-righteous and angry or you can say, "Hmmm, give me a moment to figure out what's going on here." Guess which really makes us look stupid.
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My integrity? I just don't have the bitter, wounded Weltanschauung you seem to have. Nothing the interviewer says or does can affect my integrity or my human dignity. I am there to propose a business deal, not to struggle with my personal drama.
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A few of my colleagues and I were moving from one company to another. Fortunately, I was able to talk to some of the people who had been interviewed and caught wind of some of the asinine questions they asked.
The one that sticks out to me is "How many barbers are there in the US?" The intent was to get us to try and define an equation based on the number of Americans, the frequency with which they get their hair cut, and come up with a rough number.
I checked the US Department of Labor Statistics and got the exact answer, and when they asked me the question, I just cited that report. When explained the point of the exercise, I said that in any circumstance, developing included, if I have access to real data, I'd always use that instead of what would undoubtedly be a completely inaccurate estimation of my own. I got the job.
Admin
You don't need input from a user or customer to find yourself in a situation like that. Suppose you're approached by some co-worker who asks "why does this piece of code keep crashing?" Do you:
A) Look at that piece of code until you find the problem, or B) Make sure the problem is with that piece of code (ie. validate the question before trying to answer it)
The world of software development is very far from the ideal environment where you can just write your code within a limited scope according to a perfect specification. It's a complex if not chaotic-dynamic environment, full of (among other nasty things) false questions. The first priority of any interviewer should be to confirm that the candidate has what it takes to function well under those conditions. The $29 question legitimately tries to address those concerns. There's more to programming, obviously, but if you can't even see how the question may be relevant, you fail in a very serious way.
I'd ask the question (or something similar) if only to quickly discard those candidates who are offended by it.
Admin
<sigh> A person who sees two hats of the same color should guess that his is the opposite color. A person who sees one hat of each color should pass. This gives survival odds of 75%. That's the best that can be achieved.
Admin
How do you know that there is no better strategy? Show off some math
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The only information available to A is hat(B) and hat(C). He cannot make his decision based on anything else.
So, any strategy for a player can be expressed in terms of what he'd do in each of the four possible scenarios. And what he could do is guess red, guess blue or pass. That gives 12 possible strategies for each player, for a total of 12^3=1728 for the trio. There's a symmetry to the situation, making most of those redundant, but never mind.
Point is, there's a manageable number of strategies, you can enumerate them easily, and each has to be tested only 8 times. So someone with too much time on his hands could easily go about finding the best strategy. My gut tells me you'll find what's been proposed already.
Admin
Actually, I didn't notice anyone proving it's the best possible strategy. It was proven quite a few times that the odds are 75%, not that those odds are the best you could hope for.
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He didn't ask for proof that you can get 75%. He asked for proof that you can't get more.
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That should of course have read 3^4=81 combinations and 81^3=531441 for the group. Still, no problem to search through those.
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Brainteasers and riddles can tell an interviewer several things about you.
Can you listen, process, and form specs around verbally communicated information?
Can you ask questions intelligently to clarify the problem?
Are you clever?
How do you react to a question when you don't know the answer?
How do you go about breaking down a problem and solving it, especially when there isn't one single correct answer? Can you cope with the fact that you might not select the answer that they feel is optimal?
Admin
What are the odds that 4 coin tosses will be HHHH? One in 16, of course. What are the odds that they will be HHHT? Also 1 in 16.
Do we agree so far?
Now, you are at the point where you have already tossed the coin 3 times and arrived at HHH. According to you, since "HHHH" is one in 16, the odds are one in 16 that the next will be H. However, you have also agreed that HHHT is one in 16, so using your logic, the odds that the next toss is T is 1 in 16 as well. That means that the odds are only 2 in 16 that there will be any result after the next toss. Obviously, the odds of all possible outcomes must be 100%. Therefore, there must be some problem in one of the previous steps.
Look at it another way. The odds of HHHH and HHHT are both the same. Prior to any tosses, they're both 1 in 16. However, after getting HHH, there are only two possible outcomes -- HHHH or HHHT. Since both are of equal probability, the odds are 50-50 for either H or T.
You have to realize that, even though the odds of getting HHH on the first three tosses is 1 in 8, the fact that your scenario says "you have gotten HHH on the first three tosses" means that the 1 in 8 has already been met, leaving a 1 in 2 chance to mean the 1 in 16 odds you started with.
