Re:How to Interview Engineers
by lurker83256 on Tuesday June 27, 2017 @03:38AM
(#14643216)
This question is trickier than it sounds. Sure 109 clock cycles per second, but estimating for actual human-perceived ops for an algorithmic problem one should use 106. (Source: USA Computing Olympiad problems.)
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Would you mind explaining in a bit more detail what you mean here? I'm not quite sure where you're getting those numbers from.
They mean 10^9 and 10^6, and that each "operation" in a complex algorithm is often something like a hash-table lookup, which may be constant time, but takes closer to 1000 clock cycles than 1.
Ahh, I got it. For whatever reason I didn't associate 109->10^9 and 106->10^6.
No worries, it took me a little while to figure out, too.
We totally would interview someone that responded as you did. Thing is, I'd say roughly 50% of the people that applied for the position would respond with something like "I dunno" or "A" and be unable to have any sort of rational discussion about it.