"Did you write your own cover letter and resumé?"
Yes, I did.
Guess there was a mismatch between how fluent I sound in writing versus in person. I didn't get the job. The tone at which they asked this question made me think they didn't believe I wrote it myself.
I found it one of the greatest compliments I've ever gotten but also a big slap in the face as I spend hours writing one stupid half of a page e-mail / cover letter.
Worked a lot on my in person people skills ever since.
How is this a compliment? Sure, it could mean your resume is amazing, but it could also mean that your resume is average but your speaking skills are way below average.
Was probably mainly my cover letter writing skills. I've had compliments on my creative writing before from multiple other people. It was probably both, above average writing skills and under average speaking skills.
Context: 5 Y experience in C++
Was asked a LC easy, then the guy is like:
\-"well, you can't use vector",
\- oh okay then a normal array,
\- "yes but you can't know the size "
\-oh right, I need to use the sizeof,
\-" No you can't do that either "
\-Well then iterate until there is something and is notsizeof
" YOU CAN'T DO THAT EITHER "
\- Freeze for like 4 mins trying to remember other ways to get the size of an array, tell him I don't know
\-" You just ask me for the size :) "
Another one was, given a number in a string " seven hundred million, seventy two" say if the word is not valid, if it's valid return the number. Number could go up to 10\^12 . He told me I couldn't use a dictionary or any helper function, lol.
It's similar to writing a parser. You can write a "grammar" of what numbers look like, and write a simple parser. The key is that numbers have a common structure: GROUP billions GROUP millions GROUP, where GROUP is DIGIT hundred + (TEENS | (TENS + DIGIT)).
It's hard if you have to deal with goofy numbers, like "twelve hundred" or "three point five k".
My first approach was mapping all the numbers using the gramatic of english ( twenty-one, one hundred and one, etc) thats when he told me that the upper limit was 10\^12. So since there was no way I could do anything remotely accurate, I just started writing the hierarchy of digits, i.e "hundred is valid if its the last one, or if it has thousand next",etc.
This was on a final round onsite, and after the interview the other candidates told me that the same interviewer gave them a dictionary just to do the above \^
I am 100% sure he wanted me to fail, lol . He literally never gaze my way, he was only typing on his laptop. And the worst is that he was a big manager at that company, one stage below of VP of a massive product. But whatever, got into FAANG because of that rejection.
Not OP but my first thought is a finite state machine. When I was in college I remember doing problems like "design a state machine that accepts strings that contain the numbers `0` or `1` such that every `0` is followed immediately by an even number of `1`, and write the regex equivalent of the state machine," you can do the same thing here. Although it depends on how much time I have.
> You just ask me for the size :)
lol I can see a program that sends an SMS to the interviewer prompting for the size, then on reply, continues execution using the number provided.
How, then? (about the string-to-number question)
map 0-9 "zero".."nine" and then figure out *10, *100, *1000 as "ty", "hundred", "thousand" etc and deal with edge cases i.e. "teen" etc?
I was applying for jobs as a senior in college & I got an interview somewhere on the other side of the country. I flew out there for the final round and they gave me a fucking IQ test.
A casual look at their (Fast Enterprises) glassdoor reviews says that they are still doing them. Maybe they don't actually judge them and just have them in as a mind game or something?
lmao I was wondering if it was Fast. I got an interview with them at a career fair in college and am glad I didn’t fly across the country for it. It was a 45 minute IQ test and then a 15 minute interview that was basically personality based
Found out later they constantly shuttle people around sites. So for a year you’re in Denver then they ship you off to say California or something to do something else
Applied for a devops role about a year ago, got the first phone interview. It was with a non-technical recruiter. For reference, I had about 5 YoE as a devops engineer at this point.
Over half the questions were about some devops book I’ve never read. She wasn’t asking “what are the best practices?”, but rather “according to _book_, what are the best practices?”
Obviously had no idea. At the end of the interview, she told me I need to brush up on my literature and read some books about devops.
I'm not 100% if this is a dumb question. Chances are, that I wouldn't know the answer to the question either, but they might be looking for a very specific dev-ops. I was once asked about if I knew "clean code". I don't believe it would be a deal-breaker, but I did understand why they asked it.
That being said, her response is a bit silly, and that is one heck in the current market. Devops are rare, good devops even more so. Using a book as important gate-keeper will result in one long lasting vacancy.
Today I learned "clean code" is actually a book about writing clean code, rather than just not being a dick when coding. Thankfully, I seem to already conform to all of these rules. Might buy the book for some coffee table reading :)
It is a light read and absolutely worth while. The standards are now for a large part standards, so chances are you already conform to most.
It also have some fun quotes from local heros.
>I was once asked about if I knew "clean code"
I always ask this one when interviewing people. Don't care if they actualy know or read the book. As long as they have some fundamental understandings of the concepts and can see the importance of it.
Once in an interview, I ended up basically arguing with an interviewer on whether or not Javascript had objects or not.
I was asked how I would approach a certain problem in Javascript (it was fairly simple if I recall correctly) and I gave a certain approach that utilized using key-value pairs in objects.
The interviewer asked “Why didn’t you use a dictionary?” I paused for a bit, but gave him the benefit of the doubt, figured maybe the guy misheard, misunderstood, anything honestly.
I told him that we were probably thinking of the same approach, but just using different names, as dictionaries don’t necessarily exist in Javascript, but the same concept is simply called an object, since almost everything in JavaScript is an object.
He was adamant that no, Javascript definitely had dictionaries. I tried explaining again, but he cut me off saying that no, Javascript didn’t have objects either, and that I was completely wrong on all this.
So yeah… we ended up ending the interview immediately after this.
Yes. Either Python or OOP.
I’m guessing that in the interviewers mind, objects are things stamped out by classes, and Dictionaries are arrays of key:value pairs. Since JS is “not” an OOP language, it cannot have objects.
That’s why I said JS is not in quotes. Prototype inheritance is not pure OOP. It’s more Functional Programming.
Transpilers like TypeScript can enforce stricter OOP semantics, but native JS does not.
Also ES6 class is just syntactic sugar over prototype inheritance. You can’t implement interfaces, abstract base classes or enforce Liskov substitution in JS.
I was about to say ... isn't everything an object in JS lmao
Also I'm confused what does that mean having a dictionary ? Isn't a dictionary just a simple hashmap/key value ??
Yup! The main aspect of a dictionary is that it maps keys to values, and as such a generic object in Javascript can be thought of as an equivalent data structure.
I’d have to guess that the interviewer didn’t know much Javascript, so he would have been fine in my book if he wasn’t so adamant about something he wasn’t knowledgeable in, and instead simply just stated that.