Along a similar line...
What are the odds that a lottery which draws a random 3-digit number will pick the same number two days in a row?
It's amazing how many times people react when this happens in real life with amazement about the "million to one odds" that were beat.
The real answer, of course, is one in a thousand.
How can that be when there are a million 3-digit-number pairs? Simple. What are the odds that a given 3-digit number will be picked? One in a thousand, of course. What are the odds that tomorrow's number is the same as today's? No different than any other particular number -- one in a thousand.
Yes, beforehand, what are the odds that any two particular numbers will be picked? One in a million. However, we have not predetermined the first number, only that the second number be the same. Even if you were to predetermine the pair of numbers, your scenario presupposes that the first number was already picked, meaning that the "one in a thousand odds" of that number being picked has already come to fruition.
Boy, this post has gotten a lot longer than I originally envisioned. I hope people are still reading it...
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Congratulations in arriving at the "reality is sometimes counterintuitive, or at least not always instinctive" side of the universe.
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the fun part about that is that there is a faster solution. ;)
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Nope, I'm still with Gwenhyfaer on this one.
Or the interviewer could ask a question with direct relevance to the job. Why clarify a problem that has no relevance to the job? In any case, what sort of question would "clarify" the "problems" presented in this thread? Well, the modish way to look at this is that there are several types of IQ. There is "conventional" intelligence, there is "body" intelligence, there is "artistic" intelligence ... there is also the sort of intelligence that causes you to walk away from an interview when they ask a tom-fool question like this.Put another way, is the interviewer clever?
I put one hand on my waist, stick the other in the air, and repeat in my finest Lady Bracknell voice, "I'm a teapot! I'm a teapot!" What do you do? This is rather missing the point. I can break the problem down (perhaps), I can solve it (perhaps), I don't particularly care whether there is no correct answer, or one, or a set bounded by an infinity greater than aleph-null. I feel it's more appropriate to walk away.Incidentally, anyone referring to Gwenhyfaer as "dude" or "guy" might profitably brush up their knowledge of Arthurian legend. They might also consider reading "How do you move Mount Fuji," which comes to the reasoned conclusion that questions like these are a silly way to conduct an interview. I suppose they're all too busy bitching about how some ingrates don't "get" the awesome beauty of using logic puzzles when trying to determine a good fit for a job.
How do I move Mount Fuji? I read it a particularly heart-rending haiku...
Admin
The question says "they paid $27, plus the $2 kept by the bellboy, adds up to $29" rather than the $30 originally paid. Read that statement again. And again. Eventually you will see the "trick".
They paid $27. The $2 kept by the bellboy was part of that $27, not in addition to it. That leaves $25, which is what the hotel received.
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I have not yet heard any evidence that there is no correlation between performance on riddle questions (or the qualitative assessment of attempted reasoning) and employer satisfaction with a new hire.
I'd be interested in hard evidence either way. But hard to condemn something absolutely without facts. (OK, its actually really easy, but rather pointless I'd say.)
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Yeah, the j/k was for "just kidding". Just wanted to make it clear that I wasn't an idiot. At least not on this count.
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You are assuming alot about my situation. You know nothing about me other that a few words on a message board. As far as the "Be conscious of what you hold dear, and of the compromises you make for its sake", what I hold dear is my family and and I will compromise anything, including my integrity, for them. I'm glad and proud of that fact.
The reality of the situation is that the "argument" I was having ended up with me and the other person making amends of sorts and being ok with the situation. You, on the other hand, are a troll and I refuse to be trolled.
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Didn't even think of that. I'll have to be more careful in the future!
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You are correct of course. Thanks for pointing out the error and for providing the correction.
captcha: doom
Admin
That's ridiculous. Tire pressure doesn't work like that.
Admin
Well that settles it. You're exactly the type of candidate people are trying to weed out when they ask riddles and brainteasers. If you are too narrow minded to draw any correlation between real life scenarios, seemingly pointless hypothetical scenarios, and programming then you are pretty much just qualified to go sit in the corner, read a tech spec, and be a good little coder who can't think. There are definitely positions for you, but these aren't the positions they are interviewing for.
Thanks for giving me hope and confidence that I am even more qualified than I thought. Even after explaining it and dumbing things down, you still can't catch on to why these techniques are useful.
