Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

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What does the above problem have to do with the pigeon hole principle? I’m all for CS foundations, I learned the pigeon hole principle as an undergrad, I never used it (in work or during my phd) and have since forgotten it, but I’m glad I did that. But the above problem....just feels like a Googly interview question, whether it is just diff or not.

What really gets me riled up is that these companies don’t care about my specialty or actual experience at all during the interview even if this is why they want to hire me at all in the first place. Nope, it’s all brain teaser coding questions that have nothing to do with what they would actually want me to do if hired. I get why they do it (one size fit all interview process), but I don’t think it is at all better.

There are now whole undergrad courses at universities like Stanford devoted to gaming the interview process at google and Facebook and other big techs. I don't think this is desirable or sustainable.

This seems related to Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

If the hiring process for some tech companies has become so dysfunctional that they actually consider brain teaser coding questions to be meaningful then we should expect that competitors with more results oriented hiring processes will eventually beat them in the market.

Perhaps the tenacity and work ethic needed to study a couple of months for an interview selects for people who would do the job well anyways? Maybe that is what it means to be Googly as a culture fit?

Anyways, practicing solving clever small programming problems at least isn’t boring (though I’m beginning to burn out on it), it reminds me of prepping for a high school or ACM programming contest. As long as it eliminates enough false positives, they’ll keep up with it.

It isn’t just if you can solve these problems, but can you also write straight lines of text on a white board? Also, do it while talking and and standing on one foot at the same time.

I love to hate on these interview practices, but I have to admit, the brain teaser problems have actually improved my programming, I think.

> As long as it eliminates enough false positives, they’ll keep up with it.

So Google is relying on a brute force approach to hiring?

Ya, but everyone is. Too many fakers in this industry.

And too many people that can't be bothered to think of easy ways of filtering them without something stupid like fizzbuzz

Who's the faker again?

If you have a better way, propose a startup, you’ll make bank.

> work ethic

I sometimes wish people explain what they mean by that, because I'm confused by the phrase. I assume it's some Americanism that has a broad range of meanings. Cramming trivia for interviews doesn't sound like the "work ethics" I see when I google the term, but then again, I recently had a German student explain to me that they understand hard (but dumb) work as what this phrase means.

I agree it can be hard to put your finger exactly on what it is.

My best sense of it is that it is something approximating your ability to follow through on some task that a) was never, or has seized to be interesting or otherwise stimulating or b) is sufficiently difficult that many people would allow themselves to quit. Often related to the idea that there is some form of delayed gratification to be had.

Yes I would take this as behaving ethically at work eg not sexually harassing co-workers, not stealing from the company by abusing the expenses system, hiring hookers on the company amex which happened at one company I worked for in the UK - and so on.

To use an example from the military "officers eat last".

That would be my default interpretation too, but I've seen this phrase used plenty of times to mean "working hard", or "enduring work drudgery" (without any relation to ethical issues you mentioned), so I'm confused about the correct meaning of this term, and every time I see it, I have to infer from context what it is that a commenter is talking about.

The American meanings of work ethic relate to working hard or diligently. They don’t have anything to do with ethics. That would be under “work values” oddly enough.

Thanks for the clarification.

> I recently had a German student explain to me that they understand hard (but dumb) work as what this phrase means.

Not quite.

It's a phrase derived from "Protestant Work Ethic":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic

Stripped of the religious connotations the phrase as commonly used (eg. "having a good work ethic") essentially means "feeling an obligation to consistently work hard for your employer".

Maybe I should have put scare quotes around it (work ethic)? It means whatever the hiring company wants it to mean, it isn’t a very well defined concept.

>work ethic

Translation: have enough free time so spend months preparing for an interview after work hours or have no actual work ethic and do it at your current job.

Basically, fuck people with families, commitments, or already mentally demanding jobs.

fangs a vs g approach

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