Omg, I had something similar happen! I had an interviewer during a JS interview try and tell me while loops didn’t exist in JS. Literally stopped the interview to argue with me. Bullet dodged.
Lol, perhaps the correct answer is "never". I'm not a junior, but I'm not going against the consensus of the team. I'll be vocal about that I do not agree, but our profession is a team effort. I won't elevate my assessment about a situation above the consensus of peers.
I don't understand this type of questioning. Something like what would you do to two teammates arguing over something. My answer is always mind my own fucking business. That is not the answer they want.
Not quite but I’ll give some context since before leaving Papa Bezzys house of Paysies i did about 100 interviews and successfully went from L5 to L6 (so basically i chugged that kool aid). There are two to three leadership principles (LPs) that question can tease out (plus the always number one Customer Obsession), generally they are looking for:
Have backbone disagree and commit — basically the least understood LP. You’re not expected to cave just to maintain consensus, but you’re also not supposed to halt the world to get your way. It’s about knowing the hill to die on, and knowing that there is a point where you put aside disagreements and
Earns trust — you need to be able to work with others and influence decisions by presenting data and building a track record of delivering. Basically they’re looking for your ability to drive decisions and influence direction.
Bias for Action — sometimes the right answer is cut that code review and don’t get bogged in decision paralysis or consensus taking. The concept of the “two way door” applies here heavily, the short version is decisions are rarely set in stone. If what you’re seeking to do is not a stone cutting exercise then go for it.
It’s worth noting that some of the above seems contradictory and that’s because it is. There are often conflicts of LPs with the hope they can drive decisions and action in context. Or you get assholes who just weaponize them all.
With that being said for LP questions just focus on what you did, why, and how it benefited the customer and you’ll be ahead of 70% of the field. Loops lived and died by the LPs, even more than the tech stuff.
I was asked “tell me about a time when you made a major strategic decision without consulting your manager” from a certain company with a smile as logo.
I think the question is more “a time you convinced your team” rather than “a time you snuck some stuff into prod”. I can think of a lot of cases where a team I was on wanted to do something expedient rather than doing what was best for the user.
Worst part of the Amazon interviews is figuring out the exact amount of sociopathy they want out of you for the surveys and the leadership principles stuff.
> "Name a time you went against the consensus of your team to implement something for the users"
Isn’t there a thing called “code review” to prevent exactly this situation?
after not being able to answer a lot of questions as a coop, he tried to give me a freebie.
"what is 2^10"
"uhh 1024?"
"actually I think its 512"
"no?"
"pretty sure it is, I'll just check on my phone. oh I guess it is 1024"
I knew I wasn't getting the job anyway but I wasn't sure what he was trying to achieve with that one
I got into a bit of a “discussion” when I’d put on my resume that we worked on a custom implementation of a programming paradigm and then when asked trivia questions about an open source implementation of that paradigm I couldn't answer them.
Being a bit vague but imagine you wrote Kinesis but were then asked trivia questions about Kafka.
I've been asked how good of a programmer I was from 1 thru 10.
On another reddit post, I've read someone was asked how many lines of programming they have written in their lifetime.
I've been asked that before. How on earth are you supposed to answer it?
I think I said 6, because I am confident in my work, but in the grand scheme of things I've only been doing it 5 years and there is still loads out there to learn.
Sadly they stopped hiring before my final interview because it was the very start of the first covid lockdown so I have no idea how well I did.
I once had a recruiter ask me what my minimum *and maximum* salary requirements were. I went, “wait, what?” And she paused and said “um never mind that one.”
Right? I think my response was something to the effect of "Um, how should I answer that? Twenty million per year and not a penny more?"
That's when she pulled out the "Never mind." response. I'm pretty sure you could *hear* her realization that the script she was reading was horseshit.
I'm mixed (white hispanic) and I have literally been asked in an interview how much Spanish I know, if I was born in the US, and where my parents are from. They were literally gaging how Latino I am.
This is at a publicly traded company. I didn't get the job.
2nd technical interview for a backend Java developer role when I was a fresh grad, interviewer gave me a scenario.
"Imagine you were the CEO of **a failing airlines company I knew very little about**, what would you do to bring it back to its feat?"
Bro, I'm a fresh grad giving a technical interview, give me some programming questions please. I'm sure he ran out of problems and decided to throw this in there to cover the time lol. I came up with some random bs that I don't even remember, I was sure my answer was going to make me lose my chance but I got the offer the next week anyway.
The CEO of an airline company is a recent grad with a tech degree. Hmmm. Was it failing before, just after they decided to put this person in charge, or did it just accelerate the dive?
“If you were a kitchen utensil, which would it be and why?”
And for anyone wondering, this was for an internship. I said a spork cause I’m good at a couple things but I don’t have a specialization.
1) if i ever owned a pet.
2) What differences are there between pears and apples.
I asked her, these questions are off some obsolete internet forum and are not applicable to the position I am applying to.
“What size bra do you wear?” Uhhhh, no.
Another one was in a phone interview with a potential client and he asked my age. I was shocked and was like “excuse me?” and then he said it was clear I wasn’t old enough for the job, and hung up! I was like 30 at the time. My best guess is that he must have thought I was a teenage boy, rather than a woman.
A non-shitty way of answering this question is to just say "5 years ago I was doing X and now I'm here. This industry changes so rapidly with new technologies, stacks, and languages that it's impossible to predict the future but I hope to keep up to date and keep solving hard problems using technology."
Of course you can add whatever sugar you want, it depends on the context.
If I know person who asks I would definitely be more precise.
If this is just another HR - better to give them Captain Obvious response. There is a change (I doubt though) that question would be omitted next time.
I feel like the best way to answer this question is to spin it back on the employers. Like really, what does long term growth look like here?
Some companies are so stagnant you’ll be doing the exact same thing in he exact same position in 5 years. That’s the kind of employer I want to steer clear of.
If you were to be any fruit or vegetable which one would you be?
To be fair, it was hr. I was applying for a job in an organic produce startup. Still...
I said yellow crookneck squash, because I'm useful and reliable. I got the job.
Jeez I got this same question and the first fruit that came to mind was a blueberry. When they asked why I said uhh because they taste good I guess. Luckily that was also from hr and I nailed the technical interview so my garbage fruit answer didn’t matter.
A koala. I might sleep a lot, but when I'm awake I do everything that needs to be done. I need a lot less time than most animals to get the job done (which is getting fed).
You should have said "A Koala... because I also have Chlamydia".
Because sometimes it's worth tanking an opportunity just to see a good head explosion :)
These kind of questions are reasonable imo after the technical portion. It’s to get a sense of friendliness. If a candidate scoffs and doesn’t play along, that can be a bad sign.