"Move a mountain? I'm not actually going to be moving mountains in this job am I!?"
"Excuse me, I was here to interview for the programmer position. What do probability, statistics, cleverness, gross estimation, and problem solving have to do with anything? Here let me show you how I can write a binary search. SEE, I ARE A GOOD PROGRAMMER!"
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I interviewed with MS back in college and at the big CS meeting about MS before the interviews were setup the presenter made mention of "why manholes are round and not any other shape". Naturally I knew the answer was so that the cover couldn't fall inside. I went up to him after the interview to tell him that and him and a few other students simply disagreed and deemed my explanation as stupid.
Incidentally I got an interview... with that same guy. I didn't get the job probably due to the fact that I researched the shape of manhole covers and brought in a stack of papers proving my explanation.
As far as the little brain teasers, mine were fairly simple.
In a single elimination soccer tournament with 64 teams, how many rounds are there? (Clearly an attempt to force you to think in base 2)
Given a scale x number of marbles that are the same shape and size, with one being heavier, how do you figure out which one is the heavier one in the least number of steps?
I think that was all of the ones they asked me. Nobody from my University got hired that time around.
Admin
It's a sort of triangle.
Start with an equilateral Triangle, then make each edge curved out by using a compass with the point on the opposite vertex. So it's like a triangle, but with curved sides, the arc of which is a segment of a circle centered on the vertex of the triangle opposite the edge. This triangle has a constant cross section (ALl lines through thecenter are the same length) therefore it cannot fall through any hole built in the same shape and slightly smaller.
Admin
If tire pressure "doesn't work like that", then can you please explain how it does work?
Now, granted that if this thread has taught us anything, it's that the intuitive answer is not necessarily the right answer, but...
Let's say that the tire pressure in the tire is 30 pounds per square inch (psi). Let's further say that the tire has 25 square inches in contact with the ground. Finally, there are four tires, all with the same pressure and contact area. That's 30psi times 100 square inches, for 3000 pounds of pressure at the tire-to-surface contact area. Is that not the weight of the car?
If the weight were more than 3000 pounds, then the pressure exerted by the air in the tires would be insuffient to support the car. If the weight were less than 3000 pounds, then the pressure exerted by the air would cause the car to rise.
Is the intuitive answer wrong?
Admin
An excellent point that zooms over the heads of people too wrapped up in their self-righteousness. You frequently hear people complaining that they didn't get the job because the interviewer was a total idiot. And it's like, well, dude, if you can't put on a good song and dance for a total idiot, what hope would you have with a real sharpie?
Admin
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That is a particularly bad interview question, except strictly as a "compatible personality / joke" type question. The "missing dollar" question from the Paleozoic is also pretty bad, and any employer thinking that only a genius could solve it is probably suspect. However... as people have pointed out, these are more signs of a bad interviewer who doens't understand the point of brainteasers. Look, these are flaws in riddles, but these flaws tend to be much worse for other types of questions, as stories of questions from people unfamiliar with technology X have proved.
If your interviewer can't seem to grasp that your solution to a riddle is correct or understand your approach to it, then yes, mark the company down. But if your interviewer seemingly has no clue about the technical questions, then that should raise far more alarm.
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For those who don't know that joke (it's a joke, not a riddle)... you look in the mirror. You see what you saw. You use the saw to cut the table in half. Two halves make a whole. You climb out of the hole.
Mildly amusing, but utterly impossible to "solve," and if the interviewer wants to ask a truly impossible question, there are plenty of better ones (for instance, ask the person how they would solve a variant on the Halting Problem, and see if they figure out what you actually asked).
Admin
Geez, it sounds like you missed a really good job opportunity because you didn't "get" a riddle. Now you're bitter and fighting the evil which is brainteasers. Fight the good fight. They aren't out to get you. They determined the riddles can tell them something about you that asking you to program some stack methods won't.
I've worked places where the tech spec was gospel. I've worked another place where it was a rough draft at best. Here are some general ideas... go talk to the customer, marketing, etc. when you get a framework done. They are different kinds of positions, but you're still a developer. Some people just aren't good enough to "wing it" and work with what they have, then fill in some pieces later.
Admin
And, given that there are an infinite number of shapes that cannot fall through the corresponding hole, why use only the circle?
Finally, what about the fact that some places use other shapes for covering such holes?