On the second interview they asked the exact same questions and he got the job offer.
He's now got his name credited to several AAA games and moved in with an indie studio to publish his personal project under them.
See? Interview puzzles work!
Interview question was the first result... 7 years later.
Instead they should have asked: design a manhole such that these constraints are satisfied.
Except that question in particular is a fairly silly one. A satirical rendition exists that illustrates why, and happens to have been discussed long ago on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=569897) but apparently the original article has moved (https://sellsbrothers.com/12395).
https://web.archive.org/web/20070810204407/http://www.sellsb...
It was 1982. A small company from the Pacific Northwest called Microsoft sent some engineers down to recruit at Caltech. I was a senior that year, and interviewed with them. They asked me their probability problem, I got it wrong, and did not receive an offer.
I've occasionally wondered how different things would have been had I got it right, and so maybe got an offer, and accepted [1]. I think pretty much every engineer that started at Microsoft around that time and stuck with it (which I almost certainly would have done) ended up quite well off.
I've also wondered if any of the engineers that interviewed me are people whose names I would now recognize.
[1] It was not at all certain I would have accepted. I was more interested in bigger machines than the microprocessors MS was focused on, and also had a strong preference for staying in the Los Angeles area.
We just hope to be certain about the present moment.
GP is in fact, doing the employer a favour by bypassing this silly charade and letting them have access to his real talents.
In this case, if the interviewee had been radically honest and interviewer had not had a backup question, the interview might have gone badly, even though the interviewee apparently was a good employ.
In fact, radical/extreme honesty is often seen as a sign of childhood problems or mild autism by mental health practitioners, as people normally learn to white lie at young age.
That seems like a wild assumption to make.
Interviewers will usually tell you straight up to inform them if you already know the question.
Seven puzzles later of me saying, “yes, I’ve heard that one” and giving an short description indicating that I understood the solution, the interviewer became visibly upset/annoyed.
And so when they asked the 8th question I suddenly ‘didn’t know this one.’ The interviewer was delighted. Of course I did know it already but pretended to work my way through it.
Got the offer, didn’t take it because that interviewer would’ve been my boss’ boss.
Unsurprisingly, did not get an offer.
This reminds me of another time on HN someone told a story about how they'd cheated in a hi-tech way in an exam and a dozen comments supported them, not one person suggesting it might be wrong...until me, then I got virulently attacked for doing so. At least there their comment got [dead]ed.
I just wanted to say - you're not alone, that also seems very dodgy to me. Moments like this HN is very disappointing.
But I also thought "quite unethical" was a bit silly (though I didn't downvote anyone). Perhaps people didn't like the tone. Also there could be a language issue with the degree implied by the word "quite". In stark black and white terms, it is unethical, yes, as a lie of omission. If there are shades of gray, it is not on the extreme to get lucky and have heard a question before.
I have also noticed there is a contingent of commenters who seem to view stories in terms of the victimized workers versus the evil corporations, and punish people who appear to take the wrong side. Probably a similar bunch shows up when the argument is about students versus teachers. Not necessarily a universal lack of ethics.
But a good interviewer should also follow up on questions that can lead to trivia-type answers.
For example, if some interviewer ask you "What is the sum of integers from 1 to 100", a valid answer from you could be
"Well we learned in school that Gauss figured out this problem at early age, and came up with the answer 5050 - so the answer is 5050"
In which case the interviewer has the options of
A) Conclude the question, and move onto something else
B) Try to get you to expand on this theory - and how Gauss came up with that
If he then goes with B, and you start explaining that (1 + 100) + (2 + 99) + ... + (50 + 51) equals 5050, he could ask you to come up with a more general form of this answer - i.e the sum of some arbitrary arithmetic sequence.
And if you then go to expand on this, and arrive at the answer that the sum of the original sequence is sum = s(s+1)/2, then that is IMO very good for both parts.
The key here is that you actually walk them through the steps, and interact with the interviewer. Maybe they introduce constraints, or new rules.
One can take "easy" questions that you've seen thousands of times, and make them into interesting ones, where you spend some time communicating, and showcasing how you solve problems.
The point is not to arrive at "the sum is 5050", but rather to monitor how you think, and solve problems, with people around you.