OK, but I was showing them some stuff I'd already done, not creating something new. No whiteboarding or anything, just like a software demo and showing some of the more interesting pieces of the code.

I noticed they didn't ask for a project I've done, just a presentation where the audience learns something and gets a feel for how I approach difficult problems.

My plan is to present hierarchical state machines. This is a design pattern I've used successfully for a long time. I don't think it's widely known? so some of the audience will learn something. It is representative of how I approach difficult problems.

I'll include code from projects where I used it.

My concerns:
* they expect something different?
* it's a complicated topic for a short presentation?

but I am outweighing those with: the engineers will learn something interesting.

Right - which I can do all day. It's in my presentation.

I'd like to learn about hierarchical state machines.

me too

I think we do something like this for senior (director+) hires.

You don't make them figure out what this.length is?

k, I'll share

The key, as with women, is to absolutely not give a **** what the outcome is.

If this is impossible, at least try to pretend you don’t.

Might work with women, but code doesn’t care how much confidence you project.

I neg my code all the time. 10% performance increase! Wonderful!

I touch my code in non-threatening places to establish a rapport.

@Rusty - thanks for the response.
@suzzer - Congrats on new job. In the grand scheme of things, seemingly it worked out well for you. Pretty sure you are exaggerating about your apprehension with white board coding challenges. If not time to move on.

I'm muddling through them. But all these places have some kind of a metric about how fast you get through, how far, what innovations etc. I'm middle of the pack at best right now. I can basically prove my resume probably isn't a fraud, but I'm not impressing anyone.

I completely aced the realistic one about building a like button widget and how you'd store it. I just suck at the super abstract stuff right now. Here's one I got a couple days ago:

Imagine an array of ints that corresponds to wall height, from left to right. So basically a bar chart. Calculate how much water the bar chart will hold (if you poured water all over it).

I muddled through but I didn't wow anyone. The funny part was the guy giving the problem (greybeard) got just as mixed up as I was at a couple places.

I think it will change once I get back to serious coding. I'm just really rusty right now. It's gonna take a month or two to get back up to top speed I think.

I grab my code by the pussy. When you're a star it lets you do it. You can do anything.

is your offer from the company with grey beard?

Nope. Kinda hot Asian lady who really liked me and she's the only one I talked to.

Is this a trick question? A wall or a bar chart has no volume so it holds zero amount of water, except for maybe a small amount of film clinging to the surface. Did they want you to be a mind reader about the requirements? Maybe assume that they're asking for the area of the bar chart assuming water behaves like a liquid in 2d?

If that's the case then this would be my attempt:

I don't think this is right. Consider [10, 1, 10]. The water would fill in the 10x2 area. Also, as written, factor spaceBetweenBars.

Though is a horrible question given how much room for confusion there is.

yeah, I just figured out why my thing won't work and came here to post that.

Lots of interview questions are intentionally confusing or ambiguous. The point is to get you to ask questions to flesh out exactly what you're trying to solve.

Yeah, I don’t see a problem with a somewhat ambiguous question or one that you have to think about a bit. Figuring out what exactly people are asking you to do is a pretty big part of most jobs.

Sorry in the interview there was a diagram too.

But yeah assume it's 2D water. So arr=[2,6,3,2,4,1] would hold 3 sq. units of water as only arr[2] and arr[3] would have water over their heads.

I don't understand it at all lol, I think I'd need the diagram (and then probably the expected result!)

Imagine you filled all the empty space in this panel up with water. How much water would it hold? Expected answer is 5 "units" (ignore the y axis labels), because only Susan would hold any water and only up to the level of Millie.