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Comment by haburka | Hacker News Reader

The interviewer is incentivizing this behavior by playing gotcha with computer science knowledge. The only reason I know about radix sort is from college and I have never used it. If they are hiring a college professor, then I understand but otherwise this is ineffectual and biased towards young college grads.

If your interview is breaking when someone googles information, then your interview is flawed.

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I had a similar thought reading this. The interviewee gave what the interviewer admitted were normal and valid answers, though ‘not what I was looking for’ (uh ok—job seekers aren’t mind readers) but effectively badgered the individual into “cheating” after they repeated multiple times not knowing the fuller answer.

To me, were I the interviewer at that point we’d have already moved on to the next problem set or next question in the interview.

I got just the opposite impression- the interviewer gave a problem that is different from the normal “sorting problem,” particularly so that the answer wouldn’t be any of the algorithms one learned in school. He was presumably hoping that the interviewee would get that, figure that the added constraints allowed a more efficient solution, and try to think through a novel algorithm. If the guy had used a bit of creativity, it wouldn’t matter if he didn’t know radix sort from a hole in the ground.

I couldn’t promise that I’d make that leap either, sitting sweaty-palmed in front of a hiring manager, but I see what the interviewer was thinking.

I hate this. I haven't had an interview that did this in a while. Once I got my confidence up enough to do so, I started ending interviews with this kind of esoteric puzzle play.

Let's have an actual conversation about what I think about a relevant real-world process or problem. Then we're both engaged in learning something. This should not be a setting for exacting a candidate to recite a study of algorithms or discrete structures--go back to campus if we're going to be that pedantic.

Well, it’s the Chinese room situation, right? If your interview is remote you can’t enforce quality in any real way. The person you’re talking to could just be rule following.

The interviewer did a good job. He wanted to see how they think and see them try to work through the problem. They didn't even try at all.

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