Will the Solve-the-Riddle Hiring Trend Affect IT?

An anonymous reader wonders: "It's probably harder to find a good developer, than for a developer to find a job. Seems to be a Google-riddle trend; rather than caring about references/diplomas/resumes, employers are using solve-this-and-you-have-a-job approach, not even caring about any usual information. Does that give decent graduates/talented unexperienced devs/homegrown coders a chance at the corporate job, or does it alienate potential matches?"

Comments

It Seemed to Work for Bletchley Park

[eldavojohn]

From the Wikipedia entry:

Some 9,000 people were working at Bletchley Park at the height of the codebreaking efforts in January 1945, and over 10,000 worked there at some point during the war. A number were recruited for various intellectual achievements, whether they were chess champions, crossword experts, polyglots or great mathematicians. In one, now well known instance, the ability to solve The Daily Telegraph crossword in under 12 minutes was used as a recruitment test. The newspaper was asked to organise a crossword competition, after which each of the successful participants was contacted and asked if they would be prepared to undertake "a particular type of work as a contribution to the war effort". The competition itself was won by F H W Hawes of Dagenham who finished the crossword in less than eight minutes.

Solving a crossword in under 12 minutes was the entrance exam. That's interesting. I remember reading about this in Simon Singh's The Code Book in the Chapter on Alan Turing.

I think the ability to solve puzzles is tightly correlated with the skill set desired by IT. Because it takes an inquisitive and unrelenting mind to hit the hardest puzzles. If they like to do this for fun, surely they can do it well for a living.

Perhaps it's even more important than the education because of the way IT problems arise? I constantly tell my boss that I complete the crossword everyday at work without fear of repurcussions. I feel this keeps my mind nimble and prepares me for the day.

Isn't a college degree just a symbol that says, "Look, a whole bunch of people with good reputations threw a bunch of puzzles at me. Some were hard, some were easy, but overall I did well enough to pass through these puzzles. I retained some of the information and processes but that's not really important. What's important is the fact that I'm able to solve problems and paid to do it for four years."

So, in the end, I predict this will have little or no effect on the IT world at all. In fact, I think it's a better shift towards hiring the most qualified person. For financial reasons, I went to the University of Minnesota but people on the East coast imagine a backwoods podunk frozen tundra instead of an institution of learning when I mention it. If I'm a good puzzle solver, it shouldn't matter.

Re:It Seemed to Work for Bletchley Park

[networkBoy]

You're making too much of it.

The average network diagram is so convoluted that it can not be accurately put on paper. Having a mind that can actually grasp what's really going on is a rare thing. It's simply another puzzle to be solved.
-nB

Re:It Seemed to Work for Bletchley Park

[Aladrin]

You hit the nail on the head there, twice.

Real IT problems aren't as easy as the Sunday crossword. The problem being that different people are good at different puzzles. But if you're bad at problem solving, it'll show up in your lack of ability to solve puzzles.

Even our small network here at the office was ugly to diagram out. I was amazed at what a pain it was. And the guy who installed the IP-based phones could not do his job until he drew it out on the whiteboard. We ended up fixing his drawing, then revising it several times as we re-ordered the office a bit for convenience. But we had to draw EVERYTHING for him. With extensive labelling. And we also had to call things by the names he learned in school. It had to be 'FQDN' and not 'domain name' or he'd be lost. (He did eventually figure that one out and start correcting us when we just said 'domain name', though.) He's exactly the sort of 'tech' the puzzles would have made sure they never hired.

Relying solely upon the puzzles is as crazy as relying on any other single part of the interview process, though. Our office is extremely smooth, and most people get along with most everyone else. A year prior to my hire, the office was not like this. Most people hated coming to work, including the owners. They instituted a personality test during the interview process and things got better quickly.

Just 1 more thing to help weed out bad apples, that's all.

Re:It Seemed to Work for Bletchley Park

[Monkelectric]

Yes and no.

Out here in Orange County, IGN Entertainment is infamous for their tests. I went in and nailed the interview. The next level to advance to was a test. The test was to implement a small web server (GET/HEAD commands basically) in C++ using *no external libraries of any kind*. They stated the test should take 3 - 4 hours. The specs were extremely vague and any attempt I made to get clarification was met with "do what you think is best".

They also mailed me the test late on a thursday evening, and were calling asking where it was the following monday morning. Problem being I was currently working 50/60 hours a week as well, and it just happened to be the weekend I was moving :(

I ask you then, how is anyone who currently *has* a job and perhaps a family supposed to complete a test like this? It seems like the most talented candidates would *HAVE* jobs and therefore find it much more difficult to complete the test. I rushed the program together because -- what choice did I have? It did not represent me well.

Looking back, the only appropriate response on my part would have been to say "Your requirements suck, and this is not a 3 to 4 hour job. Thanks but no thanks." The entire thing was a waste of their time, waste of my time. Maybe that was the test, to see if I'd tell them to fuck off.