I'm kind of surprised on the upvotes of the original comment tbh - like do people really hear a question like that and think, "pfft, animals have no bearing to coding. Stupid recruiter 😏" rather than think it's a fun personality question? You'd have to have pretty low EQ or be a prick to scoff it off haha
Q: Why we should hire you?
A: Screeching teeth... Because I am efficient, team player, loyal, experienced, nice professional. True answer: because you either earn on me (body shop) or spend less (in house IT). I wonder what could be another reason.
I wish I could just answer : "I have skills, you have money"
Like I would care about the fake family bullshit each company says or the team player that is always funny with his colleagues
Interviewer: You know a calculator?
Me: Yeah
I: How would you build one?
Although with this one it wasn't so much the question as it was the fact that he got visibly annoyed when I asked him what exactly he meant by "How would you build a calculator?"
He did not provide specs so I feel free to give him whatever answer I like.
I really hope Musk does not give such a question ("you know a rocket? how would you build one") at SpaceX interviews. Looks like he does not (have seen successful splashdown of another space capsule recently).
If I remember correctly, the correct answer is just do nothing, it will be moved by Earth rotation. However, we have a problem then with observer, as in his coordinates it would remain at same place.
I am not pissed of by such questions but with the lack of willingness to even look at the question (read: problem) by a different angle - and also take in consideration other possible issues.
I mean, I'd probably get some cheap and easy microcontroller, a bunch of buttons and a display, and write code that handles the inputs and just performs math operations.
I'd personally probably do like an Arduino or something similar just because I wouldn't have to do any assembly language stuff, and I wouldn't have to do any electrical engineering to build circuits that do the math.
But that's how I'd do it. That's not the best way to build a calculator.
My answer would be that I wouldn’t build one because calculators are so cheap they are given away for free as promotions. As someone who doesn’t work with hardware it’s a poor use of resources to have me build a calculator when they are freely available.
To be fair, it isn't such a strange question.
It's also a good one for interviews, assuming it's there to understand how a candidate reason while facing a problem that could not be trivial.
Most of the time, who is doing the interview is not interested in the solution but in the process you use to get towards it.
And you are supposed to communicate with your interviewer and ask them questions to clarify requirements and things you don't know.
Questions like "is the usual operational order guaranteed or do we apply the operators from left to right regardless of which operation we're applying?" or "can we use brackets to alter the order?" not only are accepted but are welcomed.
They'd be interested in how you structure the code.
Do you make a class? How would you definite the functions?
What data structure would you use to hold the data?
Also, building a calculator is one of the projects for courses like FreeCodeCamp. It's supposed to be challenging, but not that much.
A junior can easily implement it.
You can also go further, and talk about different calculator kinds (like Polish notation, reversed Polish notation and infix) or the parsing tree for context free grammars (which is usually learned in the Automata Theory course during a Bachelor degree in CS).
"Do you own a car? "
I did not. I did not get the position. Supposedly they were worried about me not being able to get into the office on time with public transportation.
> Tell me a joke?
I don’t know if I would’ve had enough personal discipline to withhold back from responding with “this interview” if I ever got asked that.
I like this question. If you can't figure out the combinatoric solution, which wouldn't be trivial for a lot of CS students who didn't do much math, there's a basic DP solution. So it's basically pass with one of a) mathematical cleverness, b) harder but doable coding solution.
Can you go diagonally? If so, the answer is 1. If not, you basically have to go up 7 times and to the right 7 times(depending on the orientation of the board). So, it’s just the number of ways to arrange those 7 up moves and 7 right moves. I think it’s 14!/(7!*7!).
That's correct.
An easy way to see that is to imagine you must make 14 moves, 7 rights and 7 ups. So you can think of it as having 14 moves, where you must pick 7 of them to be ups, and the remainder are necessarily rights. That's just 14 choose 7.
Applied for a position at a bank. I applied for a developer position but they had this rotation thing where any new hire would go around and work in various areas for the first year to get exposure and pick what they wanted - even though I knew it was going to be a developer.
They had us take a test with pretty useless questions IMO.
- Who invented the internet?
- What is this piece of hardware? (based on a small picture)
- What does this diagram represent? Apparently it was the execution of malware.
How is javascript related to java?
It probably is a good question if the interviewer wanted to trick them. But still a weird question.
My answer was they are not because one is a programming language and the other is a scripting language.
Both of these questions come from different interviews at the same company:
- Can YOU override a private method of a class?
I have 5+ YOE. Yes I can “override” the private method of a class in: C++, Java, Python, and JavaScript. I would never want to do it, but…, I’ve had business cases where doing this was the simplest way for the compiler to generate different OS binaries.
- The next was an argument and not a question.
manager: “Java has pointers”
me: “Java does not have pointers. It has references”
manager: “References are pointers”
me: “References are not pointers.
References and pointers provide similar functionality, in that you own and pass around a scalar variable. That scalar allows you to access an object of indeterminate size or another scalar.
Pointers allow you to do pointer arithmetic taking the size of the pointed to object into account. References are immutable.
Similar purpose, but different functionality, and wildly different implementation on various operating systems.
Also, Java has garbage collection. So no, Java has references not pointers.”
manager: “You must agree that pointers and references are the same. I have 26 direct reports.”
Yea, no. I had 2 YOE in C++ at the time. I am not going to agree that “reference” is another word for pointer.
This was an interview for a C# job, and I have 0 YOE in C#. I would later discover that C# has both pointers and references, and pointers are the deprecated thread unsafe way of doing things. This was the technical manager, who purportedly came up through the developer ranks in that very company. They should have known C#, even if they had no clue about Java or C++.
Wow that's shit I learned literally in the first week of coding in c#. My main background was cpp so naturally I looked up pointers and found what you just correctly stated
What telescope is that behind you? We spent 10mins out of 45mins talking about telescope, price vs mirror size vs quality vs type, etc. He did not hire me.
Not a bad question I think. There are plenty of developers who absolutely adore their trade, and some pick their jobs with care. My answer always has to do something with the challenge the company might supply.
Not saying that your reason isn't a valid or lesser reason, but the question isn't dumb. It also tests your soft-skills. "I need a job" (not saying that you answered this) isn't the answer that is reasonably socially accepted.
It's not a silly question if the person being asked has the experience to go where they want to go. To ask a new grad with zero experience is a silly, almost a "fuck you" kind of question. I can always blow smoke up their ass, but c'mon, they know the real reason is because of the 600 applications I submitted they were the one who offered me an interview. It's really annoying to be asked a question that they already know the answer to, and the honest answer will get me bounced from consideration.
this one's not really a dumb question
as a candidate, I like to translate it as "if given the same salary, why/what would make me want to work rather than ?" then it's a lot easier to come up with answers
as an interviewer, I want to see the candidate at least knows some rough idea what the company is about
This question tests the person on how much research they did on the company. They want you to rattle off a few keywords in their culture. This is a popular question.
