I'm in a 2 hour mandatory corporate leadership seminar. Takeaway so far: Coach K is like totally awesome. Coming up: Coach Knight. I'm gonna guess not totally awesome.

Any chance you can find out how much they get for speaking...gotta be sick $_$

had an interesting interview process a couple of weeks ago. I was given 4 days to prepare a case study and 30-45 minute presentation with demo of my proposed solution for the problem they gave me. they got to see how I present and communicate ideas, what I could create given some time (and they grilled me on my process, presumably to make sure I didn't have someone do it for me), and the presentation led to a natural discussion about some of my choices and how I'd handle other sorts of problems. the format wouldn't work for every type of job role, but I thought they did a good job of getting to dig into who I am and what I can offer.

Seems like a lot to do for the first step of an interview process. Something like this seems more appropriate for the final step of the interview process.

What kind of problem, how specific was it?

Did you get the job? I wouldn't be able to recover for a few weeks if I went through all of that and heard a no.

I'd also be a bit paranoid that they are trying to get free work or advice. If there is an ethical line that has to be drawn, I feel like an interview like this edges very close, unless you are getting paid like 200k.

Here's to hoping you are proven wrong!

I went a meetup about the MEAN stack today. It was kind of interesting how he described it. Then the aftertalk was about all of these tools and technologies people in the web sphere use. Just why why why?

Is it a common phenomenon to be unable to solve a problem, go to sleep, and wake up with the solution readily available in you head?

Just curious if I should come to expect this or not.

And will the dreams always involve naked French yoga instructors before it happens?

There's a word for that I think. But yeah that's basically what sleep is for. Organising thoughts. Pretty much your brain takes time off from running your body to defrag and normalize its data.

Yeah, happened to me too while working on problems that I obsessed over in C++ and assembly. Not so much on prolog b/c didn't care as much I guess.

Seems quite common.

Yep, your subconscious works on problems for you.

I never quite understood this. Happening upon a solution to a problem that you were thinking about before, but not presently, and in a way that has nothing to do with your present thought process, happens to me throughout the day, not just in the morning. Maybe I've been just sleep-walking or day-dreaming my whole life?

From Pragmatic Thinking and Learning.

I think it's the same sort of mechanism as if you're walking/cycling somewhere, you sort of go into a daze/deep thought and just appear where you were going. You never felt in danger though, but your brain was doing some complex problems navigating the roads without any concious thought at all.

Le Corbusier did something similar, he designed a chair for napping that would let his arms fall to his sides and wake him up if he started to doze

What I meant is, do most people experience this almost exclusively upon waking up from a night's sleep or a nap? I would never get anything done if it wasn't for random solutions popping up from my unconscious mind throughout the day. I don't know if I'm part of a small minority or other people also operate this way, but merely misattribute their spontaneous insight to conscious, effortful thought.

I'm pretty much in this state most of the day, except when I consciously choose not to be.

Is this something Thomas Edison actually said or other people's speculation? I love naps and require lots of sleep to function properly, but sleep feels much closer to general maintenance and system administration than research and development. I don't think your unconscious mind, especially in regards to tasks that you are consciously working on, works any harder while you sleep than while you're awake.

It seems more likely to me that if you're thinking about something right before you go to sleep, you're probably not working at 100% capacity due to being tired. Get some rest, wake up refreshed, it's easier to concentrate and figure out a solution.

I'm always skeptical of stories like those.

Its not that rare for me to wake up in the middle of the night and start thinking about a problem I'm trying to solve. Usually with pretty good results (at least for technical problems that are solvable - not so good for problems that aren't).

On the interviewing front, today was the first real interview I've done where I was interviewing someone for a position that I'm in no way knowledgeable enough to be doing myself. Kind of an interesting problem - since if we had someone knowledgeable enough to do the interviewing we wouldn't need to hire someone.

I've always wondered how non-technical founders of start-ups find a good technical co-founder (when they don't have/know someone already). This just reinforces that its probably just a crap shoot for most of them.

well, in my case, my waking thoughts were specifically:

'Who the hell was the yoga instructor?'

followed immediately by:

'Ah, here's the solution I couldn't even begin to figure out last night, completely solved with no additional work needed whatsoever.'

It's not like I started trying to work it in my head or anything, it was quite literally that the answer popped into my head as the second thought of the day.

I meant stories about historical/famous people.

Yeah, of course I have no idea whether Edison said it himself or not as I quoted it directly from a book I'm reading that I've referenced in that post. That's the only mention of him in it.

200k for 4 days work? Hmmm.

It should be obvious from the problem domain whether this is "free work" or a programming exercise and the follow up questions. I'd be more concerned that it was wasting the applicants time if it was too early in the process.

it was the bulk of my interview process. I was referred so I think I skipped a few steps. it definitely wasn't free work. the problem was right in the wheelhouse of what they do (distributed systems) and it's a pretty entry level data engineering position (I spent my 20s playing poker and have 0 real-world engineering experience), so they were interested in my ability to communicate ideas and think logically about problems rather than knowing a lot already.

I did get the position but wouldn't have been too torn up if I hadn't. the worst feeling is leaving an interview feeling like you didn't represent yourself well. preparing a presentation provided me the ability to have some sense of control over the interview, to some extent. I've never had a proper coding interview but think I would much prefer having to prepare something than having to write some code on paper/whiteboard under pressure.