Re:It Seemed to Work for Bletchley Park

[EastCoastSurfer]

These kinds of tests usually tell me I don't want to work at that sort of place. If they are going to expect an interview candidate to write a web server in a few hours, then what will they want when you work there? Expect to have demands like 'we need an entire application written this week, don't worry about design or figuring out what the application really needs to do, just write something.'

Re:It Seemed to Work for Bletchley Park

[Monkelectric]

Yea, but C++ is all about the details, and no external libraries meant you had to implement *EVERYTHING* ... no parsing tools (flex/yacc), no threading libraries, no file utilities. Not even simple things like path normalization.

In the "real" world you'd be a fool to implement any of those things.

Re:It Seemed to Work for Bletchley Park

[rlp]

'we need an entire application written this week, don't worry about design or figuring out what the application really needs to do, just write something.'

Wow, I used to work there too! Did you know Fred?

Re:It Seemed to Work for Bletchley Park

[nine-times]

The next level to advance to was a test. The test was to implement a small web server (GET/HEAD commands basically) in C++ using *no external libraries of any kind*.

So you had to GET/HEAD over a weekend? Was your wife allowed to help you?

Re:It Seemed to Work for Bletchley Park

[griffjon]

Fred... Fred... He wrote that big thing with no documentation, right? Man, do you have his contact info?

Re:It Seemed to Work for Bletchley Park

[Geoff]

Amen, brother.

I once had an interview where they handed me a few lines of abberent C code and asked what's the output. I answered that it didn't matter, because C code should never be written like that. Production C code should never look like an entry in the Obfuscated C contest.

That was the wrong answer, of course, and I didn't get an offer, but I figured a sysadmin job at a place that wanted me to be able to read obfuscated C entries probably wasn't the place I wanted to work anyway.

Geoff

Re:It Seemed to Work for Bletchley Park

[sesshomaru]

FRANK: When we talked, you only referred to him in the past tense. Do you remember that? Like he WAS an under-achiever, or he HAD very strong opinions. And I think the other one was: he WAS a very spirited kid.

[Frank slams his hand on the table.]

FRANK: Do you know something we don't?

ROE: Yes, I speak about Landon Bryce in the past tense, because there's a system in place, gentlemen, one that constantly evaluates our youths and our lives with no application of relativity. A 4.0 will succeed, a 2.5 will not. Below 750 on the SATs and certain doors close. A quality of person, sense of humor, heart, these are not on any applications. It's all about your numbers and although, yes, definitely Landon Bryce had it - that intangibility of soul that kept him in school, that could allow him to affect the quality of our lives for the better, that could lead people where they wished to go, Landon Bryce couldn't pass through the numbers. Numbers which tell a young person at 18 they're through. And unless there's some miracle of timing or events and greatness is thrust upon you, your life is over. Next? So, if I'm guilty of anything it's of giving in to this despicable system of numbers.

Millenium: A Room with No View

Re:It Seemed to Work for Bletchley Park

[TrebleJunkie]

If it takes you 2-3 hours to GET/HEAD, you're cruising the wrong street corners! ;)

Re:It Seemed to Work for Bletchley Park

[tricorn]

Writing a simple web server is trivial. It doesn't even need to be multi-threaded, though it wouldn't be difficult to make it serve multiple connections at once with select.

Someone who can't write the code to parse out a GET request is pretty lame. Heck, you SHOULD be able to write it all in 3-4 hours using nothing but system calls, no section (3) library calls at all. That is, you get to use socket, select, open, read, write. Write your own damned string parsing routines, most of them are about 3-15 lines long. No, you don't get to use malloc; include (and check) reasonable limits on string lengths, simultaneous connections, etc, then you won't need to dynamically allocate memory. If you insist, create your own memory allocator, using anonymous mmap to get more raw memory, but it won't be worth it. Might impress them, though.

Suggestion: create an index file mapping URL to static file to return. Look up the URL, return the file. Manage the index file manually, with Perl, with shell scripts, whatever, they didn't tell you how to administer the server. If you're feeling slightly ambitious and want to impress them, include the ability to run programs with simple arguments passed in on the command line. Heck, you could even include POST and PUT support without too much trouble, but that might take more than 3-4 hours to get it all working just right, dealing with multiple processes and pipes that can block, etc, all while also dealing with multiple sockets, any of which can close or die unexpectedly, can be a bit tricky. I'd start off writing a generic process-handler library and integrate it with the socket handler so everything can be run off of one select (or poll) call. But, if you do that, come up with a better solution than CGI.

