Interviewing

july 14, 2008 : steve kong : 4 comment(s)

As an effort to help streamline hiring at work, we are now doing interviews with representatives from different groups under the same business group umbrella. I don't know how the hell I got picked, but I represent my group during these interviews. I hate interviews. I hate getting interviewed. I hate giving interviews. I have only one standard tech question that I ask interviewees:

Given the string "aaaabbbccdddddeefaabbbbccef", write a script for me that returns: "4a3b2c5d2e1f2a4b2c1e1f". This was a question that was asked by my former director when I was interviewing to join Yahoo!. It's a pretty nice question that lets me see how one thinks through a problem (or even if someone tries to think through a problem. The answer seems easy, but it has some twists.

Other than that, I try to ask questions that are based on the resume of the interviewed. Know Perl? Tell me the easiest way I can get only the hosts common between two text files. Know Red Hat Enterprise Linux? Tell me the easiest way to find out the CPU in a box and how many cores it has. Vi or Emacs? I'm curious, what kind of questions have you gotten or do you give at interviews. What do you think about the whole interview process?

Comments

You ask an RLE question as well? I would totally fail out of i had to interview at Yahoo today.

alice

July 18, 2008 @ 09:12 AM

I'd totally fail out of an interview Yahoo nowadays too :)

mookie

July 18, 2008 @ 09:35 AM

(btw, i thought that was an rle question)

mookie

July 18, 2008 @ 09:35 AM

Part of me want's to create a CPAN package called Interview. use Interview; print Interview::rleEncode($_ARGV[0]); I'll let others implement: Interview::nPrisonerLightSwitchProgression($_ARGV); Interview::decimalPointOfPi($_ARGV); and Interview::currentNumberSewerCoversInCountry($_ARGV) { print "slightly more than the number of sewer holes." }

July 18, 2008 @ 01:13 PM

ultramookie