So then what's the point of the interview at all? If it's so easy all anyone has to do is to read a quick primer to do well, then it sounds like it's nothing more than a symbolic act?

Programming/system development is an area where a pretty big pool of the work force are going to be introverts. A lot of introverts are by their nature going to do poorly at interviews - and it has nothing to do with what they know or how good they are/can be at their job.

The rest of your post was exactly the same point repeated over and over... how will they deal with managers? How will they deal with executives? How will they deal with cllients? These are not separate points "pointing out why what you're saying is ridiculous" - they're the same point repeated over and over and completly ignoring my multiple previous posts saying that my point is that doing poorly in an interview situation does not mean much when it comes to deciding how that person will do in an actual work situation.

Also, if you feel you have to include pointless insults in your posts, at least make them make some sense or at least be somewhat clever/amusing.

Ok.

FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!

There's tons of ridiculous patents. One click shopping. Dynamically loading content on a web page, etc. etc.

Sadly, I think you're a couple posts too late. My "Ok" is my, I no longer care about this argument.

Also what's the right answer? "Since Mt.Fuji is clearly an object I just call the .move() method on it and pass the distance"?

Someone that does well in an interview is more likely to do well in actual work situations imo. Assuming both did equally well on the programming related parts.
The questions people usually call idiotic and irrelevant are usually questions you can prepare for pretty well. And even if you have no idea or think the question is just plain dumb there's really nothing wrong with being nice about it.

Is it really that unlikely that someone like the first blog poster will just be an ass when some new intern asks him a simple question? Or maybe when some coworker asks him something he deems trivial. Or maybe if he gets some task to finish that may seem like moving Mt.Fuji to him he'll just argue endlessly instead of finding a solution?

I actually think the answer that tyler posted is "the right answer" or at least the right approach. You show that you can think critically and that you know how to object to stupid projects in the right way. I think a good interviewer (who for some reason was forced to ask a stupid question) would be able to take that candidate and run with the question.

Btw - for those interested the book 'Are you smart enough to work at Google?' deals with these kinds of interview-questions, giving a lot of examples and explaining different interpretations and "correct" answers as well as the general thinking behind this process. Some are nonsensical like the mt. fuji one, like "you are shrunk to be an inch tall and thrown into a blender that will start in 2 minutes - what do you do?", but a lot of them are interesting and good puzzles also.

There's nothing in patent law that says that you can't patent something obvious.

However, that vague description of that patent might suggest that it's a lot stronger than it is.

Hi Greg,

In my experience, this sort of response comes from defensiveness. No one responds this way simply because he thinks a question doesn't do a good job of distinguishing between good and bad candidates. Very few interview questions survive this sort of strict scrutiny and almost any question that gets the candidate talking has the potential to help the interviewer.

The candidate's ego was obviously threatened by this question and he's trying to soothe his ego by trying prove that the question and the interviewer are stupid. This is a natural response - I'm not good at X, but I'm a smart/good/valuable person, thus X is not a good test - but inability to deal with this natural response to present a more constructive attitude does not bode well for the candidate's ability to work with anyone other than his mother. This is especially terrible attitude for a technical hire, because technical situations are full of ego traps of this kind.


This is an overly defensive way to frame the situation (answering questions -> submissive) but if you do follow this frame, yes, having an ego that doesn't allow you to be in "submissive mode" is going to be a problem in any organization. When you join an organization, the hope, on the part of the organization, is that you will subordinate your own personal goals to the goals of the organization, when inevitable conflicts arise.


Hi MinusEV,

How do you assess these skills? Say you're a hiring manager and you have to hire people. What would you do?


But interviews are all you have. Doesn't any attempt to judge the candidate degenerate into an interview situation? Good interviewers instinctively know what instances of "doing poorly" in interview situations correlate with "doing poorly" in work sitautions and what instances of "doing poorly" don't. No one thinks how you act in interviews is a mirror image of how you act at work. But how you act in interviews does give the interviewer an idea of what kind of person you are.

I'd argue that the main problem with interviews isn't that they don't tell you much about how the person will do in an actual work situation, but that interviewers' agenda don't always line up with the organization's.

I was having a chat last week with a guy going into IT recruiting. He wanted advice on how to identify good people.

I came to the conclusion that stupid logic questions, while stupid and gimmicky, probably make sense if you're recruiting someone from the big corporate world, using technologies popular and specific to that world.

In all other cases I'd rather see published code.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventi...on-obviousness

I would guess it's the patent to the algorithm that displays a certain link based not only on votes. I would also guess votes aren't the only factor, else some links would stay on the main page forever. Say number of votes multiplied by a timer that goes from 1 to 0 as time passes by ( brand new is 1, 10 days old is 0.5 etc. ).

Make that a complex thing and I think you could patent it.

My bad.

One of the silliest ones I saw was something like an "Online 3-step registration process" which attempts to cover any on-line website that registers people in 3 steps lol.

Met a tech-patent lawyer at a convention in London recently, he was a very interesting person and said he could write a book about the misconceptions about patents in tech. I'm not saying they are right but hearing the other side of the argument would be very interesting.

ibetsports,

like a compiler and api documentation, a good set of headphones/earbuds is a critical item in the programmer's toolkit.

ibetsports,

i said good headphones.

My headphones probably are the best thing I've ever bought in terms of enjoyment, quality and long lastingness! I got HD650's and had them for years, amazing things that are comparable quality to my hi fi. Seriously good cans, worth every single penny.

I got the Bose AE2 ones and I really like them. Not everyone is a bose fan but these are super lightweight and have amazing sound quality.

haha that guy must have got 1tb&c'd in the interim. that's what you get for wearing ****ty headphones!

I bought the dorky Diablo 3 branded headphones in a moment of lunacy and they are actually pretty nice.

And they light up.

How far are you in d3? I'm stuck on the fat boss in act 3 on infeno, Ghom or whatever he is called, can't seem to not die

I'm only Act 1 in Hell, trying to farm enough to get better gear. Probably made a mistake in having 1 of each class going though.

Gold farming is ok in hell, but if you're gear farming you have to do it in Inferno, nothing decent drops in Hell

Ya, that's the biggest problem with the game. To get geared up for the next act you need to be in the next act. Dying a bunch of times to get a crappy blue gets really old...