Specifications? All you need to do is implement a subset of HTTP. If you can't look up the specs to that, I certainly wouldn't hire you. Since they didn't give you any other requirements, I'd consider the job done when a standard web browser (your choice) can connect to it and follow links. It's not like you have to implement PHP or JSP or whatever for the thing! I think 3-4 hours is reasonable. If you don't, you obviously weren't the right person for the job.

Re:It Seemed to Work for Bletchley Park

[ozbird]

Solving a crossword in under 12 minutes was the entrance exam.

I assume it was solving a cryptic crossword in under 12 minutes.

English cryptic crosswords are notoriously difficult, at least in part because of their assumed local knowledge (e.g. "Mayfair" stands for the two letters "WI".) I've seen one where virtually all of the clues referenced the answer of others - until you solve the key clues, you can't even start! Another had no numbers - you have to solve all of the clues first, then fit them together jigsaw style... Australian cryptics are much easier.

Re:It Seemed to Work for Bletchley Park

[tricorn]

Of course it was the wrong answer. The ability to analyze a bit of C code (whether or not you think it's "abberent") is an important skill, when determining what a piece of code IS doing as opposed to what it APPEARS to be doing or is DOCUMENTED as doing.

Re:It Seemed to Work for Bletchley Park

[j35ter]

Ummm, no one said it has to be an embedded server!
You could actually run the server under (x)inetd...should make this a 2 hour job of just parsing and handling file requests. The socket stuff should be obsolete in that case.

Re:It Seemed to Work for Bletchley Park

[tricorn]

A more obvious meaning for their request is that they want you to write a simple web server without pulling in a bunch of libraries already written that implement a web server so that you can write "HTTPserver server = new HTTPserver(localhost, "http"); return server.process("/usr/local/http");" and claim you know how to implement a webserver in C++. "of any kind" simply means that they include string parsing libraries, socket handling libraries, error logging libraries, or anything else. "external" is much more the relevant phrase, and OBVIOUSLY means "not part of the actual implementation of the C/C++ compiler suite". So yes, "new", "malloc", "printf" would be allowed. "3-4 hours" is also a pretty big clue as well - since that's a reasonable estimate of the time it would take to write something like that using only the language-standard facilities.

Saying "well, you SAID no external libraries of ANY KIND, so I took that to mean whatever would get me out of having to do it" certainly wouldn't impress me, unless you then went on to implement your own C compiler, operating system, Ethernet drives, TCP/IP services, wrote the web server for that, installed the whole thing as a boot block and brought it up by booting it straight from the BIOS. That would probably take a bit more than 3-4 hours, though, so it probably isn't what they meant.

Your approach is basically saying "hahaha, you guys suck, you don't even know what's implemented as libraries in a C++ program, so I'm going to show you up by saying it can't be done". You've shown that you'd be very difficult to work with.

Oldest riddle of all...

[Presidential]

"Where shall we have lunch?"

--Douglas Adams

Websense

[gEvil (beta)]

Hmm. Websense blocks proveyourworth.net because it falls in the 'sex' category. Now I'm really curious about what this riddle is...

Re:Websense

[grub]

It's just the goatse pic with "How?" printed below it.

Re:Websense

[ellem]

You can't even get around websense?

I am so NOT hiring you :)

Re:Websense

[smoker2]

Actually, the "H" and "W" are on either side .....

I've used them

[Cybert4]

Well, I tried to do riddles when I was hiring at a technology company. I liked to do mathematical ones that couldn't show any cultural bias. For example, deriving the quadratic formula. Or proving that the square root of two is irrational.

I like this. It's a lot better than the usual asking for "ten years in a five year old language". Cool trick too. I wonder how many people won't even get to the "view source" option!

Re:I've used them

[iapetus]

By the sounds of it you did show a cultural bias - towards people with a background in pure mathematics. If the work required that, then it's fair enough, but it shows next to nothing about problem-solving abilities. I dislike this - and not just because I didn't study pure maths to any particularly high level.

Re:I've used them

[RingDev]

While I appreciate the unforgiving rock solid logic that is math, asking someone who has been out of math based education for a number of years to prove the irrationality of sqrt(2) is a bit of a stretch.

I'd much rather go with a series of standardized logic questions (pattern recognition, basic math story problems, etc...) and one question buried in the test that is intentionally vague or poorly worded. Because well defined problems are easy, it's the problems that are not well defined that really test us in IT. Seeing how a potential employee handles themselves in a confusing situation is just as critical as how they handle themselves in a well defined situation. I would stay away from anything that depends on a complex understanding of any given topic, because at this point, we're not looking for someone who has the quadratic formula memorized, we're looking at someone who can look at a situation and pull values from that situation to plug into a formula.

