https://elaineou.com/2017/03/10/technical-interviews-from-th...

> 2. A bill for 5 typewriter ribbons and 24 pencils totalled $9.85. If a typewriter ribbon costs $1.25, what is the price of a dozen pencils?

> The IBM Programmer Aptitude Test is from 1960 (? I think. It’s tough to read the date on the mimeograph). Is it just me or have technical interviews gotten much harder?

> I interviewed for a programmer job at Facebook several years ago, and one of the questions I got was, “Given a set of obstacle coordinates, write a function that finds the shortest path between two cells for a knight on a 3-D chessboard while avoiding the obstacles.”

> I remember this question because it was one of the few that I managed to solve. Probably a half-dozen others ended in fumbles. Not surprisingly, Facebook didn’t give me an offer.

https://elaineou.com/2017/08/26/the-mystery-of-the-vanishing...

> Some time ago, we compared technical interviews from the 1960s to those of today: They’ve gotten much, much harder. I suggested that the last few decades of lax immigration have invited overseas talent to raise the bar – it was unfounded speculation at the time, but some number crunching shows it might be true.

> According to this Joint Venture Silicon Valley report, 74% of Silicon Valley tech workers are foreign-born immigrants. A decade ago, 36% of Silicon Valley tech workers were born abroad. In 2000, only 29% were.

> Tech industry employment has increased from about 300,000 jobs in 2007 to 400,000 in 2016, so even though we created 100,000 engineering positions in the last decade, we’ve also displaced 88,000 domestic engineers.

I'm suddenly curious what other fields are staffed by 74% foreign-born immigrants.