Eric Schmidt struggled to answer a Google interview question | Hacker News Reader

Eric Schmidt struggled to answer a Google interview question

qz.com

What's really funny here is not only did Eric know the answer he managed to turn it into a joke.

Not everybody knows that Eric rewrite lex as an intern at Bell Labs, or that he set up Berkeley's first network; he's actually a brilliant computer scientist who also happened to be CEO of Novell and Google. He also understands the world economy better than almost anybody I've met.

Also nobody at Google asks this question.

He didn't set up Berkeley's first network. Berkeley was an ARPANET original.

http://bnrg.cs.berkeley.edu/~randy/Courses/CS39C.S97/Interne...

Schmidt wrote something called BerkNet which was buggy as hell.

you're confusing a LAN with WAN. I'm talking about a LAN. Also, I believe he did hardware as well as software, and frankly, anybody building LAN hardware and software was buggy as hell. Do you have some primary citations? I'm always trying to increase my knowledge of the specific details of Berkeley's physical infrastructure from mid 70's to late 80's.

From the question itself: "Your crew gets to vote on how the gold is divided up."

If you're a pirate captain and you've allowed this to happen on a ship you supposedly command, you deserve your fate.

Its actually quite a good question I think, because it makes you think about the maths of the situation.

It's a simplification of a traditional math puzzle question, so it's likely that some of your interviewees have seen it before. If you actually want to ask that specific version of the problem, those that remember at least parts of the solution have quite an advantage, if not it "only" gives them a good starting point on what to ask next to get clear details on the scenario.

Or you don't actually want to extend the scenario and a math answer (because which pirate ship is going to have a crew that thinks perfectly logical?) and confuse this subset terribly ;) Which might be the point of the exercise, but I'm not a good way of going about it.

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