Alternate Questions

[brainwane]

Is it still in vogue for US tech companies to ask quantitative estimation/implausible-problem questions like "how many phone booths/piano tuners are there in Manhattan?" in hiring interviews, particularly for programming-related jobs? Fog Creek asked me one of those in 2005. There was even a book, How Would You Move Mount Fuji?: Microsoft's Cult of the Puzzle -- How the World's Smartest Companies Select the Most Creative Thinkers.* How many companies are still into that?**

I ask because I came up with a couple you could use, maybe for a digital humanities kind of position:

1. How many people, throughout history, have actually been named "Flee-From-Sin"? I feel like you see this as a jokey Puritan first name in books like Good Omens or the Baroque Cycle, but was it a name that some non-negligible number of people actually had?
   
2. Out of all the people currently within New York City limits, have more of them written a sonnet or a dating profile? What's the ratio?
   

* That's right, two subtitles. That's how you know you're getting a lot for your $16.00 MSRP.

** It's hard to tell these things sometimes even if you listen to lots of people discuss hiring and recruiting. "Five Worlds" and its decade-later ramifications apply to work culture, not just software development methodology. Stripe's engineering interview aims to "simulate the engineering work you'd do day-to-day" (link via Julia Evans) so I think you can expect your interviewer won't show up wearing a question-mark costume and screeching, "Riddle me this, Batman!" This software engineer, who's just been through scads of hiring interviews, doesn't mention puzzle questions. This level of detail ain't exactly on the "How to Become a Computer Programmer" page in the Occupational Outlook Handbook from the US Department of Labor -- but then again we already knew that the assessment vacuum in software engineering skills is a huge problem.

[Cross-posted to Cogito, Ergo Sumana. I'm doing this just now for new Dreamwidth followers, but usually I don't cross-post from there to here; check out sumana_feed if you want to follow that blog.]

Comments

off-topic, intro

[ewt]

Hello -- thank you for this post, which was interesting to think about, I have subscribed to the feed and will see how I get on with it.

I added you because you seemed smart, interesting and kind in your comments on a community we are both in.

Re: off-topic, intro

[brainwane]

Thank you! Glad my comments and post struck you that way. :) Best wishes and hope you enjoy!

[princessofburundi]

I definitely think that more New Yorkers have written dating profiles than sonnets. And I'm glad that I'll never have to go to a tech company interview, if that's the sort of questions that get asked! What was your answer?

[brainwane]

I also think it's likely that more of my neighbors have written dating profiles than sonnets, but I wonder what regions would have the opposite be true!

Almost none of the questions I've been asked during tech company interviews have been "sizing questions" (Lindsey Kuper pointed out that term to me after reading my post, and she's right, a sizing question is somewhat different from other sorts of puzzles and brainteasers, even though the general reason interviewers ask any of them is to hear you think aloud as you work to solve it and demonstrate your approach to this sort of question). The only interview I can remember that included a sizing question is the Fog Creek one in late 2005. I can't remember whether my interviewer asked about phone booths or something else -- stoplights? stop signs? -- but it was something where the physical geography of the city was my jumping-off point. I started reasoning about the number of street intersections in Manhattan and how often people needed that thing, and multiplying stuff out based on guesses of various kinds, thinking aloud when various numbers seemed too small or too big and refining my guesses, and so on. I'm pretty sure my interviewer didn't know the actual number. It must have been a good enough performance; I got passed along to the next interviewer, and then I was hired.

[commodorified]

I would not move Mt Fuji. Mt Fuji is perfectly fine where it is and moving it would destroy vulnerable flora and fauna.

[brainwane]

I respect your response!

[ccommack]

See, here my response was "wait ~50 years, then it will move about a meter, all at once, and this will be uncomfortable for Greater Tokyo." I think your answer is better, though.

[rachelmanija]

I was once asked to teach the interviewers how to boil water. I made use of a dry-erase board and diagrams, and they stopped me before I'd gotten past step two of five.

[brainwane]

Solid!

[damnitnicole]

I've never been given any puzzles in a tech job interview.

In my interview for the coding bootcamp I attended, I was asked, "if a small nuclear bomb was going off in an hour at the Domain (a mixed use development in North Austin with a mall, a bunch of hotels, a good amount of tech businesses, and a ton of personal condominium residences), how would you go about evacuating as many Austinites as possible to get them out of range?"

I honestly wish more places would ask questions like this of junior and entry-level developers. They're actually useful for interviewing people who may not have good whiteboarding skills yet or be able to produce working code quickly.

Instead, I once interviewed for an entry-level position at one company that was small enough that it was the CEO doing the interviewing, and where they knew that I don't have a CS degree and instead had graduated from the local bootcamp less than a year before (one of the other interviewers was a regular mentor at this bootcamp and knew the curriculum at least in passing), where they asked me about binary tree traversals and were surprised when I looked at them blankly. This entry-level position, by the way, was a client-facing support engineer thing that mostly consisted of spinning up Rails apps, adding a few reasonably documented customizations, debugging API calls, and then doing a bit of technical writing to document the apps for the clients or the bugs for the greater engineering team as needed. I was more than qualified for that job, but was totally set up to fail that interview, because they had no idea how to interview for the position.