On 7/23/20 3:26 PM, William Herrin wrote:
On Thu, Jul 23, 2020 at 6:33 AM Michael Douglas
<michael.doug...@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 would have probably asked whether he'd fire me if I started writing
code after 15 minutes of handwaving in real life.
Mike
