My favourite interview question
I meant to add some context to this nugget I posted. I guess I'll do it here. Aside from the topic around the Monopoly interview question, the various quotes at the end were fun and thought provoking. For example,
"I’m exaggerating a lot, but the point is, when you select 1 out of 200 applicants, the other 199 don’t give up and go into plumbing (although I wish they would… plumbers are impossible to find). They apply again somewhere else, and contribute to some other employer’s self-delusions about how selective they are."
Joel on Hiring
LOL, I went to an interview a little while back, and the chief geek gave me about 6 pages of really obscure coding problems dealing with O notation and complicated algorithms. I had to sit there and do them on paper (not in a terminal with vim: phail), while the guys on the other side of the table mused about their response times to the same questions, while I suffered trying to write code with pencil and paper. Rather than just having a good discussion like "tell me something really f-kn cool you've worked on lately" , or "tell me something you did in the past that was a fail", we spent 45 minutes of this, wasting time until the CEO came in and talked the other 45 minutes about the virtues of the company.
During the course of this interview, I got to talk <5% of the time. Now really hard problem solving is not done in these confines; it is done in a relaxed and iterative fashion. This type of test was totally bogus in my mind and a horrible "Gauntlet" for weeding out candidates.
As I was interviewing the company, it became more and more apparent that it was not going to be a good fit. Later I replied back to the CEO about how bad the interview was.
Just curious: Did he get defensive/dismissive, or pay attention to your feedback?
