All the best advice we could find on how to get a job

The interviewer said this works, asked me the time complexity (trivially O(N), where N is the number of integers in the range on that axis), and seemed happy.

Then he asked if I knew a way to do it using the GCD. I said I did not know off the top of my head, and then he concluded the interview and left no time for me to ask questions.

I think your characterization that I "didn't engage" is not right. The interviewer was also clearly not looking for someone who needed paper and pencil to work out this property, but instead specifically for someone who "just knew" it as an immediate trivia fact.

FWIW, I don't agree this is a good question. It's so-so, and it's fine if the goal is to work through it, but that was not at all the case.

I should also add that I consider myself reasonably good at dumb-shit tricky interview questions. I've done well in stereotypical finance interviews asking riddles, card shuffling tricks, colored balls in urns, drunk man sitting in the wrong airplane seat, etc., as well as more formal probability questions. This simply just came down to me not making an instantaneous connection between the number of integer lattice steps between the end points and the GCD of the ranges. I don't think it's the same as freezing, it's just that that knowledge would never have been accessed in the particular interview setting. It's just not how I think about that problem, and never would have been.

I'm certain you could devise endless algorithm trivia just the same. Print a binary tree in some weird order, rotate a 3D data array, etc. The one and only way I'd ever solve anything at all like that is slowly and by drawing lots of pictures, making some candidate code, putting it into an interactive programming environment with small toy examples, and iterating.

And in all my professional experiences, including a high-intensity quant finance job, that has been more than good enough for any job-related problem, and has also been what everyone else did. Only in interviews have I ever encountered anything like this.

In my experience, it is extremely hard to find jobs that provide a combination of paying well, allowing you a personal life, and having reasonable enough hours to avoid excessive fatigue or burnout. I've interviewed with places top to bottom and had four post-graduate jobs, all of which failed in at least two of those categories while having appeared like they would succeed in all of them when I did interviews. All of my friends and colleagues report similar anecdotes, as do many, many commenters here. The anecdotes describing jobs in which you feel you are well paid, have a feasible work/life balance, and freedom to pursue a personal life, are unequivocally in the minority. That's not "my perspective" ... that's just collecting data in the wild.

And though I think I've had it bad, my experiences have been like a dream vacation or something compared to what my mother has lived through in her job as a court reporter in a small town courthouse. Rampant sexism, ageism, uncompensated overtime which is not allowed for her position, bosses (judges) who demean her, yell at her, do illegal things like carry out their private landlord affairs in their judges chambers during work hours and force her to handle the paperwork for it.

Or my brother, a factory worker in the area whose work stories almost cause me to have an aneurysm out of frustration. More uncompensated overtime, overtly insulting and demeaning bosses, sales staff who make jokes about all the catered meetings they get and how they will leave the day-old food out on the factory floor because the floor workers are so desperate for a free meal that they'll eat anything. He earns just barely over the poverty line, has no vacation, commutes around 40 miles each way plus traffic, and every single other job in the region that he could possibly get is no better. All so he can just barely service college loan debt that has been utterly useless for getting employment.

The problem of finding employment that can sustain human cognitive health is massive and hearing you utterly dismiss it like this makes me feel like you reside in an incredible bubble where you've been shielded from what it's really like, and that while I appreciate your advice, it is just not applicable.

I don't actually consider this to be interesting or controversial. It's been talked about and thought about significantly since at least the 80s when Peopleware was written, and even much further back. Christopher Alexander also talks about the detrimental effects of poor office design in The Timeless Way of Building.

You can Google for dozens of studies about communicable diseases in open plan offices, decreased morale, cognitive health problems related to lack of privacy, fatigue caused by listening to music for too many hours, effects of curtailing workplace conversations and speaking superficially to avoid overstimulation from constant contact and interaction, etc. etc.

I'll put some links at the bottom (you can easily find summaries of Peopleware and it's easy to find the Stack Overflow real estate blog posts). But before I do, I just want to point out that the whole issue is well modeled by what Michael O. Church called "artificial scarcity" -- that executives and corporate management are fully aware of what they are doing and that spending money of gaudy and over-the-top open-plan offices with climbing walls, gourmet cafes, and hideous open-plan sweatshops workspaces, they are perpetuating a hedonic treadmill atmosphere. Getting that coveted private space becomes the carrot they can dangle, basically starting you out by making you work in poor conditions and making you feel like you must sublimate away your human needs to signal loyalty, and if you do that long enough, you might be rewarded with a physical environment that supports basic human needs like privacy and quiet. Many firms just do cargo cult copying of trendy start-ups, and so they do this by accident. But you really do have to put your radar out and be extremely careful not to work for the firms that do it intentionally -- places where, as described in Moral Mazes, there is real, intentional effort placed on social engineering employees and pitting their intrinsic human needs against what the employer demands of them.

I once worked for a company that had offices across the U.S. Their Columbus, Ohio, office mostly housed executives, regional sales, and a large portion of the company's senior HR staff. When a new CTO took over, he was able to rally others in the company to a mandate that "engineers like open-plan spaces" and that they needed to radically alter their current office spaces, moving into artsy neighborhoods of metro areas, loft spaces, creating a cross-country theme of exposed brick and ductwork with fancy kitchens, glass walls, etc. Totally cliche. Douglas Coupland couldn't have scripted it better.

When I did my exit interview with that company, I talked with an HR rep from Columbus about how the distraction and noise of the open-plan layout in Boston was just killing me. As an introvert, it made me feel exhausted and like eyes were constantly on me no matter what (even if people overtly insisted they weren't). And it was just impossible to work. She told me that the exact same thing happened to the Columbus office, and that there was not even an engineering presence there. Most people there had 10+ years of tenure with the company and had always worked with private offices, and in fact really needed them because all of them handled private HR calls and employee personal matters all day every day, things that can't be done in an open-plan area. Now they were constantly crowding each other out of booking the few private conference rooms and making everything exceptionally hard.

Amazingly, the company spent over $12 million on just that Columbus office re-design!! They actually spent money to tear down productivity-enhancing privacy features and replace them with superficially trendy open-plan designs that were overwhelmingly obviously counter-productive, all under a mandate about engineering which did not even take place in that office location!

When people try to tell me it's about saving money, I just laugh. Maybe for some bootstrapped start-up accepting zero outside funding. But for any company with VC backing or any established, revenue-generated business, it's a million percent bullshit.

A few links

[0] < http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272494413... >

[1] < http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00140139.2013.87... >

Quoting from the first paper:

> "Our results categorically contradict the industry-accepted wisdom that open-plan layout enhances communication between colleagues and improves occupants' overall work environmental satisfaction considering previous researchers' finding that satisfaction with workspace environment is closely related to perceived productivity, job satisfaction and organisational outcomes, the open-plan proponents' argument that open-plan improves morale and productivity appears to have no basis in the research literature."

You do have to be extremely careful about confirmation bias, of course. You can Google a zillion opinion pieces arguing voiciferously for or against open-plan offices. But the real productivity research does not lend any support to them.