-Rick

Re:I've used them

[iapetus]

Perhaps you ought to consult a dictionary before telling me that I have no idea what I'm talking about:

USAGE NOTE
The application of the term culture to the collective attitudes and behavior of corporations arose in business jargon during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Unlike many locutions that emerge in business jargon, it spread to popular use in newspapers and magazines. Few Usage Panelists object to it. Over 80 percent of Panelists accept the sentence The new management style is a reversal of GE's traditional corporate culture, in which virtually everything the company does is measured in some form and filed away somewhere.
  Ever since C.P. Snow wrote of the gap between "the two cultures" (the humanities and science) in the 1950s, the notion that culture can refer to smaller segments of society has seemed implicit.

The arts-science cultural divide (and subdivisions within each of those) is significant, and the sort of puzzle presented by the original poster is heavily slanted towards a specific subcategory of people on the 'science' side of the divide. There are plenty of good puzzles of this nature that check an ability for rational thinking that doesn't require particular knowledge on either side.

The distinction you attempt to draw isn't one that exists - in just the same way that your example requires the knowledge of the meaning of the words 'birdie' and 'eagle', the original examples require understanding of terminology ('quadratic formula' and 'irrational') as well as techniques specific to a particular area of education. They also skew against many of the same social groups as your golfing example.

Moo

[Chacham]

Guvf vf xvaq bs fvyyl, ohg vg vf n avpr jnl gb svaq ng yrnfg *fbzr* gnyrag.

Re:Moo

[gEvil (beta)]

For those of you confused by the gibberish above, you can solve it by using the key in the subject line. The process involves adding and subtracting each subsequent character value in the key. Since 'm' is the 13th character, you start by adding 13. From there you subtract 15 ('o' is the 15th character), and then you add 15 again. This gives you a final rotation value of 13. You can then apply that to the message to decrypt it.

Re:Moo

[sirsky]

www.rot13.com, copy and paste.

Re:Moo

[Thuktun]

The text is simply rot-13'd, the bit about the subject being the key is a bit of humor.

Of course, they say a joke isn't funny when you have to explain it, but I thought it was funny anyway.

Can't solve the puzzle, so you're trying Slashdot?

[AKAImBatman]

Well, that was fun. For about 10 minutes. Then I got bored. :P

Or more precisely, I don't need a job in Quebec, nor do I particularly want to work with PHP for a living. So I wasn't particularly interested in submitting my resume and 'PHP code'. Still, it's kind of a neat site. I would encourage companies looking for high-end talent to do more of this as a recruitment effort. After all, it had me intrigued enough to solve their little puzzle (even if it was overrated) despite not looking to work for them.

Unfortunately, the comparison with Google is poor. Google requires that you have a Masters Degree (PhDs are preferrable) before they even give you their test. Then they're so secretive that they may never get back to you even if you complete their test perfectly. You'll never even know why they didn't get back to you, despite a promise to start an interview process after the test.

As a result, the two don't really compare. :)

P.S. The Prove Your Worth site really does track your movements via (some rather ugly looking) Javascript. So move carefully.

Answer

[kevin_conaway]

I suspect that its not necessarily that you solve the riddle this instant, they probably want to get an insight into how you think and how you solve problems.

Problem solving is a huge part of developing software and an important quality to have in a candidate

The question that trumps riddles

[plopez]

"What have I got in my pockets".

Considering the resemblence of hiring trolls to Gollum, it seemed appropriate :)

Re:The question that trumps riddles

[ajlitt]

No tea.

Solution

[mikeumass]

http://www.proveyourworth.net/?p=begin&mistake=lit tle

Re:Solution

[Nos.]

That's step one, step two is to automate the reply to the form in step two. Not incredibly difficult, and they give you hints on what to use to do it (fscok, curl, snoopy). Since it requires you to use POST, its a little more than just manipulating the URL, but like I said, its not incredibly difficult.

That being said, this is probably not a bad way to screen out those who are incompetent. It would narrow the field down at least somewhat.

Re:Solution

[Qzukk]

The interesting thing about it is that not only does it test the applicant's ability to use various PHP tools (in a roundabout way) it also forces awareness of some of the stupider things people do in their site designs. Hidden values in forms that are expected to be secure because you can't see them in the browser, aren't. People can post anything to your form from anywhere, not just from the page you thought they should be coming from, and so on.

That said, I've done the kind of automation that they're looking for, and all I can say about it is that if my "targets" for scraping had tags like <mistake> that told me the important parts, my job would be five billion times easier. Especially if the tag was always the same. Nothing like setting up a script that logs into a website, "navigates" to the page I want and read the parts of the page that were interesting to me, only to have the company completely redesign their website... now if only companies would use SOAP.

Riddles work

[grapeape]

Its how I landed my current job. Resume wise I have an unrelated degree, few certifications that are still valid but many years of experience. The companies owner saw my resume and noticed an application I had listed was a relatively obscure one that they were having trouble with. I was asked to come in as a consultant for a week and fix the problem for them. I had everything fixed in less than a day, they were impressed enough that I was offered a full time job on the spot.

