Re:Steve Ballmer's incorrect binary search interview question
by extr on Tuesday September 03, 2024 @05:57PM
(#41439721)
Yeah I mean the vacuum landfill thing is stupid. The point was never to try to trip people up, there's no wrong answer (or question), just find out if they could recognize ambuiguity. "Let's try to estimate the amount of pet food sold each year in the USA." -> "Dogs and cats too?", "In terms of dollars or pounds of food?" type of stuff. This was for analyst roles - basically your whole job would be something similar to this where you're asked ambiguous questions and you need to translate that into a semi-rigorous analysis, infer intent, etc. I hate to say it but if you didn't realize that going into the interview, you were probably not a good fit as an analyst in the first place!
Re:Steve Ballmer's incorrect binary search interview question
by ozim on Thursday September 05, 2024 @02:11AM
(#41454023)
Well cannot agree really.
Assumption is mother of all fuckups.
I’ve seen customers wanting X and assuming that you should know that X comes with A and B because everyone in their business knows that. But you implement only X with A because you made your own assumptions and did not ask. So you missed the deadline and customer that’s it.
When you're in a real situation with a customer or user, you ask tons of questions. You use a lot of common sense to figure out what they really want, what's actually important, etc.
But often times these interview questions -- like how many vacuum cleaners in a city -- don't need any further questions asked. The idea that you'd count vacuum cleaners in landfills, or dental suction devices, is just silly. In real life, if someone wanted to know about the vacuum cleaners in landfills too, they'd tell you in the first place.
If an interviewer wants to see if someone can ask clarifying questions, they'd better come up with a scenario where it would make sense to ask them in a normal conversation. Scenarios that are genuinely ambiguous to anyone with common sense.
Otherwise interviews become this weird cargo-cult thing where you have to learn that interviewers present common-sense clear questions, but you have to ask silly clarification questions that you wouldn't in real life, just so somebody can check a box that you asked questions.