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I've used this in interviews for developers.

How do you use it? It doesn't necessarily seem intended to be solved (especially since it doesn't have a unique solution).

Brain teasers are just like any other interviewing tool - what matters is how you use the tool. As an interviewer, if you use brain teasers to determine *how* the candidate is attempting to solve the problem, you are probably doing it right.
If you are using the brain teaser to tick a box in your checklist based on the answer, you're probably doing it wrong.

I've used this in interviews for developers. I probably wouldn't do this for a straight-up code monkey. I do this for more complex roles that interact with more systems than I can directly hire for.

For example, I have an application which uses crystal reports that get updated every year or so. So while experience with CR is a plus, I can hire someone who will be able to learn enough about CR to get the job done when the time comes. Same thing with PL-SQL, DOS batch files, Cron jobs, FTP servers, LDAP, XML, and about a dozen other technologies. These are all areas that are not day-to-day issues, but could break or need to be updated at any time.

I can hold out for someone who knows everything, but I'm more interested in finding folks who can learn new things and have good troubleshooting skills. Even for the core technologies in my application, I know things will break in some way we've never seen before. It's what Dick Cheney called the known unknowns.

So for my brain teaser, I have absolutely no interest in the answers given during the interview. It is all about how they handle the question. Do you take a few moments to study the problem or just start talking right away? What assumptions do you make about the 'rules' of the puzzle? Are you able to articulate a plan for finding a solution?

At the heart of it, I'm more interested in what someone can learn than what they know.

After my latest round of interviews for an open developer spot on my team, I decided the skills I'm looking for in IT can be identified by this test:

http://www.drunkmenworkhere.org/170

Hehe nice test - quite frustrating though (just like IT I suppose).

I'm down to just one wrong answer. Deduction only got me about 8 or 9 answers and a few other eliminations, so it was whack a mole after that. I think I'll give up now while I still have some of my sanity left. Hmmm... this really is starting to sound like IT.

After my latest round of interviews for an open developer spot on my team, I decided the skills I'm looking for in IT can be identified by this test:

http://www.drunkmenworkhere.org/170

Notice there's no mention of code, development methodology, or any other IT concepts.

And that's fine by me, because all those things change. I don't need a Windows IIS guru, because we're likely to switch over to Apache Tomcat next year. I don't care how l33t your PHP skillz are, I want to know how useful you are going to be when we need to move all the code over to JAVA.

Basically, I want to know how well you can answer the questions I don't yet know to ask. New technologies, new challenges, new bugs. I need to know how well you can think.

There you are. That's the skill need in IT--past, present, and future. Can you think?

Their results are getting better all the time. In a time where Google is having troubles staying up to date and MSN search is still lacking, it seems the others must be afraid. The newest public sign of results can be seen on http://www.alltheweb.com/ with the Yahoo powered Live search.

I'm not applauding them nor affiliated with them, all I'm saying is that it is clear that inside Yahoo they want to aggressively compete and are up for it. At least that is a good thing, for starters it puts the pressure on Google. Likewise in such a situation it's clear they don't want/need MS. So this has all been an irrelevant exercise, the outcome was clear before the game started, so this is probably all aimed at internal MS politics or something. Some manager just proved a point. Probably about internal re-allocation of money. So, in the end, you might have a point, as the game might be aimed at getting more budget for MSN search. But now I'm just guessing.

Meanwhile, for no good reason, here's some gorgeous stats porn on how Google (and Yahoo and MSN) crawled a sample website. The animations and closeups of the trees are very cool.

The graphs produced by HP resemble this self-referential meme: a meme tree that maps its own propagation.

As for Qix, I'm simply direct you to my earlier post. That game really rocked. Big time.

A comparison list of blog features? I bet no site can beat the drunkmen's blog service. Not only is it cram loaded with features like RSS, it is the easiest posting mechanism around: automatically generated posts!

Check the slasdot blog: slashdot.drunkmenworkhere.org

How's that for google blog clog?

A comparison list of blog features? I bet no site can beat the drunkmen's blog service. Not only is it cram loaded with features like RSS, it is the easiest posting mechanism around: automatically generated posts!

Check the slasdot blog: slashdot.drunkmenworkhere.org

How's that for google blog clog?

This mirror of the Copyright^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hleft Society is an interesting read.