Riddle solving evens the playing field for those that are skilled but may not have the resume to reflect their skill level. I know most hate the old saying that "those who can do and those who cant teach" but many times book smarts doesnt translate into real world performance. Being able to display the smarts and tenacity to tackle a problem head especially after others have tried and given up instantly gives you a "value" to the potential employer. I think most that dont like the idea arent comfortable with the idea that someone with a lesser resume might actually be better in real world situations.

As long as they do it for every other employee....

[Anonymous Coward]

Manager
    "The bad news is that you failed the puzzle exam, the good news is that if you can make this power point slide animate annoyingly while playing music, you're hired."

CEO/CFO/etc.
    "Here's a knife and here's your mother, stab her and I'll give you $20."

Corporate Lawyer
    "Look outside and tell me it's raining (it's sunny). Now write the most incomprehensible sentence you can. When you are finished, Bob the CEO wants to talk to you about another test."

Accountant
    "See these two piles of cash on my table? When I turn around, you have five seconds to hide one so that I can't find it."

Marketing
    "Tell me again how this pen in my hand can cure cancer?"

Sales
    "I have several baggies of what appears to be baking soda on my desk, when I come back at lunch, they should be gone."

Intern
    "When I say it's all your fault, you say ok. It's your fault."

Technical Support
    "This button on the phone transfers the caller to another support person. Can you press it?"

Office Assistant
    "Do you have experience with the mentally handicapped or young children? Meet Bob, your new boss."

Re:I like this

[BenEnglishAtHome]

and a criminal background check that comes up negative

Is your hiring policy so brain-dead that any blot on a criminal background check is an automatic disqualifier? Or is a potential candidate given a chance to explain? We live in times when it seems that everything is illegal. No one gets through a day without doing something illegal. No one gets through a month without committing a serious crime. (Well, at least that's true if you have a half-way fun sex life.) Is your requirement for a negative background check absolute? If so, why?

It filters for one type of person

[pauljlucas]

Does [solve-the-riddle] give decent graduates/talented unexperienced devs/homegrown coders a chance at the corporate job, or does it alienate potential matches?

If I do say so myself, I'm a pretty good software architect and developer. However, I don't do well under the kind of pressure typically experienced at a job interview when asked to solve oddball problems in real-time. Often, my biggest insights come when I'm not consiously thinking about the problem, e.g., while in the shower.

Those who do well at solve-the-riddle interviews are certainly intelligent and can solve problems, but it's not necessarily true that they can solve ill-specified problems -- real-world problems that need solving aren't usually as completely specified as a riddle or puzzle.

There are other ways to conduct interviews that yield good candidates. Get the person to talk about his past work -- technical people who have done good stuff love to do this with great enthusiasm. You can then ask about trade-offs in thei designs and implementations. You can usually figure out whether the candidate was a key player in the work being discussed.

Another way is to describe a real-world problem facing your company, but without actually asking the candidate anything. A good candidate will be interested in yoru problem, ask questions, offer suggestions. If the candidate just sits there, s/he's not a good candidate.

Re:It filters for one type of person

[starfishsystems]

Absolutely.

There are certainly tech support jobs out there which consist primarily of what we might call solving puzzles.

Generally, however, a technical person needs to be broadly competent, needs to have strengths in both analysis and design, needs to communicate well, needs to be able to manage relationships effectively, needs to be able to organize and prioritize effectively under directions which can be incomplete or ambiguous.

The best technical people are not just able to address the issues in front of them, they use them to generate leverage in making progress toward larger goals. They have to articulate and negotiate for those larger goals, which means they have to be sensitive to interests of other individuals, and to the potential for alignment and conflict among them.

These requirements hold especially for more senior positions. It's fine to be able to solve puzzles, but that's not most of the job. And as anyone with hiring experience knows, it's far more successful to gain senior people by letting them rise through the ranks than it is to hire them from outside the organization. Unless you make a point of attracting and hiring people who have that potential, you can risk ending up mostly with a whole bunch of puzzle solvers.

Even scientific research, which obviously tries to solve some very hard puzzles, is mostly driven by collaboration. I've seen generations of compuer science grad students come and go, and the ones that go furthest are invariably the most collaborative. Out of the practice of collaboration they seem to have an easier time understanding their work in context, and they seem able to pick up all the other necessary management skills along the way.

Re:It filters for one type of person

[Frogbert]

I typically get around this problem by tipping a glass of water over my head when presented with hard problems that I need to figure out asap.

Is it legal to do this?

[Animats]

To submit your resume, you have to construct a URL manually. The Angelides campaign in California is in trouble for doing that on Governor Schwartznegger's "speeches" site, where all they did was to look at the directory of available audio and listen to it, instead of just listening to the stuff that had external links.

If anybody cares, http://www.proveyourworth.net/?p=begin&mistake=lit tle gets you to their stupid form.