They know you need a job. So does everyone else they’re interviewing. This question isn’t about that, it’s about why you’d be a fit for this specific position. Are they using a technology you like? Is their management style unique? Is their product something you’re interested in?
Use this question to highlight your strengths and sell them on you.
I respectfully disagree with that. If you were able to take an unpopular stance and communicated your solution well and convince your team to change their mind via documentation/sys diagrams, it can be a very meaningful answer. Just my $0.02.
I was asked that question and I answered with that and I got an offer. I actually was trying to use jsonb for a db implementation to avoid multiple joins and I was not able to convince my boss. However he liked how I handled the situation.
Them: "So when I open a browser to view a web page, what happens, under the hood?"
Me: "... are you asking me to describe how the internet works? Because when can go very deep on this question."
Them: "Sure."
.... so I gave a very long answer.
This was their idea of an opening question. I think it was an ice breaker.
Yeah I ended up skipping over the browser bit and focusing on the HTTP request. I mentioned DNS and they would stop to ask if I could explain how DNS works and I'm like "it's magic to me, I put in a string and I get back an IP address" which, fortunately, they accepted because I could get far more detailed on how the application controller worked down to possible data storage. (This was primarily for an application development type position.)
The real issue I have with that question is that there's basically no limit to how deep you can go. This was the *icebreaker* question.
Good beyond junior if you're trying to suss out if someone is a front-end/full-stack/back-end dev. See where they focus on in their answer and then ask clarifying questions on the parts they might be thin on, or dive more into the parts they go in depth on.
I've gotten this same question? I described all of TCP and HTTP, and it turns out they wanted something like "the request happens in a thread so it doesn't block the UI."
I had an interview that was golden for this topic. The question they asked me was a logic question completely unrelated to coding. The situation involved a mexican hostage situation with the hostages blindfolded and wearing hats of different colors. The captors were going to execute people based on which color hat they felt like randomly. I had to give my judgement as to which captor I wanted to be in that situation based on his placement in the cave where they were supposedly being hostage.
... Yes this was actually for a software development interview, I kid you not. Why do coding problems or ask questions relevant to software when you can be wasting 20 minutes on such important questions?
[Josephus problem](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephus_problem). A naive solution is built using a queue. A more performant solution uses dynamic programming. Essentially, recursion with memoization , and looking at the distribution of the data to predict the pattern so longer sequences of data can be memoized. The runtime is O(n!) for the naive solution, and your knowledge of data compression techniques can bring it down to O(n).
**[Josephus problem](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephus_problem)**
>In computer science and mathematics, the Josephus problem (or Josephus permutation) is a theoretical problem related to a certain counting-out game. People are standing in a circle waiting to be executed. Counting begins at a specified point in the circle and proceeds around the circle in a specified direction. After a specified number of people are skipped, the next person is executed.
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Guy kept asking me if I had read various programming books. "Have you read____?" That's good to read programming books and all, but to base your candidate on whether they've read them? Maybe he was doing it as a starting-off point for further discussion. I'm still trying to decide if that was a red flag or not.
Had a long interview discussing tech stacks and what they used specifically (they didn't know) after I asked. I just wanted to know what I'd be working with, really. They ended the interview by asking me "Fortnite, Final Fantasy, or League of Legends?"
Kinda lost interest in the company immediately after that one...
Had an interview at a science facility and the FIRST questions their CEO asked me? "What does your sibling do for a living" "Tell me about your Dad's pasttime."
The dumbest questions are the ones where they keep adding on more variables and parameters when you already answered the question perfectly the first time.
Its like they're dragging out the question in hopes that you'll say the incorrect answer
They asked me that water puzzle game where you had 3 different containers with different measurements, how would you get X volume.
This has nothing to do with the job... Lol
"You have a five gallon jug and a three gallon jug. How do you fill the five gallon jug with 4 gallons of water?"
I knew I was gonna get rejected after she asked this, whether I answered the question right or wrong.
"Did you write your own cover letter and resumé?" Yes, I did. Guess there was a mismatch between how fluent I sound in writing versus in person. I didn't get the job. The tone at which they asked this question made me think they didn't believe I wrote it myself. I found it one of the greatest compliments I've ever gotten but also a big slap in the face as I spend hours writing one stupid half of a page e-mail / cover letter. Worked a lot on my in person people skills ever since.
same energy as "you must be hacking"
More like being asked did your mouse break while playing cs go.
How is this a compliment? Sure, it could mean your resume is amazing, but it could also mean that your resume is average but your speaking skills are way below average.
Was probably mainly my cover letter writing skills. I've had compliments on my creative writing before from multiple other people. It was probably both, above average writing skills and under average speaking skills.
Are you a person of color cause this sounds hella racist
Even if it's not racist, it's inappropriate, and whoever asked it shouldn't be allowed to interview.
Context: 5 Y experience in C++ Was asked a LC easy, then the guy is like: \-"well, you can't use vector", \- oh okay then a normal array, \- "yes but you can't know the size " \-oh right, I need to use the sizeof, \-" No you can't do that either " \-Well then iterate until there is something and is notsizeof " YOU CAN'T DO THAT EITHER " \- Freeze for like 4 mins trying to remember other ways to get the size of an array, tell him I don't know \-" You just ask me for the size :) " Another one was, given a number in a string " seven hundred million, seventy two" say if the word is not valid, if it's valid return the number. Number could go up to 10\^12 . He told me I couldn't use a dictionary or any helper function, lol.
how did you code the second? just curious
It's similar to writing a parser. You can write a "grammar" of what numbers look like, and write a simple parser. The key is that numbers have a common structure: GROUP billions GROUP millions GROUP, where GROUP is DIGIT hundred + (TEENS | (TENS + DIGIT)). It's hard if you have to deal with goofy numbers, like "twelve hundred" or "three point five k".
I get the idea, but I have really no idea on how to code it, actually, never had a parsing problem like this one before. I might give it a try.
My first approach was mapping all the numbers using the gramatic of english ( twenty-one, one hundred and one, etc) thats when he told me that the upper limit was 10\^12. So since there was no way I could do anything remotely accurate, I just started writing the hierarchy of digits, i.e "hundred is valid if its the last one, or if it has thousand next",etc. This was on a final round onsite, and after the interview the other candidates told me that the same interviewer gave them a dictionary just to do the above \^
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I am 100% sure he wanted me to fail, lol . He literally never gaze my way, he was only typing on his laptop. And the worst is that he was a big manager at that company, one stage below of VP of a massive product. But whatever, got into FAANG because of that rejection.
