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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

It might not be obvious but these kinds of questions are terrible for diversity and inclusion because they incorporate too much cultural knowledge that is not universal. A person who has never seen chess will spend more of the interview just trying to figure out what is meant by the Knight's move. That disadvantages people from low-chess cultures, no matter how qualified and intelligent they may be. Chess also has a class aspect, so you are biasing against class background as well.

This is the same reason why they had to stop writing SAT questions that started out "Tad and Buffy are at duece in the fifth set of their tennis match ...".

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I doesn't take long to understand how a knight moves, though. Move two squares in a direction and then move one square perpendicular to that.

Not hard, but still disadvantageous to people who haven't seen it before as that's one more thing they have to learn and keep in mind during a stressful interview.

Sorry, what is a square? I come from a society that exclusively uses a polar coordinate system and have no such concept of your cartesian-biased constructs. (/s)

While I get this sentiment, and agree with it, I would like to also point out that there are almost no clear cut and dry problems in the real world. One needs to be able to know how to ask questions in order to get a good enough grasp to begin formulating some kind of solution.

When you are taking an SAT question, there is no opportunity to ask 'can you tell me how tennis is scored?' That is not the case in some/most interviews.

I have a worse example of this -- I've seen a programming question going around that involves tournament brackets (specifically how they're seeded). I'm not particularly into sports, but if you were, you would have a huge leg up on this problem because you'd already have an intuitive sense of how brackets work and are constructed, that I wouldn't.

This reads like satire. There is no chess knowledge involved. The constraint is that you can only dial in a 2x3 L-shape.

Edit: Typo, as opposed to the well known capital L-shape that is just one unit wide.

Swipes like "This reads like satire" break the site guideline against calling names. This comment would be just fine without it. Please edit them out in the future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: we've had to ask you this more than once before. Worse, you've been doing it in other places too, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24683603. We ban accounts that do this. I don't want to ban you, so would you please review the guidelines and stick to them?

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=FriendlyNormie

What does “banned” mean exactly? Because this individual continues to post heinous garbage day after day and they’re “banned”.

Banned means that an account's posts are killed, and only users with 'showdead' turned on in their profile can see them (with the exception of posts that enough users vouch for as good, which certainly hasn't happened in this case). If you turn on 'showdead' on, you're committing to see the worst of what the internet has to offer. If you don't want to see the bottom of the barrel, turn off the setting and you won't.

We don't delete posts outright except when the user who posted it asks us to. So yes, banned accounts can continue to post, except the posts go into [dead] status immediately, which removes them from public view. Only the tiny minority of users who've signed up for 'showdead' see them.

That balance is the best we can hope for on a site that allows anyone to create an account. If we stopped banned users from posting altogether, they'd just make a new account, and post the same stuff except now they wouldn't be banned anymore. Edit: In other words, it's an optimization problem and this seems to be the optimum, even though it's not entirely satisfactory.

Thanks.

Given how primitive and easy to understand the movement constraints in this particular case are, this seems like an unnecessary concern. Note that I am not dismissing the rest of your post.

> A person who has never seen chess will spend more of the interview just trying to figure out what is meant by the Knight's move.

I mean he explicitly spells it out as part of the problem. I highly doubt in an interview they'll just plop down a term like "knight's move" and refuse to clarify what is meant by it, if necessary. It's not exactly the sort of thing that takes living a life of privilege to understand.

The difference is on the margin. If typical candidates who reach the optimal solution reach it in the last 5 minutes, and if it takes 5 minutes to discuss with a non-chess-playing candidate how a knight moves, then you have severely disadvantaged that candidate.

Isn't this somewhat dependent on the outlook of the interviewer? I know interviewers will greatly vary, but is it not more important to consider what my path to the solution was, rather than what the actual answer is?

I would be more inclined towards a candidate that knew nothing of a problem but was able to explore a way to the answer vs. a candidate that knew the answer simply because of hours of rehearsal

> and if it takes 5 minutes to discuss with a non-chess-playing candidate how a knight moves

If it takes 5 minutes to explain how a knight moves I think that person might not be Google material...

We've already established that there are at least four different people in this thread alone who cannot clearly explain how a knight moves.

No offence, but this might also mean you failed to understand it.

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