Hacker News Reader

Comment by gkoberger | Hacker News Reader

This isn't groundbreaking science, sure, but it is a great way to get people interested in a topic. After all, it wouldn't be on Hacker News if the word Wordle wasn't in it. I'm a huge fan of using things like this to teach science, math and engineering.

We started using "Solve 100 Wordles programmatically" as our technical interview, and people _love_ it. They get really into it and have fun. It's pretty easy to do inefficiently, and it's great to watch people build on it and try to improve their scores.

It has two benefits: 1/ everyone clearly understands the problem 2/ people see it as fun rather than a drag.

View on HN

Another small benefit: Everybody understands this isn't what the job is. Nobody is hiring you to beat Wordle, and you solving this is clearly not somehow on the path to their actual task, they are asking you if you can write software which solves a problem and you're demonstrating that you can do that, which makes sense.

I think "Solve 100 Wordles programmatically" sounds like a lot of work, so that'd probably be a "No" from me unless it was last hurdle for a job I was enthusiastic about but unlike "Write a program to solve this class of graph problem" I at least wouldn't be worried that you're trying to get me to do work for free.

Actually Wordle solver as Code Review task sounds like maybe a more interesting live interview than the one we do today. "Here's this mediocre Wordle solver, what is your feedback in review?" has the advantage that they've probably seen a Wordle puzzle before but it's not an example problem they've seen in fifty textbooks.

Well, the 100 Wordles is just "Solve one Wordle" in a for-loop. If you're an even somewhat decent engineer, it takes under 10 minutes to get it working (inefficiently).

Then we encourage people to do whatever they want next: improve their average score, build a frontend UI for it, solve on Hard Mode, etc.

In the past, we never did technical interview questions like this. We always asked people to bring their own project, and work the way they want to. However, with the addition of AI, we hit a wall: we want people to feel they can use AI in a way that mimics how they'd actually work day-to-day, BUT we also need a simple check to make sure they understood engineering basics.

Next week on HN: Solving Multiple Parallel Wordle with SIMD

"Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming In Multiple Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Spacetimes... For Wordle!"

(Yes, I'm referencing a real thing, and it's worth watching.)

it's a drag... i mean if you're 22 it's fun. if you love games, or you're older, or mature, i don't know. the pretentious stuff Josh Wardle says is tough. (https://gdcvault.com/play/1027882/-Wordle-Doing-the-Opposite). he says all sorts of stuff that is wrong ("innate understanding of language" except if you're a kid, which is the average gamer...)

it's like when interviews asked people to implement 2048. it's not even the best version of that game, Threes! is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com