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I agree with you. The puzzle solver ABSOLUTELY hate it if you somehow say that the question is flawed. Ie if you think outside the box and render their hypothet

I agree with you. The puzzle solver ABSOLUTELY hate it if you somehow say that the question is flawed. Ie if you think outside the box and render their hypothetical situation flawed. It’s as if they didn’t spend enough time to realize that they are missing the forest for the trees.

paulgrant999 8y ago
lol. I rolled something that was patentworthy by a researcher at one of the FANG-sized corps (from scratch). Corrected a theoretical flaw that rendered the algorithm request impossible mathematically. Detected and solved a much larger semantic problem (which fixed permanently the problem they were trying to solve). And the "coder" was only concerned about "why I chose to log" -- "so I can break the job down, pause and resume - since you didn't include ms timestamps I had to come up with a way to partition the log into parallelizable, resumable chunks". -- They were extremely upset about the flawed spec. They couldn't understand either the patentworthy algo; or most of the programs actual key details. -- Also, they lied about being a coder. - Now what, a I supposed to do with that. You asked, for a professional. You got one. Not my problem if you only hire hacks. -- Even worse on the devops side.
Drdrdrq 8y ago
To be fair, almost everyone hates it when you show them they are wrong. Especially in the setting where they are supposed to be judging you, remember? And even in normal settings it pays to think about how some critique will be received by the other side. It's a slippery slope in the interview... For me it would raise red flags if the flaw was pointed out in an inappropriate manner. After all, this is the person who would be involved in code reviews where sensitivity to other people's feelings (and egos) is very important.
- Matumio 8y ago
  > they are supposed to be judging you, remember? It's actually supposed to be mutual judgement. But I agree: be respectful if you decide to drop a remark about the relevance of the question. There are enough reasons to treat people with respect even if you can afford to turn them down.
  - Drdrdrq 8y ago
    > It's actually supposed to be mutual judgement. Agreed, I was being sarcastic.
    - audience_mem 8y ago
      It didn't come across as sarcastic to me, btw
gdy 8y ago
"It’s as if they didn’t spend enough time to realize that they are missing the forest for the trees." In their eyes, they have given you a problem involving a tree from the graph theory and you are insisting on an "out of the box" solution involving woodpeckers. Let me elaborate. Usually hypothetical situation is just a way to talk about an abstract problem. It's easier to visualize and to talk about an egg falling and breaking (or not) than abstract measurements. Now what you call 'thinking outside the box' is just attacking the irrelevant details of an imaginary situation which is there purely for convinience and can be replaced with another hypothetical situation corresponding to the same abstract problem.

paulgrant999 8y ago

lol. I rolled something that was patentworthy by a researcher at one of the FANG-sized corps (from scratch). Corrected a theoretical flaw that rendered the algorithm request impossible mathematically. Detected and solved a much larger semantic problem (which fixed permanently the problem they were trying to solve). And the "coder" was only concerned about "why I chose to log" -- "so I can break the job down, pause and resume - since you didn't include ms timestamps I had to come up with a way to partition the log into parallelizable, resumable chunks". -- They were extremely upset about the flawed spec. They couldn't understand either the patentworthy algo; or most of the programs actual key details. -- Also, they lied about being a coder. - Now what, a I supposed to do with that. You asked, for a professional. You got one. Not my problem if you only hire hacks. -- Even worse on the devops side.

Drdrdrq 8y ago

To be fair, almost everyone hates it when you show them they are wrong. Especially in the setting where they are supposed to be judging you, remember? And even in normal settings it pays to think about how some critique will be received by the other side. It's a slippery slope in the interview... For me it would raise red flags if the flaw was pointed out in an inappropriate manner. After all, this is the person who would be involved in code reviews where sensitivity to other people's feelings (and egos) is very important.

Matumio 8y ago
> they are supposed to be judging you, remember? It's actually supposed to be mutual judgement. But I agree: be respectful if you decide to drop a remark about the relevance of the question. There are enough reasons to treat people with respect even if you can afford to turn them down.
- Drdrdrq 8y ago
  > It's actually supposed to be mutual judgement. Agreed, I was being sarcastic.
  - audience_mem 8y ago
    It didn't come across as sarcastic to me, btw

gdy 8y ago

"It’s as if they didn’t spend enough time to realize that they are missing the forest for the trees." In their eyes, they have given you a problem involving a tree from the graph theory and you are insisting on an "out of the box" solution involving woodpeckers. Let me elaborate. Usually hypothetical situation is just a way to talk about an abstract problem. It's easier to visualize and to talk about an egg falling and breaking (or not) than abstract measurements. Now what you call 'thinking outside the box' is just attacking the irrelevant details of an imaginary situation which is there purely for convinience and can be replaced with another hypothetical situation corresponding to the same abstract problem.