A classically terrible interview question. Solving riddles in realtime is almost never a real job skill. _Maybe_ in an incident, but you’d be relying on tooling and experience, not an intern.

Same with leetcode at startups. It makes no sense. You’re almost certainly not going to do algorithms work. It’s only relevant if you’re looking for people willing to grind bullshit, which is certainly some jobs, but, again, you’re almost never doing this under arbitrary time pressure with someone watching over your shoulder judging and not helping.

My advice: if you encounter this, don’t work there. If a company doesn’t value testing relevant skills for candidates, don’t expect leadership to be strong critical thinkers once you get there.

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arcfour 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The speed with which I can remember some obscure AIX partitioning-related fact during an incident, for example, is orders of magnitude faster than the speed with which I would figure out which of 12 marbles is slightly heavier than the others.

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xelxebar 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> I can remember some obscure AIX partitioning-related fact

Now you have my attention. I'd love to read about some of these trivia.

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prewett 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Not the GP, but I have one non-partioning AIX trivia I discovered by accident. Turns out that malloc(0) returns NULL on AIX, but non-null on Linux, SunOS, and Irix. (I was surprised multiple ways on that one!)

	▲	doubled112 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Sometimes I think "it's a UNIX system, I know this" but I've been caught by subtle differences before too. killall is very different between Linux and Solaris, for example. I would rather have not found this out on a client machine for the first time.
	▲	mjevans 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Now that you know, can you conceptualize reasons why each pattern might be a correct preference? Among those reasons, which would you prefer as a system? ^^^ THAT is how an Interview Question should work around this factoid.
	▲	shakna 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		That one has bitten me more than once

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jameshart 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This was an internship interview over a decade ago. Nothing wrong with a brain teaser interview question under those circumstances. What would you rather ask an internship candidate? They don’t have work experience or real world skills.

	▲	Waterluvian 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I’d be unsurprised if an interviewer who thinks that trivia isn’t a goofy waste of time also believes that young people don’t have real world skills. But a good interviewer would probably spend time getting to know the candidate’s character. Something I’ve learned from years of mentoring teens and raising kids is that there are qualities you cannot teach, and they’re enormously more valuable than any technical skills. I’m confident I can teach just about anyone any of the skills Microsoft employees find themselves milling away at. But I can’t teach that fire a 10th grader has where they go home and spend their entire weekend figuring out how to make their idea work in Java, even though they barely understand programming, and then swarm you at the door next week to proudly show it. That’s the kind of quality you seek to find in an interview. All the other stuff can be taught to anyone.
	▲	tyre 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I was interviewing interns before this, starting in 2013 or so. There are plenty of more useful questions you can ask. Tell me about a project you’ve worked on, then many follow ups, for example. Asking about group project dynamics or something they’re passionate about and involved with. Ask why they’re applying for this role, ask about difficult conversations or things they’re proud of. Ask about decisions they would do differently if they could go back and why. There are tons of ways to glean actually relevant information in an interview.

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coolThingsFirst 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Classical algorithms kind of thinking is similar to ML research.