Re:Is it legal to do this?

[Animats]

And then you have to build up the URL as if some app had built it. The arguments are

p="auto_submit"&hash="number you get from form page"&referer="URL of form page"...

There's more, but you get the idea.

Re:Riddle me this...

[RyoShin]

I didn't misspell nothing. I made up a word. Shakespear did it, so can I!

"eptitude" means "idiot shouldn't work here".

(Actually, I'm rather drowsy from some new meds, so burn away.)

Re:I like this

[MindStalker]

1) It proves you are good enough not to get caught.
2) If they tell you to do something illigal they don't want it comming back to them in the terms of "You hired a known felon..."

Some more relevant questions:

[192939495969798999]

1. Sales has agreed to build a system, and the client's already signed off on a fixed price payment. You have 1 month to build it until the budget runs out. There is no spec, no design document, and no way to confirm any given feature. What do you do?

A. Build as fast as possible and hope for the best.
B. Cry and whimper like a baby, because you're completely screwed.
C. Pitch a fit to management/slashdot/etc about what sales did.
D. Burn the place down.
E. All of the above.

Re:Some more relevant questions:

[Fulcrum of Evil]

A through D look like a step by step plan, not a set of alternatives.

Re:Can't solve the puzzle, so you're trying Slashd

[bladesjester]

I don't know. I don't have a master's and I've been contacted by two Google recruiters that were interested in me...

It's a good filter

[Opportunist]

Actually, I got my job that way. Basically, the catch was that they contacted me, and my interest came on when I saw that they used riddles to filter applicants.

It is a good filter when it comes to separating those who have relevant skills from those who are good at pretending. You can't cheat at "riddles". You can't talk and weasle out of them. You can't impress the interviewer. Don't forget that in HR, few if any people have relevant coding skills. Now, you want to hire a coder. The HR guy hasn't the foggiest what assembler or an export table is, but he should hire someone who can read assembler and understand foreign 80x86 code. How should he do it? Would you rather have the HR guy listen to someone rambling about his "achivements" and qualifications, or do you hand him a paper saying:

What does this do:
POP EBX
INC EBX
PUSH EBX
RET

(together with the correct answer, of course).

Which strategy do you think will give you the better qualified applicants for the final examination?

Re:It's a good filter

[ewhac]

What does this do:
POP EBX
INC EBX
PUSH EBX
RET

More often than not, crashes the machine.

Schwab

Re:It's a good filter

[wintermute42]

You certainly have a right to your opinion. It's great that there's a match between employers who do this sort of thing and people who like that sort of interview. I wrote a web page, Calculating Permutations and Job Interview Questions on this topic. What do I suggest for interview questions instead? How about detailed questions about the projects that the applicant has worked on, what exactly they did on these projects, how the solved the problems they encountered, how the software they wrote was structured, how they worked with other members of the team, how they dealt with conflict...

I will note, just in passing, that Soviet Russia has not existed for some time so the present tense of the sentence below seems misplaced.

In Soviet Russia, the government controls the commerce.

Re:It's a good filter

[biobogonics]

What does this do:
POP EBX
INC EBX
PUSH EBX
RET

More often than not, crashes the machine.


Maybe so. A better question might be - Why would you want to use code like this or similar code? On the 65xx, one way of passing arguments to a subroutine was having them embedded in the code stream. So the return address is a pointer to your arguments. You deal with them, then adjust the return address to skip the arguments, push it, then return. So do I get the job???

College is a game

[nuggz]

Isn't a college degree just a symbol that says, "Look, a whole bunch of people with good reputations threw a bunch of puzzles at me.

No, it's mostly proof that you can play the game.
There are two games.
1. The technical education which is the following game.
They ask a question.
You determine what the real question is.
You find the right book.
You read how to answer the question.
You answer the question.

2. The People game.
You learn how to make people happy and play the politics and admin game. I think this is the real reason most education administrations are described as a nightmare, it's actually part of the learning experience.
Later you play the sales/job interview game. They're pretty much the same, only the product changes.

Re:College is a game

[Knara]

All of which are applicable to a corporate job.

But if you think you can get through a good CS program without learning puzzle solving or problem analysis, you're either an idiot or you went through a really bad CS program (which admittedly, are probably not in short supply).

Just when I thought interviewing techniques...

[Quiet_Desperation]

...couldn't get dumber. This is flavor of the week type of stuff, folks. I'm lousy at riddles, but I win design award after design award plus bonuses in my engineering job. I have several patents. I'm sorry, but I just have very little patience for these Grand Unified Theories Of Everything when it comes to dealing with human beings. It just strikes me as HR people looking for ever lazier ways to hire the talent.

Also, Our IT people have that site blocked. I wonder what that riddle means?

Re:Just when I thought interviewing techniques...

[qsqueeq]

Your IT people are idiots.

