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- I'd estimate our FizzBuzz success rate is somewhere around 20%. I initially opposed asking about this because I thought any self-respecting developer would get this right easily. I am now no longer that naive. - We ask some stupid "ropes question" ("you have two ropes that burn end to end in 60 minutes; measure 45 minutes" - one of those stupid logic questions that accomplishes nothing besides letting the interviewer feel superior because they read the answer on the internet). This has a 0% success rate, though some people get close. We don't really count it against anyone regardless of how well or poorly someone does, except: - When one woman gave up on the ropes question and we gave her the answer, she proceeded to argue with us for a half an hour. My manager later came by and showed us the thank you letter she sent afterwards, which had a paragraph starting with "I still think your answer to the ropes question is wrong..." - One very awkward candidate sent us thank you cards with handwritten notes. One developer's had a full paragraph, another's just said "This card conveys how I feel about you". Mine just said, "Thanks MisterZimbu". - One candidate included his company's website in his resume Being a web development shop, we pulled it up. It was more or less an "under construction" page that looked like it belonged on Geocities, with a javascript countdown timer. His company was an actual service on the web, so it wasn't supposed to be some brochureware site. Viewing source, we found all his javascript files had ".php" extensions and css files had ".mysql" extensions. We asked why he would do something like that during the interview, he said "to see if it would work since I don't know too much about websites". Since then, his site launched, the site looks just as dated (and uses frames!), and the .php and .mysql files are still there years later. - A co-op/intern who was completely incapable of answering any questions whatsoever- technical or nontechnical- including "so why do you like programming"? We deal with a terrible outsourcing firm (and one I hope we're done with), some highlights of our interviews from them are: - Our first interview was a skype video call with 4 candidates, one at a time. The first one did okay. The second one faltered on pretty much every question. Until the first candidate started audibly feeding him answers off-screen. I have no idea why we continued doing business with them after we saw that. - When we got to the point where we were pretty much firing any candidate that we did hire from them after 2 weeks after finding they were grossly incompetent, our contact at the firm gave us two final candidates, A and B. He said that A was hands-down their best all-star developer, and that they didn't think we would like B, but give him a shot anyway. - Candidate A was clearly Googling the answers to even simple questions while on the phone. Like, he would stutter for a good two or three minutes and repeat random words out of the question, followed by a perfectly eloquent answer clearly pulled straight from the internet: quote:What's the difference between a left, right, and inner join? quote:Well you see... umm... tables... left... and when, umm, you put them together... join... uh... a left join is will give you everything out of the first table that matches the join condition and NULLs from the latter table,whereas the right join will give you everything from the second table and an inner join will give you only the rows from both tables that match the join condition. - Candidate B passed with flying colors, we hired him, and he was awesome. The email we got from our contact said, "I knew you would like him and that he would work out, he's one of our best guys". He got a very stern call from us after that calling him out on his bullshit. MisterZimbu fucked around with this message at 20:32 on Mar 15, 2016 |
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Mar 15, 2016 20:14
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piratepilates posted:Don't you just burn the first rope for 30 minutes, then wait until half of the other rope is burned for another 15 minutes? I mistyped that; it's 60 minutes for a rope, not 30. The full question is: You are given two ropes and a lighter. This is the only equipment you can use. You are told that each of the two ropes has the following property: if you light one end of the rope, it will take exactly one hour to burn all the way to the other end. But it doesn't have to burn at a uniform rate. In other words, half the rope may burn in the first five minutes, and then the other half would take 55 minutes. The rate at which the two ropes burn is not necessarily the same, so the second rope will also take an hour to burn from one end to the other, but may do it at some varying rate, which is not necessarily the same as the one for the first rope. Now you are asked to measure a period of 45 minutes. How will you do it? Answer: Take rope 1 and burn one end, and take rope 2 and burn both ends. When rope 2 is done burning, burn the other end of rope 1. 45 minutes have passed when rope 1 is done burning. We had one guy say- completely seriously- that he'd use a stopwatch. It took a couple minutes to explain to him why that wasn't an acceptable answer. We screen our candidates better now.
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Mar 15, 2016 20:29
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If I needed fib(n) in a project and someone gave me the closed form version I'd tell them to redo it the right way. Premature optimization etc etc
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Jun 10, 2016 20:59
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