On Thu, Jul 23, 2020 at 6:33 AM Michael Douglas <Michael.Douglas@ieee.org> wrote:
One time I got asked in an interview how to estimate the number of manholes in a city. I replied that I would google 'pretentious interview questions' for a problem solving methodology.
Many moons ago, I interviewed at Google. During one of the afternoon sessions the interviewer and I spent about half an hour spitballing approaches for system monitoring problem at scale. I no longer remember the details. With a little over 15 minutes remaining he handed me a marker and said, "Okay, now write code for that on the whiteboard." For an abstract problem without foundation that I had never considered prior to that discussion. I said, "I really don't think I can do a credible job of that in the time we have." He says, "Well it's okay to use pseudocode. Don't you want to try?" I think you're missing the point dude. It's still an abstract problem and after half an hour's discussion I might be ready to draw boxes and arrows. I'm certainly not ready to reduce it to code. I said, "No," and needless to say I didn't get an offer. And I'm okay with that. I really didn't fancy making a career of competing to be the first to write poorly considered software. The booby prize for failing the interview was a Google coffee mug. I still have it in storage somewhere. Regards, Bill Herrin -- William Herrin bill@herrin.us https://bill.herrin.us/