Re:Can't solve the puzzle, so you're trying Slashd

[AKAImBatman]

The first rule is that there's always exceptions to the rule. ;-)

Google appears to pursue non-degreed people in a couple of different situations:

1. The early responders to their public Quiz sheet they put out a little while back.
2. You have a project, product, or unique knowledge they wish to acquire.
3. The position is not in a development area of the company, but is in a supporting function. (e.g. Customer Relations, Tech Ops, etc.)

Unfortunately, things seem to NOT work out with Google more often than they do. I remember a couple of fellows who were in category 2 and went in for interviews with Google. Google ended up turning them down, again for reasons unknown.

It's just *weird* working with Google. At times, even frustrating. There's absolutely zero visibility into the company and their practices. And from what I know from Google insiders, it doesn't get any better once you're there. I'm left to wonder if they're not having some growing pains as the company gets larger and larger. Being as meticulous as they usually are, I imagine that they're still trying to work out the best way of growing beyond a relatively small set of braniacs.

best credentials

[TLouden]

if you were a manager looking for a wrestler, wouldn't you want to test their physical strength?

IT is now so much about problem solving, why not test potential employees ability to do just that.
While it might once have been possible to already know everything about a technology which one was responible for maintaining, that's no longer how the industry works. When there's a new problem, we google. The better problem solver is the better hire.

Re:Can't solve the puzzle, so you're trying Slashd

[charlesnw]

Exactly. I interviewed at google and got the impression it was a sweat shop. I detailed in a Blog Post why I won't work there (at least as an engineer. I would do consulting on hiring practices). They are way to secretive for my liking. I work for Disney and am very happy.

Re:Thought Processes

[Monkelectric]

I disagree heartily. Saying "it cant' be done" could equally be the response of a battle hardened veteran who isn't willing to go into a battle he has no hope of exiting.

That was what I learned about myself during the test. That *I* ignored my own good sense that the task was not reasonable, and that a true master would not have.

Re:Thought Processes

[Sancho]

Exactly. They may not have actually wanted a complete working product.. they probably wanted to see what you thought of their task, see what assumptions you made, see if you could convince them that their timeline was infeasible, etc.

I knew a guy who went into an interview and was asked to solve some intractable problem. He was able to point out that their request wasn't feasible and provided some alternate options. This story wouldn't be interesting, of course, if he hadn't gotten the job.

I suspect that even if a person couldn't have written a webserver in C++ in 4 hours, they might still have had a shot at the job depending upon how they approached the problem.

My 'puzzle' experience

[digitalamish]

I was taken to a conference room, given a hardcopy chunk of code, and told to figure out what it did. On the way out one guy said, "Oh there might be an error in there too". So I did my 'Russell Nash' thing and ran the program step by step in my head and figured the program out. I ran a few more calculations, and I determined there was a problem given a certain numeric precision. The guys came back in about 30 minutes after they left. First they asked to see any scrap paper I used determining the solution. I told them I didn't have any, except for a couple of numbers I wrote on the code pages. They were stunned, but I explained exactly what the program did, which one of them confirmed. Then I explained the error I found. At this point they got very defensive. It seems this piece of code was pulled from their production systems, and "didn't have any errors". I explained what I found to them, and one of them wandered off.

Oddly I didn't get the job. They said I lacked the ability to document. Funny since I graduated with a degree in technical writing. Maybe they just wanted people to come in an debug for them in interviews.

Re:My experience with riddles...

[Chapter80]

The trick is in the wording. The answer is "don't cut the pizza - just eat it".

Hand this problem to the person you are planning to eat with. While he's solving the puzzle, scarf down the pizza.

Once the pizza is cut, you will both start eating at the same time.

Eat, don't cut.

Hey! We interviewed at the same place!

[Just Some Guy]

I interviewed for a telecommuting position in a city about two hours away. The Big Project was to re-implement Pointcast or some other stupid push technology, but this time users would actually like it. Yeah.

So during the interview, they revealed that they were expecting to support about 1,000,000 clients with updates every minute. "Oh?", says I, "how much data are you pushing to each user every minute?" They answered with, "we're very efficient! Only about 1KB." "And how much bandwidth do you have?", I pressed. "We just added a third T1," they replied with obvious pride.

Apparently my riddle was to figure out how to push 137Mbps through a 4.5Mbps pipe.

And they were betting their company's future on my ability to answer it.

The "exam" ended when they discovered that I wasn't planning to move to their city to take the 100% telecommuting position, even though I'd made that perfectly clear on my resume, cover letter, and application. They apparently also sucked at measuring distances.

Re:College?

[Richard Steiner]

Some schools must be better than others. :-) I *still* use practical things that I learned in college from time to time, mainly related to structured code design and the breaking down of various problems using pseudocode, etc.