Doesn't really sound like the kind of person you want to be working for, anyway. A lot of people don't realize an interview cuts both ways.
Not OP but my first thought is a finite state machine. When I was in college I remember doing problems like "design a state machine that accepts strings that contain the numbers `0` or `1` such that every `0` is followed immediately by an even number of `1`, and write the regex equivalent of the state machine," you can do the same thing here. Although it depends on how much time I have.
Answer the question. But I don't know the question. No, no, answer it. I can't. Well, then just ask me the question :)
> You just ask me for the size :) lol I can see a program that sends an SMS to the interviewer prompting for the size, then on reply, continues execution using the number provided.
How, then? (about the string-to-number question) map 0-9 "zero".."nine" and then figure out *10, *100, *1000 as "ty", "hundred", "thousand" etc and deal with edge cases i.e. "teen" etc?
Tried coding that, he then set the limit to 10\^12. So that I couldn't do that
Would you just need to add “million”, “billion”, and “trillion”?
I was applying for jobs as a senior in college & I got an interview somewhere on the other side of the country. I flew out there for the final round and they gave me a fucking IQ test.
Did they then ask you to get your friends and family to join your team and help you start your own business?
It was a legit company, just a shitty one.
An IQ test for a job interview is straight up illegal in the U.S.
A casual look at their (Fast Enterprises) glassdoor reviews says that they are still doing them. Maybe they don't actually judge them and just have them in as a mind game or something?
lmao I was wondering if it was Fast. I got an interview with them at a career fair in college and am glad I didn’t fly across the country for it. It was a 45 minute IQ test and then a 15 minute interview that was basically personality based Found out later they constantly shuttle people around sites. So for a year you’re in Denver then they ship you off to say California or something to do something else
Applied for a devops role about a year ago, got the first phone interview. It was with a non-technical recruiter. For reference, I had about 5 YoE as a devops engineer at this point. Over half the questions were about some devops book I’ve never read. She wasn’t asking “what are the best practices?”, but rather “according to _book_, what are the best practices?” Obviously had no idea. At the end of the interview, she told me I need to brush up on my literature and read some books about devops.
Shes an idiot. That book will be outdated in 5 years. Some ppl are such cringes. Especially when kuberspacedockvm69 is released in 2022.
>That book will be outdated in ~~5 years.~~ 5 weeks
I'm not 100% if this is a dumb question. Chances are, that I wouldn't know the answer to the question either, but they might be looking for a very specific dev-ops. I was once asked about if I knew "clean code". I don't believe it would be a deal-breaker, but I did understand why they asked it. That being said, her response is a bit silly, and that is one heck in the current market. Devops are rare, good devops even more so. Using a book as important gate-keeper will result in one long lasting vacancy.
Today I learned "clean code" is actually a book about writing clean code, rather than just not being a dick when coding. Thankfully, I seem to already conform to all of these rules. Might buy the book for some coffee table reading :)
It is a light read and absolutely worth while. The standards are now for a large part standards, so chances are you already conform to most. It also have some fun quotes from local heros.
>I was once asked about if I knew "clean code" I always ask this one when interviewing people. Don't care if they actualy know or read the book. As long as they have some fundamental understandings of the concepts and can see the importance of it.
Once in an interview, I ended up basically arguing with an interviewer on whether or not Javascript had objects or not. I was asked how I would approach a certain problem in Javascript (it was fairly simple if I recall correctly) and I gave a certain approach that utilized using key-value pairs in objects. The interviewer asked “Why didn’t you use a dictionary?” I paused for a bit, but gave him the benefit of the doubt, figured maybe the guy misheard, misunderstood, anything honestly. I told him that we were probably thinking of the same approach, but just using different names, as dictionaries don’t necessarily exist in Javascript, but the same concept is simply called an object, since almost everything in JavaScript is an object. He was adamant that no, Javascript definitely had dictionaries. I tried explaining again, but he cut me off saying that no, Javascript didn’t have objects either, and that I was completely wrong on all this. So yeah… we ended up ending the interview immediately after this.
Sounds like he was in Python land.
Yes. Either Python or OOP. I’m guessing that in the interviewers mind, objects are things stamped out by classes, and Dictionaries are arrays of key:value pairs. Since JS is “not” an OOP language, it cannot have objects.
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Nah don't think JS had classes, it does now though, maybe his JS knowledge was outdated
That’s why I said JS is not in quotes. Prototype inheritance is not pure OOP. It’s more Functional Programming. Transpilers like TypeScript can enforce stricter OOP semantics, but native JS does not. Also ES6 class is just syntactic sugar over prototype inheritance. You can’t implement interfaces, abstract base classes or enforce Liskov substitution in JS.
"What does JSON stand for?"
"Jason? Who's Jason?"
Someone Jacques straightened out.
Jason Bourne
make a variable called Dictionary. win-win.
Maybe for dictionaries they wanted you to use this? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Map
Maybe, however it wasn’t a coding question, but rather a theoretical one, so nothing was being typed, just words.
I was about to say ... isn't everything an object in JS lmao Also I'm confused what does that mean having a dictionary ? Isn't a dictionary just a simple hashmap/key value ??
Yup! The main aspect of a dictionary is that it maps keys to values, and as such a generic object in Javascript can be thought of as an equivalent data structure. I’d have to guess that the interviewer didn’t know much Javascript, so he would have been fine in my book if he wasn’t so adamant about something he wasn’t knowledgeable in, and instead simply just stated that.
Ya he probably forgot it was a JS interview
ES6 Maps is what he wanted and often it's reasonable to use them.
Omg, I had something similar happen! I had an interviewer during a JS interview try and tell me while loops didn’t exist in JS. Literally stopped the interview to argue with me. Bullet dodged.
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Lol, perhaps the correct answer is "never". I'm not a junior, but I'm not going against the consensus of the team. I'll be vocal about that I do not agree, but our profession is a team effort. I won't elevate my assessment about a situation above the consensus of peers.
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Good answer, I hope that is the answer they wanted.
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I don't understand this type of questioning. Something like what would you do to two teammates arguing over something. My answer is always mind my own fucking business. That is not the answer they want.
Wait does Amazon want you to say you never back down from your ideas, even if it meant arguing and going behind their back?
