Comment by stevenjgarner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stevenjgarner | Hacker News Reader

IMHO, this was not cheating. This is a phenomenon called success. If you are fortunate (?) to be around in the entrepreneurial world long enough, you will realize that intelligence, hard work, good time management etc are not adequate. They just qualify as deserving. There are serendipities that separate those who succeed from everybody else who was deserving. Survivor bias [1]. Calling Eli was your serendipity. The opposite is also true: killer asteroids hit the planets of otherwise deserving individuals and initiatives. I was co-founder of a municipal fiber-to-the-home initiative in 1996. We had both a winning technical recipe and also a financial engineering recipe. (Extremely rare even today) We were then fortunate enough to acquire a customer that was a newly minted public company, representing a whopping 65% of our business. Banker's dream, but in actuality a big mistake. Then the double-whammy of fraud by that public company (wiping it out completely before our contract was realized) AND the dot-com crash. Killer asteroids are real.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Qd3erAPI9w

I agree, this is definitely not cheating. This is interview preparation. When I prepared for my FAANG interviews I googled so many questions that I couldn’t find another blue link, they were all purple. I prepped for them all. The more you want the job, the more you prep

Really nice way to put it!

As the adage goes, success is all about luck. Oh, and hard work. And the harder you work, the luckier you get.

"Fortune favors the prepared mind" (Louis Pasteur)

Its just luck. What you worked hard at is also luck.

I tend to think that fate and free will work like electricity and magnetism. I call the combined result 'destiny'.

The only mistake the OP made was in acting like they hadn’t seen the question before, but other than that everything was fine. These code screen questions are usually a basic gut check and the real evaluation comes later at the on-site. Honestly the interviewer did a bad job though because the question clearly gives an advantage to someone who has seen it before.

Once I had a candidate struggle with my screening question, flattening an array of nested arrays, and that’s fine because I normally use that as an opportunity to see how they ask questions and work together on finding a solution. But the candidate went silent for about 5 minutes and then came back with a perfect solution, using iterators, which are a pretty obscure JavaScript feature. I later found that exact code block on the MDN site, and I was pretty shocked at how brazen an action it was, because if they had just asked for direction and admitted they were struggling they could have still passed the interview.

There's a famous story about Gauss as a child (age 7 in some accounts) figuring out this trick when a teacher who probably wanted a break had the students add up the numbers from 1 to 100. He saw that you could combine numbers from the ends: 1+100=101, 2+99=101, and there are 50 pairs, so the answer is 5050.

Gauss was cheating since he was born! He fixed math errors in his father accountant stuff at age 3.(according to wikipedia) if thats not an unfair advantage i dont know what is ;)

There's also the joke that John von Neumann was given this task and "cheated" by just instantly adding all the numbers in his head the naive way, without having to write anything down.

The traditional story is about calculating the distance a fly (or bird?) travels if it goes back and forth between two trains. https://jcdverha.home.xs4all.nl/scijokes/10.html#Neumann_4

> The only mistake the OP made was in acting like they hadn’t seen the question before

This. Everyone in the thread is claiming no wrongdoing on the part of the author. If I was in this position, I would excitedly inform the interviewer that I had seen the question before and then quickly write down the answer. But that would look be a lot less impressive than OP’s acting as he pretended to come up with the perfect answer on the fly.

I would have done the same, but I can't blame the author either. He did come up with the solution on his own, after all.

The serendipitous knowledge of the question isn’t the cheating. The cheating is the deception in the interview that this is a question being encountered for the first time.

It’s cheating because it’s the type of unethical behavior you wouldn’t want in a colleague: pretending that they are brilliantly generating insights on the spot that they have actually researched previously.

I don’t think it’s an unforgivable sin, particularly for someone new to interviewing. But as a candidate, I’ve considered it appropriate to make it clear to my interviewer what my level of experience with the question was before diving in. And as an interviewer, I’ve always looked positively on candidates who have done the same

> it’s the type of unethical behavior you wouldn’t want in a colleague

we're talking about Microsoft here, embrace, extend, extinguish, and all manner of other perfidy.I'd say he fit right, apart from his conscience.

"If you are fortunate (?) to be around in the entrepreneurial world long enough, you will realize that intelligence, hard work, good time management etc are not adequate."

Not just as an entrepreneur. I have found that these traits don't guarantee a reward for ICs, or anyone really. I used to work hard. Now I just work hard enough. Pays the same either way.

>Now I just work hard enough.

My review from management actually got much better once I stopped knocking myself out working too hard and instead worked just enough.

That was a pivotal moment for me. That and also learning how to manage your manager.

Would you be able to share some tips or sources on managing your manager? It sounds like a really valuable skill

I had a similar realization, but it’s not really about working hard vs. not working hard, it’s about knowing what’s important to your manager. Early in my career I would never say no to any task, and would give the time estimate I thought the manager wanted, and then work over time to get it done. Half the time the finished product had bugs, got delivered too late, or ended up not matching what the client wanted, so the “hard work” didn’t translate directly into success. Now I try to figure out what the client’s actual needs are and how to meet them as quickly and with as little work as possible, and when something is requiring overtime, I immediately stop working on it and communicate that it’s a bigger issue than expected, and either push the project, get additional engineers, or find a different way to solve the issue. I think programmers really enjoy solving problems and we never like to admit that something is more difficult than we expected because we feel like we failed, but actually that’s just an expected part of the job. Obviously this only works if you have a good manager who actually cares about results. Bad managers are easy to manipulate because you just optimize for whatever BS metric they’ve decided is important, but those jobs are soul crushing.

https://www.notion.so/Manage-your-manager-26a26b82bd824f97bf... found this link on HN a while back but never really put it into practice. could be useful could not

So instead of working hard at your tasks, you worked hard at playing your manager. Seems like a “law of conservation of working hard” to me; you just needed the right kind of working hard.