(I only knew a couple of BASIC and Fortran variants before I got to college, and I'd never designed anything larger than a few thousand lines of code, so some of that stuff was new to me. This was back in 1981, after all, when not everyone had access to programming classes, and self-taught Applesoft BASIC programmers like myself weren't really known for writing structured code ).

Battle-Hardened Veteran

[theunixman]

The Battle-Hardened Veteran would explain to the potential employer/customer why the problem was impossible, and while perhaps not providing a formal proof, would present enough evidence that he would be seen as a Veteran. And he would still make an attempt to do it anyway, just to be sure. Watching how a person discovers why something is not possible is far more revealing than listening yet again to someone state quickly that it cannot be done.

Re:Battle-Hardened Veteran

[gfody]

2 hours?
it took me 20 seconds to google for and find a complete web server in under 200 lines of code
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/eserver/libr ary/es-nweb.html

Re:Battle-Hardened Veteran

[alienw]

Uh, no. The standard library and the OS API are not external libraries -- that would generally be considered part of the development environment. You cannot even talk to the network chip from Windows or Linux without using the appropriate API. They were probably referring to not using some kind of "sockets for dummies"/"webserver in a box"-type library. In any case, this is the kind of question that you should ask to clarify to avoid looking really stupid.

Re:I think you overestimated what they wanted.

[digidave]

Does it have to be a network web server? Maybe you just run the executable and it prints an HTML string if the first arg is GET.

Or maybe you use ASCII art in the source code to draw a picture of a waiter serving some HTML code on a platter.

How about an idea from Star Trek?

[speckledpig]

"How many lights do you see?"

Re:Can't solve the puzzle, so you're trying Slashd

[IamTheRealMike]

Unfortunately, the comparison with Google is poor. Google requires that you have a Masters Degree (PhDs are preferrable) before they even give you their test.

What?

I don't know what "test" you are talking about, but no qualifications whatsoever are required to do certain types of engineering at Google. Specifically look at what they call "Google.com Engineering" or "Site Reliability Engineering". This is not some trivial job; they require very broad and deep knowledge across operating system design, programming, networking, systems administration, and so on and the interview process is notoriously thorough. The job is basically running the server grid. A degree certainly isn't frowned upon but they didn't require one from me, that's for sure!

Certain jobs at Google do require degrees for sure, and some of the research jobs basically require a PhD. But that's not true of the whole company.

You'll never even know why they didn't get back to you, despite a promise to start an interview process after the test.

Again, huh? I have a friend who is also Masters-less yet they got back to him with feedback pretty much straight away.

Re:I think you overestimated what they wanted.

[feenberg]

I think you were probably expected to invoke the server via inetd and could read commands from the standard input and send pages to standard out. That "handles" threading for you also.

Daniel Feenberg

Re:I like this

[simishag]

"Brain dead?" Come on. A felony conviction is often an automatic disqualifier, full stop. Lesser convictions might be too depending on the position and company. It's nice to feel sorry for people who made a bad decision once and want a second chance, but when you have 10 other similarly qualified applicants in the queue who have no criminal convictions, the criminal's application is going to be the first one tossed in the circular file.

Actually its even easier than that

[bratwiz]

If you assume its hooked up to a UNIX system and fired off by INETD, which are certainly reasonable assumptions, especially in the face of "just do whatever you think is best" when looking for clarification-- then you could write the whole thing in C in just a few minutes. INETD will of course take care of hooking up the socket to your program's STDIO so all you have to do is parse the request, open whatever file, write a few headers and then spool it out. You could probably have it up and running before they got their hand off the doorknob...

Yes

[BenEnglishAtHome]

The policy, as originally stated, left no wiggle room whatsoever. Yes, that would be brain-dead. Zero-tolerance policies always are.

A sensible approach is to weigh the seriousness of the offense against the position and duties. Where I work, for example, you get conditionally hired for the first year. We trust what you said on your application, bring you on board, and do a full background check during that first year. (Why do we trust what you said on the app? Because lying to us on that application is a felony and, experience shows, dadgum rare. And why do we allow ourselves a year to do the background check? Because we do a serious one - verifying any hits on the initial computer searches, interviewing your family and friends if you're in a sensitive position, and auditing your last three years of tax returns, etc. It takes time.) If there are problems, you may or may not get fired. Bouncing checks, for example, will definitely get you shown the door; it's just a behavior so at odds with our mission of fiscal responsibility that there's no room for second chances. Likewise, we have to be pretty harsh about lots of things and tend to reject anyone without a clean record.

But does every employer need to exercise that same level of caution? Do I really care if the guy selling me my car has a past conviction for felony cruelty to animals? Should someone who has a previous conviction for disturbing the peace be automatically barred from a "you want fries with that?" job? I just think there has to be some room for a judgement call. Any policy that is as was originally stated (iow, absolute) is not smart. Brain dead, even.