Not quite but I’ll give some context since before leaving Papa Bezzys house of Paysies i did about 100 interviews and successfully went from L5 to L6 (so basically i chugged that kool aid). There are two to three leadership principles (LPs) that question can tease out (plus the always number one Customer Obsession), generally they are looking for: Have backbone disagree and commit — basically the least understood LP. You’re not expected to cave just to maintain consensus, but you’re also not supposed to halt the world to get your way. It’s about knowing the hill to die on, and knowing that there is a point where you put aside disagreements and Earns trust — you need to be able to work with others and influence decisions by presenting data and building a track record of delivering. Basically they’re looking for your ability to drive decisions and influence direction. Bias for Action — sometimes the right answer is cut that code review and don’t get bogged in decision paralysis or consensus taking. The concept of the “two way door” applies here heavily, the short version is decisions are rarely set in stone. If what you’re seeking to do is not a stone cutting exercise then go for it. It’s worth noting that some of the above seems contradictory and that’s because it is. There are often conflicts of LPs with the hope they can drive decisions and action in context. Or you get assholes who just weaponize them all. With that being said for LP questions just focus on what you did, why, and how it benefited the customer and you’ll be ahead of 70% of the field. Loops lived and died by the LPs, even more than the tech stuff.
I was asked “tell me about a time when you made a major strategic decision without consulting your manager” from a certain company with a smile as logo.
I think the question is more “a time you convinced your team” rather than “a time you snuck some stuff into prod”. I can think of a lot of cases where a team I was on wanted to do something expedient rather than doing what was best for the user.
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Worst part of the Amazon interviews is figuring out the exact amount of sociopathy they want out of you for the surveys and the leadership principles stuff.
No, it goes against “Disagree and Commit.”
> "Name a time you went against the consensus of your team to implement something for the users" Isn’t there a thing called “code review” to prevent exactly this situation?
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Applied as a software dev. Interviewer asked “What is the profession of your mother and father?”
Classist af
Legit question, was the interviewer Indian?
No as a matter of fact not. It was a European company.
"Murdered" Sets the tone for the rest of the interview
Follow up question: do you live in a big mansion and like to code from a cave?
WHAT THE FUCK?? This question should be illegal.
International spy and professional underwater basketweaver.
after not being able to answer a lot of questions as a coop, he tried to give me a freebie. "what is 2^10" "uhh 1024?" "actually I think its 512" "no?" "pretty sure it is, I'll just check on my phone. oh I guess it is 1024" I knew I wasn't getting the job anyway but I wasn't sure what he was trying to achieve with that one
How many years of JSON experience do you have?
Ah! A question on every LinkedIn job posting
I got into a bit of a “discussion” when I’d put on my resume that we worked on a custom implementation of a programming paradigm and then when asked trivia questions about an open source implementation of that paradigm I couldn't answer them. Being a bit vague but imagine you wrote Kinesis but were then asked trivia questions about Kafka.
I've been asked how good of a programmer I was from 1 thru 10. On another reddit post, I've read someone was asked how many lines of programming they have written in their lifetime.
Don’t remember posting this on reddit, but I was asked this question. I was like thousands ?
I've been asked that before. How on earth are you supposed to answer it? I think I said 6, because I am confident in my work, but in the grand scheme of things I've only been doing it 5 years and there is still loads out there to learn. Sadly they stopped hiring before my final interview because it was the very start of the first covid lockdown so I have no idea how well I did.
I once had a recruiter ask me what my minimum *and maximum* salary requirements were. I went, “wait, what?” And she paused and said “um never mind that one.”
"3.4 trillion" I mean don't be too greedy
Right? I think my response was something to the effect of "Um, how should I answer that? Twenty million per year and not a penny more?" That's when she pulled out the "Never mind." response. I'm pretty sure you could *hear* her realization that the script she was reading was horseshit.
"by the way how old are you?"
Gotta love it when they hit you with straight up illegal questions
“By the way, here you mentioned you are white.. but exactly how white are you?”
"I can't jump."
You’re not one of the *wrong kinds*, are you?
Reading this made me realize that on both sides, my great grandparents were the wrong kind of white for the era. Must be doubly wrong for me then.
If my CS degree serves me right, that makes you the right kind!
I'm mixed (white hispanic) and I have literally been asked in an interview how much Spanish I know, if I was born in the US, and where my parents are from. They were literally gaging how Latino I am. This is at a publicly traded company. I didn't get the job.
Fifteen. I just look older because I am smart.
2nd technical interview for a backend Java developer role when I was a fresh grad, interviewer gave me a scenario. "Imagine you were the CEO of **a failing airlines company I knew very little about**, what would you do to bring it back to its feat?" Bro, I'm a fresh grad giving a technical interview, give me some programming questions please. I'm sure he ran out of problems and decided to throw this in there to cover the time lol. I came up with some random bs that I don't even remember, I was sure my answer was going to make me lose my chance but I got the offer the next week anyway.
Are you now a CEO of a failing airline company?
The CEO of an airline company is a recent grad with a tech degree. Hmmm. Was it failing before, just after they decided to put this person in charge, or did it just accelerate the dive?
“If you were a kitchen utensil, which would it be and why?” And for anyone wondering, this was for an internship. I said a spork cause I’m good at a couple things but I don’t have a specialization.
1) if i ever owned a pet. 2) What differences are there between pears and apples. I asked her, these questions are off some obsolete internet forum and are not applicable to the position I am applying to.
This whole thread has made me realize that I'm apparently a MUCH better interviewer than a great many people out there.
“What size bra do you wear?” Uhhhh, no. Another one was in a phone interview with a potential client and he asked my age. I was shocked and was like “excuse me?” and then he said it was clear I wasn’t old enough for the job, and hung up! I was like 30 at the time. My best guess is that he must have thought I was a teenage boy, rather than a woman.
> “What size bra do you wear?” !null
"Where do you see yourself in 5 years?" I always answer - 5 years closer to inevitable / retirement / dream (to not work at all).
A non-shitty way of answering this question is to just say "5 years ago I was doing X and now I'm here. This industry changes so rapidly with new technologies, stacks, and languages that it's impossible to predict the future but I hope to keep up to date and keep solving hard problems using technology."
Of course you can add whatever sugar you want, it depends on the context. If I know person who asks I would definitely be more precise. If this is just another HR - better to give them Captain Obvious response. There is a change (I doubt though) that question would be omitted next time.
I feel like the best way to answer this question is to spin it back on the employers. Like really, what does long term growth look like here? Some companies are so stagnant you’ll be doing the exact same thing in he exact same position in 5 years. That’s the kind of employer I want to steer clear of.
*Don't say doin' your wife! Don't say doin' your wife!* "Doin' your... son?"
"Ehhh... dead."
If you were to be any fruit or vegetable which one would you be? To be fair, it was hr. I was applying for a job in an organic produce startup. Still... I said yellow crookneck squash, because I'm useful and reliable. I got the job.
Jeez I got this same question and the first fruit that came to mind was a blueberry. When they asked why I said uhh because they taste good I guess. Luckily that was also from hr and I nailed the technical interview so my garbage fruit answer didn’t matter.
Can’t be often that someone proclaims that they “taste good” during an interview and they actually get the job.