>worked hard at playing your manager

No. Instead of working until my head exploded (and my manager telling me I wasn’t showing “a sense of urgency”) I focused on doing the right thing, and part of that is helping your manager succeed.

I'd once heard a piece of advice that was along the lines of "regardless of what it may say the duties are on paper your actual job is to make your manager look smart for having you on the team"

seconding the request on 'Tips for Managing your Manager'.

As long there's a common understanding of the goal of the company it's easy. The tricky part is to get the manager to manage the upstream managers and across departments.

I agree that this is the common experience for those of us that never experience overwhelming "serendipity" (i.e. luck) - meaning no disrespect (or lack of gratitude for being so incredibly fortunate) - but for those few that do get shot out of a canon, it would appear that hard work (focused hours on task) makes all the difference on becoming industry dominant (Musk, Jobs, etc). When you get a tiger by the tail, you need to stay focused and not fall asleep.

What does IC stand for?

Incentive Compensation. It's a fancy way of saying bonus.

I once aced an interview after the recruiter handed me the list questions, all soft balls like "what is the difference between a promise and an observable". Naturally I googled every one of them and during the interview had to hold myself back as to not to totally dunk on the questions. Afterwards the recruiter called me back with the good news, I said it was almost unfair how easy it was, he just laugh and said that not everyone that gets the questions on a silver platter actually passes the interview.

What was the point of the question? That would help determine whether or not this was cheating.

Normally with things like this the interviewer claims to want to "see how you think." If some prepared rote answer passed this interview phase, at the very least, the interview failed to meet its stated goal.

What's the difference between cheating and what's needed for your version of "success?" Can someone cheat their way to success? Or does seeing the answer key before the exam just mean being better prepared than the competition?

If the fraud in your story hadn't been discovered, would that have been success?

> Can someone cheat their way to success?

Yes people "cheat" their way to success. I hate it, but they do and we support it. From just a position of basic human integrity (forget about the law), Apple "cheated" by implementing the graphical user interface from Xerox Parc without adequate compensation. Then Microsoft "cheated" by implementing Apple's GUI as Windows. Then came the lawsuits. This happens again and again.

I have experienced this personally - the USDA RUS broadband program had written rules where an ISP had to work with their regional office and not walk their application through the front door in Washington DC. Yet being the first to apply through the regional office resulted in significant delays over our competitor walking their application into USDA headquarters against procedure. They got the $20 million. We did not. Any attempt to object or litigate would only hurt us further.

> If the fraud in your story hadn't been discovered, would that have been success?

I do not consider the author talking with Eli to be fraud. There was no obligation of disclosure. For all we know the reason why Microsoft repeated this question with so many applicants may have been deliberate to see how many applicants would actually get the solution by asking around. After all, isn't that how all of us code?

These sorts of screener questions are at the level of "can you write a simple function and can you answer basic questions about it"

A surprising number of candidates I've seen interviewed cannot do the following, my code screener question: "Write a function that, given a set of integers, determines the amplitude (difference between biggest and smallest) of the set."

This is literally max(set) - min(set) in more words. I have seen countless people attempt this in different ways. My favorite was the guy that sorted the list and took the end values.

The worst is when I ask the follow up question: "where might I use this function?" I almost never get the answer of where I stole the function from (matplotlib): "the size of a graph", instead usually getting an "I don't really know".

> "where might I use this function?"

I'm not so sure about this one. Software development is quite usually "build functionality to serve a given use case" whereas this line of inquiry is more along the lines of "find a use case for the given functionality".

Perhaps if you intend for the conversation to head into a chat about charting and data science?

> Software development is quite usually [not] "find a use case for the given functionality".

If only :)

>These sorts of screener questions are at the level of "can you write a simple function and can you answer basic questions about it"

Some interview questions are like that, but this wasn't one of them. This is not "implement simple functionality" -- for that, you would ask e.g. fizzbuzz or "reverse the elements of a list".

This one requires you to work out something clever that reduces the time needed compared to the brute-force solution. You'll notice that, in this case, even someone at the end of a 4-year computing degree had to think about it for a while to figure out the shortcut.

Yes, once you have the insight that it can be reduced to max(set) - min(set), then it's a matter of writing a simple program. But obviously, this question isn't testing whether you can implement max(set) - min(set) when told to do exactly that. If that's all they were testing, they would have asked him that directly!

It is, rather, to test whether you are generally smart enough to, within the time of the interview, think of such a solution when it wasn't handed to you. To present yourself as having come up with that insight on the spot, when it really took you hours, is a kind of deception.

"Calling Eli was your serendipity"

He didn't call Eli randomly, he called to research an interview. That's putting the work in. That the question was the same might have been serendipitous (especially if the question was one of many possibilities). And he didn't just call and get the question, he then put in the effort to research an answer.

The thing is, for 20+ years you didn’t have to study. Only within the last decade or so have things become so competitive. There’s been a fundamental shift in supply and demand.

This is not cheating.

Maybe I am being too cynical but I think the author knows this too but I think he wanted to frame it this way to get more attention and indirectly promote his company

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