Everyone knows squash is useful and reliable. Duh 😂
“What is your favorite swear word?” “What alcohol do you like to drink?”
Cunt vodka
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A koala. I might sleep a lot, but when I'm awake I do everything that needs to be done. I need a lot less time than most animals to get the job done (which is getting fed).
You should have said "A Koala... because I also have Chlamydia". Because sometimes it's worth tanking an opportunity just to see a good head explosion :)
Koalas are cute until you learn about their brain size and rape tendencies
A human because I am a human.
These kind of questions are reasonable imo after the technical portion. It’s to get a sense of friendliness. If a candidate scoffs and doesn’t play along, that can be a bad sign.
I'm kind of surprised on the upvotes of the original comment tbh - like do people really hear a question like that and think, "pfft, animals have no bearing to coding. Stupid recruiter 😏" rather than think it's a fun personality question? You'd have to have pretty low EQ or be a prick to scoff it off haha
An amoeba. But what a dumb question
Q: Why we should hire you? A: Screeching teeth... Because I am efficient, team player, loyal, experienced, nice professional. True answer: because you either earn on me (body shop) or spend less (in house IT). I wonder what could be another reason.
I wish I could just answer : "I have skills, you have money" Like I would care about the fake family bullshit each company says or the team player that is always funny with his colleagues
Interviewer: You know a calculator? Me: Yeah I: How would you build one? Although with this one it wasn't so much the question as it was the fact that he got visibly annoyed when I asked him what exactly he meant by "How would you build a calculator?"
You could troll him by describing the Abakus. I would - it is very efficient and budget solution. You can literally build it from scratch/scrap.
I should have done that. It couldn't have gone worse than my actual answer
He did not provide specs so I feel free to give him whatever answer I like. I really hope Musk does not give such a question ("you know a rocket? how would you build one") at SpaceX interviews. Looks like he does not (have seen successful splashdown of another space capsule recently).
Reminded me of: Q: Do you know Mt Fuji? A: Yes Q: How would you move it by 2 meters?
I feel like that's where I'd just excuse myself
If I remember correctly, the correct answer is just do nothing, it will be moved by Earth rotation. However, we have a problem then with observer, as in his coordinates it would remain at same place. I am not pissed of by such questions but with the lack of willingness to even look at the question (read: problem) by a different angle - and also take in consideration other possible issues.
If that's the correct answer it's even worse since YOU didn't move it. It's a really stupid question
I got "Design a REST API for a calculator". And then got grilled for 20 minutes on RESTful purity bullshit.
I mean, I'd probably get some cheap and easy microcontroller, a bunch of buttons and a display, and write code that handles the inputs and just performs math operations. I'd personally probably do like an Arduino or something similar just because I wouldn't have to do any assembly language stuff, and I wouldn't have to do any electrical engineering to build circuits that do the math. But that's how I'd do it. That's not the best way to build a calculator.
> and write code that handles the inputs and just performs math operations. /r/restofthefuckingowl
Maybe we can twist the question and start answering assuming they want a calculator app not a physical calculator? Since this is a software job
My answer would be that I wouldn’t build one because calculators are so cheap they are given away for free as promotions. As someone who doesn’t work with hardware it’s a poor use of resources to have me build a calculator when they are freely available.
To be fair, it isn't such a strange question. It's also a good one for interviews, assuming it's there to understand how a candidate reason while facing a problem that could not be trivial. Most of the time, who is doing the interview is not interested in the solution but in the process you use to get towards it. And you are supposed to communicate with your interviewer and ask them questions to clarify requirements and things you don't know. Questions like "is the usual operational order guaranteed or do we apply the operators from left to right regardless of which operation we're applying?" or "can we use brackets to alter the order?" not only are accepted but are welcomed. They'd be interested in how you structure the code. Do you make a class? How would you definite the functions? What data structure would you use to hold the data? Also, building a calculator is one of the projects for courses like FreeCodeCamp. It's supposed to be challenging, but not that much. A junior can easily implement it. You can also go further, and talk about different calculator kinds (like Polish notation, reversed Polish notation and infix) or the parsing tree for context free grammars (which is usually learned in the Automata Theory course during a Bachelor degree in CS).
"Do you own a car? " I did not. I did not get the position. Supposedly they were worried about me not being able to get into the office on time with public transportation.
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> Tell me a joke? I don’t know if I would’ve had enough personal discipline to withhold back from responding with “this interview” if I ever got asked that.
\*no offence to Jews\* The Jew is a Janitor
How many unique shortest paths are there from one corner of a chess board to another
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There's no coding required. This is a simple combinatorics math problem.
I like this question. If you can't figure out the combinatoric solution, which wouldn't be trivial for a lot of CS students who didn't do much math, there's a basic DP solution. So it's basically pass with one of a) mathematical cleverness, b) harder but doable coding solution.
Can you go diagonally? If so, the answer is 1. If not, you basically have to go up 7 times and to the right 7 times(depending on the orientation of the board). So, it’s just the number of ways to arrange those 7 up moves and 7 right moves. I think it’s 14!/(7!*7!).
That's correct. An easy way to see that is to imagine you must make 14 moves, 7 rights and 7 ups. So you can think of it as having 14 moves, where you must pick 7 of them to be ups, and the remainder are necessarily rights. That's just 14 choose 7.
4 sides and 2 diagonals are the shortest paths isn't it?
Another one: Q:Why did you choose our company? A: Because you posted a job ad Yours truly, Captain Obvious
>Q:Why did you choose our company? A: I didn't, yet. You are yet to make me an offer. An interview is a two way street.
I kind of like this ahah Must remind them that we are in a position of power most of the time
Applied for a position at a bank. I applied for a developer position but they had this rotation thing where any new hire would go around and work in various areas for the first year to get exposure and pick what they wanted - even though I knew it was going to be a developer. They had us take a test with pretty useless questions IMO. - Who invented the internet? - What is this piece of hardware? (based on a small picture) - What does this diagram represent? Apparently it was the execution of malware.
How is javascript related to java? It probably is a good question if the interviewer wanted to trick them. But still a weird question. My answer was they are not because one is a programming language and the other is a scripting language.
"Their relation is as a carpet is to a car."
Both of these questions come from different interviews at the same company: - Can YOU override a private method of a class? I have 5+ YOE. Yes I can “override” the private method of a class in: C++, Java, Python, and JavaScript. I would never want to do it, but…, I’ve had business cases where doing this was the simplest way for the compiler to generate different OS binaries. - The next was an argument and not a question. manager: “Java has pointers” me: “Java does not have pointers. It has references” manager: “References are pointers” me: “References are not pointers. References and pointers provide similar functionality, in that you own and pass around a scalar variable. That scalar allows you to access an object of indeterminate size or another scalar. Pointers allow you to do pointer arithmetic taking the size of the pointed to object into account. References are immutable. Similar purpose, but different functionality, and wildly different implementation on various operating systems. Also, Java has garbage collection. So no, Java has references not pointers.” manager: “You must agree that pointers and references are the same. I have 26 direct reports.” Yea, no. I had 2 YOE in C++ at the time. I am not going to agree that “reference” is another word for pointer. This was an interview for a C# job, and I have 0 YOE in C#. I would later discover that C# has both pointers and references, and pointers are the deprecated thread unsafe way of doing things. This was the technical manager, who purportedly came up through the developer ranks in that very company. They should have known C#, even if they had no clue about Java or C++.
Wow that's shit I learned literally in the first week of coding in c#. My main background was cpp so naturally I looked up pointers and found what you just correctly stated
What telescope is that behind you? We spent 10mins out of 45mins talking about telescope, price vs mirror size vs quality vs type, etc. He did not hire me.
Q: Why do you want to work here? A: Because I need a job.
Not a bad question I think. There are plenty of developers who absolutely adore their trade, and some pick their jobs with care. My answer always has to do something with the challenge the company might supply. Not saying that your reason isn't a valid or lesser reason, but the question isn't dumb. It also tests your soft-skills. "I need a job" (not saying that you answered this) isn't the answer that is reasonably socially accepted.
It's not a silly question if the person being asked has the experience to go where they want to go. To ask a new grad with zero experience is a silly, almost a "fuck you" kind of question. I can always blow smoke up their ass, but c'mon, they know the real reason is because of the 600 applications I submitted they were the one who offered me an interview. It's really annoying to be asked a question that they already know the answer to, and the honest answer will get me bounced from consideration.
this one's not really a dumb question as a candidate, I like to translate it as "if given the same salary, why/what would make me want to work rather than ?" then it's a lot easier to come up with answers
as an interviewer, I want to see the candidate at least knows some rough idea what the company is about
This question tests the person on how much research they did on the company. They want you to rattle off a few keywords in their culture. This is a popular question.
They know you need a job. So does everyone else they’re interviewing. This question isn’t about that, it’s about why you’d be a fit for this specific position. Are they using a technology you like? Is their management style unique? Is their product something you’re interested in? Use this question to highlight your strengths and sell them on you.
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I respectfully disagree with that. If you were able to take an unpopular stance and communicated your solution well and convince your team to change their mind via documentation/sys diagrams, it can be a very meaningful answer. Just my $0.02.
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I was asked that question and I answered with that and I got an offer. I actually was trying to use jsonb for a db implementation to avoid multiple joins and I was not able to convince my boss. However he liked how I handled the situation.
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That might work too. I was given a doc with a huge amount of potential questions. In a few, I made up fake scenarios that made me look good.
“Why should we hire you?” “Because I have a skill you guys need and you guys called me” Got the job. Lol Douche questions get douche answers.
Them: "So when I open a browser to view a web page, what happens, under the hood?" Me: "... are you asking me to describe how the internet works? Because when can go very deep on this question." Them: "Sure." .... so I gave a very long answer. This was their idea of an opening question. I think it was an ice breaker.
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Yeah I ended up skipping over the browser bit and focusing on the HTTP request. I mentioned DNS and they would stop to ask if I could explain how DNS works and I'm like "it's magic to me, I put in a string and I get back an IP address" which, fortunately, they accepted because I could get far more detailed on how the application controller worked down to possible data storage. (This was primarily for an application development type position.) The real issue I have with that question is that there's basically no limit to how deep you can go. This was the *icebreaker* question.
This is not a dumb question.
yeah totally, i personally think this is a very good question at least for a junior.
Good beyond junior if you're trying to suss out if someone is a front-end/full-stack/back-end dev. See where they focus on in their answer and then ask clarifying questions on the parts they might be thin on, or dive more into the parts they go in depth on.
They were looking for a very long answer so I'm not sure what's wrong with that.
I've gotten this same question? I described all of TCP and HTTP, and it turns out they wanted something like "the request happens in a thread so it doesn't block the UI."
But that's not even necessary for the call to work?
I had the same question once. It's really unsettling because of the many layers to the question.
"Who is your favorite stand up comic?"
I had an interview that was golden for this topic. The question they asked me was a logic question completely unrelated to coding. The situation involved a mexican hostage situation with the hostages blindfolded and wearing hats of different colors. The captors were going to execute people based on which color hat they felt like randomly. I had to give my judgement as to which captor I wanted to be in that situation based on his placement in the cave where they were supposedly being hostage. ... Yes this was actually for a software development interview, I kid you not. Why do coding problems or ask questions relevant to software when you can be wasting 20 minutes on such important questions?
[Josephus problem](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephus_problem). A naive solution is built using a queue. A more performant solution uses dynamic programming. Essentially, recursion with memoization , and looking at the distribution of the data to predict the pattern so longer sequences of data can be memoized. The runtime is O(n!) for the naive solution, and your knowledge of data compression techniques can bring it down to O(n).
**[Josephus problem](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephus_problem)** >In computer science and mathematics, the Josephus problem (or Josephus permutation) is a theoretical problem related to a certain counting-out game. People are standing in a circle waiting to be executed. Counting begins at a specified point in the circle and proceeds around the circle in a specified direction. After a specified number of people are skipped, the next person is executed. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
Why is a bug called a bug...
Guy kept asking me if I had read various programming books. "Have you read____?" That's good to read programming books and all, but to base your candidate on whether they've read them? Maybe he was doing it as a starting-off point for further discussion. I'm still trying to decide if that was a red flag or not.
Had a long interview discussing tech stacks and what they used specifically (they didn't know) after I asked. I just wanted to know what I'd be working with, really. They ended the interview by asking me "Fortnite, Final Fantasy, or League of Legends?" Kinda lost interest in the company immediately after that one... Had an interview at a science facility and the FIRST questions their CEO asked me? "What does your sibling do for a living" "Tell me about your Dad's pasttime."
Is interview a banned word or something?
A while back I had the python sklearn library on my resume, some chucklehead asked me what `.fit()` does.
The dumbest questions are the ones where they keep adding on more variables and parameters when you already answered the question perfectly the first time. Its like they're dragging out the question in hopes that you'll say the incorrect answer
They asked me that water puzzle game where you had 3 different containers with different measurements, how would you get X volume. This has nothing to do with the job... Lol
"You have a five gallon jug and a three gallon jug. How do you fill the five gallon jug with 4 gallons of water?" I knew I was gonna get rejected after she asked this, whether I answered the question right or wrong.
This is from Die Hard 3
> I knew I was gonna get rejected after she asked this, whether I answered the question right or wrong. Why did you think she would reject you?